Classroom Questions

Questions for ‘In 2024, bird flu posed big risks — and to far more than birds’ 

An elephant seal and two elephant seal pups are seen on the sand on a beach near Puerto Piramides, Chubut Province, Argentina, on October 6, 2022. (Photo by Luis ROBAYO / AFP) (Photo by LUIS ROBAYO/AFP via Getty Images)

An elephant seal and two young pups were photographed on a Península Valdés beach in 2022. A year later, few of the pups born in this part of Argentina survived. A massive H5N1 infection killed off a possible 17,000-plus southern elephant seal babies.

LUIS ROBAYO/AFP/Getty Images Plus

By Science News Explores

To accompany ‘In 2024, bird flu posed big risks — and to far more than birds’  

SCIENCE

Before Reading:

  1. Briefly summarize what you know about the influenza virus. Viruses come in different variants. To what extent might the existence of virus variants help explain why scientists must engineer new flu vaccines each year rather than use the same one year after year?
  2. How important is it to monitor diseases affecting animals? What might be some challenges to monitoring diseases in animals — especially wild ones — compared to those in people?

During Reading:

  1. How does a panzootic differ from a pandemic?
  2. What does HPAI stand for?
  3. Approximately how many mammal species have been affected by this new H5N1 variant?
  4. Approximately how many years ago did this variant first appear? On what continent did it first emerge?
  5. Besides birds, give one example of an animal affected by this virus.
  6. In what proportion of grocery store milk samples did the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) detect traces of the bird flu virus?
  7. Describe a physical feature that sets an “enveloped” virus apart from a “non-enveloped” virus. Is the new bird flu virus “enveloped” or “non-enveloped”?
  8. Why do experts warn people in affected regions against drinking raw milk but report that typical grocery store milk is safe to drink?
  9. How long, at a minimum, should you wash your hands with soap and water after touching eggs or raw chicken?
  10. How many companies have developed vaccines for the H5N1 flu virus?

After Reading:

  1. The bird flu virus has affected very few humans so far. Still, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has established a program to monitor for the virus in people. Why do you think it’s important to monitor viruses that do not currently pose much threat to people? Give a specific example of how scientific findings described in this story might be used to help people.
  2. Vaccines work by familiarizing an organism’s immune system with a pathogen so that if this disease-causing agent appears, immune cells can quickly eliminate it (avoiding a real problem). This grants vaccinated people some resistance to the disease. But vaccines can help non-vaccinated people as well. How might the use of vaccines help protect people who have not been vaccinated?