Plenty of people are talking about bird flu right now for good reason.
“We’re trying to get government to do more to get ahead of this virus so that it doesn’t become a problem for general members of the public. Nobody wants to go through another pandemic, nobody wants a farm worker to lose his or her life just for putting milk in our fridges,” Nuzzo said. “So, we are kind of sounding the alarm for the purposes of policy and practice changes that could make everyone safer.”
Nuzzo noted that, because of how horrible COVID-19 was, people have a hard time grasping the idea that more pandemics will happen, hoping that they never have to go through something like that again. And it doesn’t help that society is often quick to say disease emergencies are over — a problem that Nuzzo argued stops us from planning more effectively against pandemics.
“And I think that is getting in the way of our doing the kinds of things that would just make us more ready for these events. … It may come, it may not. But if we’re generally ready for it, then we don’t have to sit there and work ourselves up about it,” she said.
Shutting down everything, as was the case with the COVID pandemic, is not how society should have to respond to a pandemic, with Nuzzo saying, “That is not what responding to a pandemic is supposed to be.”
Instead, she explained that, to curtail a potential bird flu pandemic — or any pandemic, for that matter — the government should focus on preventing the virus from infecting more farm workers and killing people, getting ahead of it so it can’t mutate and become more contagious, developing medications, and improving indoor air quality.
“So that when these things happen, they don’t just wash over us and upend our lives,” Nuzzo said.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
