Can you tell us more about what we know about maybe human to human transmission with H5N1? And of course, within that conversation, I think is sort of what's the risk to veterinarians, those people that are working closely with some of these species? Yeah, what do we know about that aspect of things?

Yeah, so we have to be a little bit careful when we're talking about zoonotic transmission or human-to-human transmission because we've got a virus that's been around for a long time.

And like I said at the start, the mortality rate was 30% to 50% in those initial 20-some years of H5N1 in Southeast Asia.

The strain we're dealing with now does not seem to be as severe.

If we look in the U.S., I think the last report was you've got 71 or something human cases that have been confirmed recently.

most of those are farm workers most of those have been mild disease there have been two fatalities in the u.s and there have been some others uh internationally but it does not have that high mortality rate that we attributed to h5n1 in the past so that's good the infection rate is probably higher than we know because disease is mild in a lot of situations and not everyone with mild disease gets tested.

Another big issue you have in the U.S. is a lot of the exposure is farm workers and there's a lot of reluctance of farm workers to report signs, both for job purposes, but because a lot are undocumented and they're worried about getting into the system.

So can you talk to us about vaccine potential here?

Do you mind just elaborating on that a little bit more specifically? And then the other aspect I want to ask you is, is this reportable?

So we do have a lot of options, like I said, and in the US you have conditionally approved drugs and emergency use authorization drugs.

So we're getting more and more of these.

There was one that was just given emergency authorization or conditional use approval about a week or so.

So we have a variety of drugs that we have a good expectation that they'll work.

We don't have as much as you would have for a lot of drugs, but we've got fairly good proof of principle.

We know drug classes, we know in small studies when they treated them, They've had very high kill rates.

Anything else we need to know?

But given what we're seeing in the States and, like you said, parts of, of, uh, Central, uh, and South America, are, are we doing enough to, to stop this? If it was expected that, yes, this was going to arrive in Texas, can we make sure, can we, can we take steps to, to, to try and make sure it doesn't move any further?

further?Well, we're fortunate here.

Unlike a lot of diseases, uh, this one can't establish in Canada.

The good thing about our climate is it doesn't support a lot of insects.

And, you know, even in your somewhat balmy Vancouver winters, this fly's not gonna survive.

It likes 25 to 30 degree Celsius, kinda warm tropical environments, and the fly and the larvae will die when you get around seven degrees Celsius.

So the concern for us would be short-term.

But had this fly then in the past been eradicated?

So when you heard that the WHO, you know, they're saying today they suspect there has been human-to-human transmission on this cruise ship, how did they, they come to that conclusion?

Well, I think part of it's looking at who got sick and when and timeframes and types of exposures, and you can't say it definitively at the start.

It's when you startDropping off the more likely causes, you come down to human, human exposure.

So often if we had a cluster of hantaviruses, w-we're gonna be thinking, "Okay, did they have the same contact with the same environment where there would've been a lot of rodents?" And from what they've said or what they've been told, at least, there aren't rodents on board the boat, which means potentially they all got infected before they got on the boat, or there was transmission on the ship, or a combination thereof.

And one of the challenges with this virus is the incubation periods, the time from when you get exposed to when you get sick is fairly long, and that can make it a challenge to trace because if it's something where you get sick within two days, we know where you're exposed, where it's easier to sort out.

If it can take a few weeks or even more, there are a lot more potential exposures and a lot more places you've been that we have to sort out.

Given that and what we're seeing now, are, I mean, are, are you surprised? Should, should travelers just be prepared for these kinds of things? Can they even for, for something like hanta?

Well, there's always risk in life, and I think that's one of the things that we know anytime you take a large number of people and you put them into a small space for a long period of time, there's risk of disease transmission.