Dr. Theresa Tam is focusing on two emerging health threats: H5N1 bird flu and measles. Canada's chief public health officer is concerned about the potential for severe illness from H5N1 and the resurgence of measles.
As we enter 2025, Dr. Theresa Tam has her eye on H5N1 bird flu , an emerging virus that had its first human case in Canada this year. At the same time, Canada 's chief public health officer is closely monitoring measles — a virus that was eliminated in this country more than two decades ago, but is making an accelerated resurgence. H5N1 , a strain of highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses carried by wild birds, has been on the rise globally.
It has decimated poultry farms in Canada and infected dairy cattle herds in several states south of the border. But its spread to humans is especially worrisome. 'What I am particularly concerned about is that this virus has demonstrated the capability of a whole range of clinical outcomes, from asymptomatic infection ... all the way to rare cases of severe illness,' said Tam in a year-end interview on Dec. 18. 'So it's something that we really need to be very vigilant about.” Canada's only confirmed H5N1 patient — a teen in B.C. — was severely ill and hospitalized in November. Health officials there have still not been able to determine how the teen got infected. No one else got sick with the virus, said Tam, which is encouraging because it suggests there hasn't yet been any human-to-human transmission. Although the risk to the general public is still considered low, there have been at least 65 confirmed human cases in the U.S. in 2024, mostly among farm workers. Most cases have been mild, with conjunctivitis, or pink-eye, among the symptoms. But on the same day as The Canadian Press interview with Tam, health officials announced the first case of severe illness in the U.S. — a person over 65 in Louisiana who had been in contact with sick birds in a backyard flock. ”(That) tells me that we need to do significant outreach not just to commercial poultry farms, for instance, but there are people who keep backyard chickens or other birds,' Tam sai
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