At the end of 2024 and through much of 2025, bird flu seemed poised to be the big health story. It was everywhere in the news - raw milk detections, dairy farms getting hit, and even human infections. But after an initial flurry of attention, it quieted down as other crises took over the headlines.

Still, even if the buzz has faded, the virus hasn’t disappeared.

What Happened Over the Last Year

Back in early 2025, bird flu made a startling jump into people. After a severely ill Louisiana patient died from H5N1 - the same virus that’s been plaguing animals - many headlines wondered if a new epidemic was on the horizon.

Then things went quiet on the public side: fewer big stories, fewer dramatic alerts. But scientists and health officials never stopped watching.

The Virus Hasn’t Gone Away

We now know that bird flu continues to circulate widely in animals around the world, especially in wild birds and poultry. In the U.S., the CDC describes H5 bird flu as ongoing, with the virus present in wild birds, commercial flocks, and dairy cows - and it’s still being monitored through established flu surveillance systems.

It’s important to remember the current public-health risk for most people remains low. Experts are not seeing sustained person-to-person transmission, and human cases so far are rare and linked to direct animal exposure.

A Rare Human Case and New Variants

One unsettling development was the report late last year of a U.S. case involving a different bird flu subtype (H5N5), the first of its kind - even though human-to-human spread still hasn’t been seen. And that’s the main concern: if and when these avian viruses mutate to spread easily between people, the potential for a much wider outbreak rises.

A top respiratory infection expert recently warned that such a mutation could lead to a pandemic potentially even worse than COVID-19 - though that hasn’t happened.