Why Read: The prevalence of new and existing disease outbreaks in the news cycle isn't hype; it's a reflection of a new reality. We now live in what has been termed the Pandemicene - a human-caused era of increasing outbreaks of pandemic disease and parasites.

This week, we outline a few that threaten our systems, livelihoods, and health. Read on for a deep dive into a number of these pathogens, potential economic impacts, how worried we should be, what can be done, and implications of the increase in these diseases around the world.

In today's world, it is shortsighted to think that infectious diseases cannot cross borders. By allowing developing countries access to generic drugs, we not only help improve health in those nations, we also help ourselves control these debilitating and often deadly diseases. - US Senator Ron Wyden

Epidemiologists - scientists who study the spread of disease - use a special number to describe how contagious a virus is. It's called the basic reproduction number, or R0 for short. It's complicated to calculate but simple to understand - it counts how many people one sick person is expected to infect over the course of his or her illness. If I'm sick with a cold and I make two other people sick, the R0 of my virus is 2. - Jennifer Gardy, It's Catching: The Infectious World of Germs and Microbes

Over the past year, the news cycle has been filled with a startling number of new cases of diseases (and, as of today, a parasite). Some are new, some old, but all of them give us human beings a sense of foreboding. Particularly since the beginning of the 2020 pandemic, it's hard not to worry that we're about to go through the wringer again.

In this issue, we will remove the fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) that can often come with standard media reporting about disease outbreaks. To serve you best, we will get behind the headlines and dive into what is really going on with five ongoing public-health issues that are coming up almost weekly. (Rest assured, our purpose here is to inform and protect you; we'll leave the "startling" to others.)

If, like me, you're getting the feeling that the world keeps moving faster and faster, and you wonder why, I have a simple answer: it is. This is very much the case in the world of infectious disease and public health. The reasons are myriad, including climate change, increasing human interactions with wildlife through habitat destruction and encroachment, lack of the appropriate resources and safety protocols from the field to the lab, and larger numbers of domesticated animals (particularly cattle and poultry) packed together in attempts to meet humans' growing demand for protein.

That's for starters.  

All of these converging, human-caused factors have led us to where we now stand: at the dawn of a Pandemicene. We won't go further today into what that means except to state that the problem is real, we are in it, and we will now need to cope with and correct it to move forward.

Meanwhile, back at the (*ahem*) ranch, this era of increasing disease burden is playing out in our daily lives. Let's take a look at the top five pathogens / parasites trending in the news today and what they mean for the next few years.

H5N1

Authorities in Dien Bien province, Vietnam, have culled approximately 5,000 poultry after two outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza A/H5N1 were confirmed in Thanh Yen Commune during May. - UNMC Global Center for Health Security (5/27/26)

[...] on February 19 and 20, the team observed northern elephant seals experiencing tremors and seizures, and multiple recently weaned seal pups were dead. The researchers collected samples from the sick and dead animals and sent them to scientists at the National Veterinary Services Laboratory (NVSL) in the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). They confirmed that all of seals had been infected with Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) H5N1 that contained the E627K marker, which allows the virus to infect mammals, indicating its pandemic potential. - Description of an outbreak in California elephant seals, The Scientist (5/6/26)

Overview

Regular readers of the Global Report will remember the SNS piece "THE NEXT PANDEMIC: H5N1 and Why You Should Be Paying Attention" (6/3/24). Despite the passing of two years without major incident, the point of the piece remains the same: we now have regular circulation of mammalian-capable strains of bird flu circulating in various animal populations while mutating. This is not a good situation.

Avian influenza, à la the 1918 pandemic, has always been a huge pandemic threat. While we can't do much about containing the spread of this novel strain of H5N1 (which is influenza A, usually clade 2.4.4.4b), we certainly can do more about watching it. So far, attempts to address the consistent risk have been middling. Surveillance in infected populations of domestic chickens and cattle is sorely lacking. Last year's chaotic DOGE funding freezes and firings(then some rehirings) at USDA only worsened an already serious situation.

Cattle and cow inventories, 1970-2025