Professor Paul Griffin

And it's thought that just with the locations and the way they interact with birds and

and some particular composition of those sorts of animals, they can be more readily able to be affected.

So there's a whole host of species that are potentially at risk that will be monitored very carefully.

Hopefully, though, the containment measures will mean we don't see that widespread transmission occur anytime soon.

And therefore, we can not have to be so concerned about all those other mammalian species that are potentially in the firing line because of where they are and some particular properties of those sorts of animals.

Yeah, at the moment, the risk to humans is very low.

We don't think that consuming chicken products, poultry products, eggs, for example, is a significant risk, particularly if it's cooked well, which you need to do for the chicken products anyway for a variety of other reasons.

And of course, at the moment, our poultry industry is not affected.

So again, there's no risk there.

And we'd encourage people not to panic buy eggs or be concerned about egg supply at the moment because our surveillance and isolation activities should hopefully be robust enough to prevent that being an issue anytime soon.

So it's not generally through consuming products that this is transmitted.

The very small number of human cases have arisen typically through very close contact with infected birds.

And that's why we want people to report any sick or dead birds that they see through taking pictures and submitting those online rather than picking those up and interacting with them where there is potentially a small risk of human cases.

Yeah, really for a variety of reasons.

I mean, we know regular vaccination is one of the best things people can do to protect themselves against the flus that are circulating and we're about to embark on flu season.

And this is a very different flu to the ones that we're seeing circulating humans.

There may be some cross-protection to a very slight degree with the vaccines that we're using.

We know that there's a number of components to the flus and if multiple flu viruses infect the same population,

animal, then they can basically mix together and we can create new flus.

So minimizing the impact of the flus that are circulating in humans does to a degree reduce that risk of a bird flu and the strains that are circulating in humans recombining to form something that will be a bigger risk to human health.