Fact-based journalism that sparks the Canadian conversation

Articles Business Environment Health Politics Arts & Culture Society

Special Series Hope You’re Well For the Love of the Game Living Rooms In Other Worlds: A Space Exploration Terra Cognita More special series >

For the Love of the Game

In Other Worlds: A Space Exploration

More special series >

Events The Walrus Talks The Walrus Video Room The Walrus Leadership Roundtables The Walrus Leadership Forums Article Club

The Walrus Video Room

The Walrus Leadership Roundtables

The Walrus Leadership Forums

Subscribe Renew your subscription Change your address Magazine Issues Newsletters Podcasts

Renew your subscription

The Walrus Lab Hire The Walrus Lab Amazon First Novel Award

Amazon First Novel Award

The Next Pandemic May Already Be Brewing

Bird flu has crossed into cows, infected humans, and spread across continents. Experts are deeply uneasy

HEALTH / JULY/AUGUST 2026

The Next Pandemic May Already Be Brewing

Bird flu has crossed into cows, infected humans, and spread across continents. Experts are deeply uneasy

ILLUSTRATION BY JEANNIE PHAN

Published 6:30, MAY 25, 2026

It began on her thirteenth birthday. The red, sore, itchy eyes. The next day, the fever. Her mother took her to emergency, at their local hospital in Surrey, British Columbia. The doctor confirmed conjunctivitis (or pink eye) but said it didn’t need treatment.

Over the next three days, symptoms escalated: vomiting, diarrhea, sore throat, coughing, difficulty breathing. Meghan Makowka rushed her daughter Joselynn Armstrong back to the ER. By now, her fever was dangerously high, her heart was racing, her oxygen level was critically low. Her lips were blue. Doctors gave her antibiotics and hooked up an oxygen mask, but when she didn’t improve, they transferred her to BC Children’s Hospital in Vancouver for specialized care. During a forty-minute ride in the ambulance, Makowka prayed the paramedics could keep her daughter breathing. They arrived around 3 a.m., November 8, 2024.

Linda Edwards was the pediatric intensive care specialist on duty that night. She saw how rapidly Joselynn was deteriorating and suspected a severe viral infection, most likely flu. She administered antiviral medication, increased the level of oxygen, and sent a swab to the lab to confirm the diagnosis. David Goldfarb, the medical microbiologist overseeing the lab, knew they were dealing with something unusual when the test came back negative for seasonal flu yet indicated a large amount of virus the test couldn’t label.

He checked the patient history and noted the conjunctivitis, a flag for the flu that had been infecting American dairy and poultry workers in recent months. Goldfarb rushed the swab to the BC Centre for Disease Control, requesting urgent analysis. Within hours, he knew they were dealing with the H5N1 bird flu, and his patient was the first person ever infected in Canada.

The result triggered alarm. Historically, the mortality rate among people stricken by H5N1 has been exceptionally high. And it is feared that H5N1 could cause the next pandemic. With every human case—seventy-one in the United States, including one death, since 2022—the question looms: Is this the beginning?

BC Children’s Hospital instituted infection control protocols, requiring Joselynn’s parents and her sister to be isolated in her room for several weeks. They were tested repeatedly until it was clear they hadn’t been infected. Public health officials searched their home to find where the virus came from, analyzed their food, inspected their dog, traced Joselynn’s movements before she got sick. They never found the source.

Meanwhile, Edwards, Goldfarb, and dozens of others focused on saving a teenager’s life. Joselynn’s condition worsened. On day two, they intubated. It wasn’t enough. Six hours later, they took the one drastic option remaining. They hooked Joselynn up to mechanical life support. Her blood was diverted through a machine, oxygenated, then recirculated, bypassing her lungs so they could rest. Edwards, who leads the Extracorporeal Life Support (ECLS) program at the hospital, explained to the parents that the chance of survival is on average 50 percent. At one point, the situation became so grim, Makowka understood the chance was only 20 percent.

Joselynn was on that machine for fourteen days. She also had kidney dialysis and multiple blood transfusions. She lay surrounded by a curtain of tubes and monitors. There was a large catheter in her neck to deliver medicines, and another in her bladder, one in her nose for nutrition, and other small tubes attached to her hands and arms. The lights were on 24/7, and at all times there were two medical staff in the room, a bedside nurse, and a specialist responsible solely for the ECLS equipment. It was six days more before the tube in her throat could be removed. The virus cleared, but a long convalescence was ahead. In the end, Joselynn spent sixty-one days fighting her way back.

Joselynn’s case offers a glimpse of the nightmare an H5N1 outbreak could become. BC Children’s has just six life-support machines—and is the only hospital in the province that can provide them for children. If the virus tore through the population, the resources needed for lifesaving care would simply not be there.

Virologists and public health specialists have warned about the pandemic threat for years. H5N1, a problem in chickens for decades, first infected humans in 1997, in an outbreak in Hong Kong. Eighteen people got sick; six died. It surfaced in humans again in 2003, and since then the World Health Organization has recorded 478 deaths among 997 cases worldwide, a case-fatality rate of around 50 percent. Just last year, out of thirty who became ill, twelve died, mostly in Cambodia.

In 2020, a new strain of H5N1 emerged in wild birds and spread rapidly from Europe to Africa, to North and South America, and even Antarctica, generating a panzootic, the animal equivalent of a pandemic. The first sign it had landed in North America was in 2021, in dead birds in Atlantic Canada that had likely migrated from Iceland. Today, bird flu is everywhere. It’s been detected in more than 200 species of mammals, including mink, dogs, cats, foxes, bears, coyotes, goats, and rodents, and has caused massive........

© The Walrus