Highlights:
- Ongoing Bird Flu Outbreak in Kerala since a month.
- Overburdened MBBS students will now have to study clinical research: NMC
- Vaccine Wars in USA: American Academy of Paediatrics to sue Robert F Kennedy Jr
Website: https://uho.org.in
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Dr. Amitav Banerjee, Chairperson of the Universal Health Organisation (UHO), presented the latest newsletter focuses on three critical issues making headlines in the media landscape, particularly relating to health and pandemic preparedness.
Ongoing Bird Flu Outbreak in Kerala since a month.
India reported 11 outbreaks of highly pathogenic H5N1 bird flu on farms in Southern Kerala state
last month, the World Organization of Animal Health, Paris stated.
WOAH is a global body responsible for monitoring animal health worldwide, ensuring transparency in animal disease reporting and setting science-based standards to prevent and control animal diseases. The impact has been severe with 54,100 deaths and an additional 30,289 birds killed and disposed to contain the spread. Mostly ducks, poultry and quail were the affected birds.
Diagnostic testing conducted at the National Institute of High Security Animal Diseases (NIHSAD) in Bhopal confirmed the presence of the H5N1.
Duck farming is a popular, profitable, and traditional livelihood in Kerala, especially
in Kuttanad (Alappuzha, Pathanamthitta) wetlands, leveraging its unique agro-ecological system where ducks manage pests and fertilize rice paddies, providing both eggs and meat with stable demand and potential for subsidies.
As yet no human cases have been reported from Kerala. Though the USA was put on high alert from bird flu after an outbreak among birds and cattle in 2024, there were only 70 human cases and two suspected human deaths in elderly people with co-morbidities
First Death (H5N1): The first human death from H5N1 in the U.S. occurred in Louisiana and was reported by the CDC on January 6, 2025. The patient was an individual over 65 years old with under- lying medical conditions who was hospitalized with a severe illness, including pneumonia. The person was reportedly exposed to a combination of backyard poultry and wild birds. The virus genotype in this case (D11) was different from the strain (B313) later detected in dairy cows.
Second Death (H5N5): The second fatality occurred in Washington State and was announced in November 2025. The deceased was an adult with underlying medical conditions who kept backyard poultry. This case was caused by the H5N5 virus, a different but related subtype of avian influenza from the H5N1 strain that has been more widespread in animal populations. This was the first human case of H5N5 reported globally.
The rest of the cases were very mild and self-limiting requiring no hospitalization. There was no human to human transmission. According to the CDC, the current public health risk is low.
However, UHO expresses its concerns regarding the “gain-of-function” (GOF), research which was resumed in 2019 after a 4 year pause. Ostensibly carried out for research purposes, these experiments have the potential to make the lab modified natural virus jump species and trigger human-to-human spread. We believe certain studies that aim to make pathogens more potent or more likely to spread in mammals are so risky they should be limited or even banned.
Overburdened MBBS students will now have to study clinical research: NMC
Vaccine Wars in USA: American Academy of Paediatrics to sue Robert F Kennedy Jr
A federal judge ruled that a coalition of major medical organizations, including the American Association of Paediatrics (AAP), can proceed with a lawsuit against U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Children’s Health Defense General Counsel Kim Mack Rosenberg said the ruling fails to account for the medical groups’ conflicts of interest.
At the center of the lawsuit is the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), a key federal panel that shapes national vaccine recommendations.
The medical organizations want the court to invalidate all ACIP votes cast since June, when Kennedy dismissed 17 sitting members and replaced them with new appointees that he handpicked.
“Plaintiffs allege that these appointments skewed the composition of ACIP in favor of COVID- vaccine and/or mRNA-vaccine deniers in order to comport with Secretary Kennedy’s personal views,” Murphy wrote.
In May 2025, Kennedy directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to remove its recommendation for COVID-19 shots for all children ages 6 months and older from the agency’s immunization schedules, and instead use “shared clinical decision-making” between parents and providers.
Plaintiffs’ lawyer has strong ties to Big Pharma. Besides, AAP and most professional societies receive significant funding from the pharmaceutical and other health-related industries..
Richard H. Hughes IV, lead counsel for the plaintiffs, told MedPage Today in November 2025 that ACIP “shouldn’t be making policy” in its current form and said the groups want the panel dissolved and rebuilt.
Hughes served as Moderna’s vice president of public policy from 2020 to 2022, during the rollout of the company’s COVID-19 vaccine, Spikevax. Before that, he worked for Merck.
Critics cite those ties as evidence that the lawsuit is aimed at preserving a pharmaceutical-friendly status quo.
Plaintiffs in the case include the AAP, the American College of Physicians, the American Public Health Association, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the Massachusetts Public Health Association, the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine and a pregnant physician identified as “Jane Doe,” who claims she faces “barriers to access to the vaccine.”
Other defendants named in the lawsuit include the CDC and its acting director Matthew Buzzelli, National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya and U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary.
The CDC had also removed the recommendation for Hepatitis B vaccine at birth for newborns whoare born to mothers who do not carry the infection.
According to a tweet by Trump, the USA endeavors to align the USA childhood and adolescent vaccine schedule to other European countries where only 11 jabs are received by children compared to 72 jabs in the USA.
UHO suggests that the Indian policy makers should also rationalize the Universal Immunization
Programme (UIP) to include only essential vaccines based on epidemiology and evidence based
research and not blindly all available vaccines in the UIP.
The weekly newsletters bring the updates on the science, battered and bruised during the pandemic, legal updates and impact of activism for a just society, across the world. These are small steps to promote Transparency, Empowerment and Accountability – the ethos of the UHO.
Announcement: Membership & endorsements to the UHO invited: https://uho.org.in/member.php
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