April 5, 2024: The bird flu pandemic with the potential to be "100 times worse than COVID" may be on the horizon after a rare human case was discovered in Texas, experts have warned on Thursday.

The H5N1 avian flu has spread rapidly since a new strain was detected in 2020 affecting wild birds in every state, as well as in commercial poultry and backyard flocks.

But the recent cases detected in mammals, with cattle herds across four states becoming infected and on Monday, federal health officials announced that a dairy worker in Texas caught the virus. "This virus [has been] on the top of the pandemic list for many, many years and probably decades," Suresh Kuchipudi, a bird flu researcher from Pittsburgh, said at a recent panel discussing the issue.

"And now we're getting dangerously close to this virus potentially causing a pandemic." He noted that the H5N1 virus has already been detected in species throughout the world and "has shown the ability to infect a range of mammalian hosts, including humans."

"So therefore, in my view, I think this is a virus that has the greatest pandemic threat [that is] playing out in plain sight and globally present," Kuchipudi said. John Fulton, a pharmaceutical industry consultant for vaccines and the founder of Canada-based BioNiagara who organized the meeting, also expressed his concerns, the Mail reports.

"This appears to be 100 times worse than COVID -- or it could be if it mutates and maintains its high case fatality rate," he said. "Once it's mutated to infect humans, we can only hope that the [fatality rate] drops."

Around 52 per cent of humans who have contracted H5N1 since 2003 have died, according to the World Health Organization. For comparison, COVID currently kills less than 0.1% of those it infects -- though at the start of the pandemic, the fatality rate was around 20 per cent.

Symptoms of the bird flu are similar to those of other flus, including cough, body aches and fever, the New York Post reported. Some people may not develop noticeable symptoms, but others can develop severe, life-threatening pneumonia.