Unlike a fire, H5 bird flu can be ignored. We don’t detect it on the air when we step outside. It doesn’t loom over our cities to remind us daily that a disaster is unfolding nearby.

While media coverage of H5 bird flu has slowed, the ‘fire’ is not out. Indeed, the move to a new way of reporting H5 bird flu casualties could be a mere smokescreen. Initially, reports of H5 bird flu cases included the total number of individual birds to have tested positive, but that changed two months in, with official reports now only counting the number of H5 bird flu ‘events’. While this is more manageable for those crunching the numbers, this shift in reporting obscures the scale of the outbreak by reducing a mass mortality event to a single datapoint that could represent the loss of many thousands of birds. This kind of reporting sheds no light on the ecological significance of the outbreaks which is left out of sight and, potentially, out of mind.

There's also a letter to govt you can sign to "call Call on decision makers to support an urgent nature resilience package to strengthen wildlife populations and improve preparedness for H5N1 bird flu."