Scarcity of bird flu tests makes it difficult to guage the spread and detect possible pandemic stage --experts

Bird Flu Tests Are Hard To Get. So How Will We Know When To Sound the Pandemic Alarm? - KFF Health News If widely used, flu tests could be helpful now. In the meantime, the government needs to clear a path for H5N1 tests, researchers warn, to avoid the early missteps of the covid pandemic. khnkytjaw KFF Health News

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The CDC has asked farmworkers with flu symptoms to get tested, but researchers are concerned about a lack of outreach and incentives to encourage testing among people with limited job security and access to health care. Further, by testing only on dairy farms, the agency likely would miss evidence of wider spread.

“It’s hard to not compare this to covid, where early on we only tested people who had traveled,” said Benjamin Pinsky, medical director of the clinical virology laboratory at Stanford University. “That left us open to not immediately recognizing that it was transmitting among the community.”

...Scarity of bird flu tests makes it difficult to detect