Category: Flu Virus

H5N1 has been found in cattle herds across 12 states this year. Image: Justin Sullivan / Staff ( Getty Images )

A former director of the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is predicting that the next pandemic could come from the bird flu virus that is spreading rapidly among U.S. poultry and cattle.

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I really do think its very likely that we will, at some time its not a question of if, its more of a question of when we will have a bird flu pandemic, said former CDC chief Robert Redfield during an appearance on NewsNation on Friday.

Redfield served as director of the CDC during the COVID-19 pandemic, from 2018 to 2021.

He added, that once the H5N1 virus gains the ability to spread from human-to-human, thats when youre going to have the pandemic.

While H5N1 does not currently transmit between humans easily, the World Health Organization warns that as it spreads it has the potential to mutate to become more contagious.

H5N1 is a type of bird influenza virus that was first detected in 1996 in domestic water foul in Southern China. It is highly contagious among birds.

A new outbreak of the virus was first detected in 2020 among wild birds in Europe. It has since spread to domestic poultry and occasionally mammal species, such as foxes, sea lions, and cows.

In the U.S. alone, over 96 million commercial poultry and backyard birds across 48 states have been infected with the virus, according to the CDC. The USDA says cattle herds across 12 states have been affected.

So far, three humans who were all exposed to cattle have been infected this year, according to the CDC. All have since recovered. The CDC says the health risk of H5N1 to the general public remains low.

Earlier this month, the WHO reported the that first human death due to another strain of bird flu, H5N2, occurred in Mexico this May. It is currently unknown how the victim was exposed to the virus.

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The next pandemic could come from bird flu, former CDC chief says - Quartz

Bird flu snapshot: This is the first in a series of regular updates on H5N1 avian flu that STAT is publishing on Monday mornings. To read future updates you can also subscribe to STATs Morning Rounds newsletter.

Seth Berkley, the former head of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, gave voice last week to a point of view STAT has been hearing for a while about the U.S. response to the H5N1 bird flu outbreak in dairy cows. Its been shocking to watch the ineptitude, Berkley, an American currently living in Switzerland, said at an event on the future of vaccines held in London.

Berkley was talking, among other things, about the surveillance being done to try to get a handle on how widespread the outbreak has actually become. It has been nearly three months since the virus was first identified in cattle, and the country is no closer to an answer to that question. As of Friday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture had confirmed infections in 102 herds in 12 states; Iowa, one of the latest states to report infected herds, announced it had found two more that havent yet made it to the USDA list. To date three people all farmworkers have contracted the virus from cows.

Have any of the affected herds cleared their infections? If so, how many? The USDA couldnt answer those questions on Thursday. And yet Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack confidently declared at a press conference earlier this month that his department feels it knows how the virus is moving between herds and how to stop it. We are trying to essentially corner the virus, Vilsack said, despite the fact that operators of only 11 of the affected herds have applied for USDA help to improve biosecurity on their farms and defray testing costs.

The governments seeming inability to get farmers to disclose that they have infected animals has many worried observers wishing more states were doing what Michigans doing. True, it has more declared herds than any other state. But thats because its response is more robust, fans of the states approach say. One of our mantras is if you dont test for it you dont find it, the states chief medical executive, Natasha Bagdasarian, told STAT in an interview.

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Bird flu snapshot: A critic of the U.S. response speaks out, and USDA tries to 'corner the virus' - STAT

A new Australian study has found that early exposure to the influenza B virus impacts how well a persons immune system can recognise new variants and protect against them later in life.

The findings indicate that individuals develop a stronger immune response to variants of influenza B (IBV) they were exposed to in childhood. As a result, their body will exhibit a stronger immune response for newer influenza B variants that share similar characteristics with strains that were circulating during their first 5 to 10 years of life.

The research provides strong immunological evidence to support previous epidemiological studies which found differences in susceptibility and severity of influenza infections based on year of birth.

Researchers analysed more than 1,400 serological samples collected from individuals born in Australia and the United States between 1917 and 2008. They measured the antibodies present in the samples and compared them to the IBV strains circulating globally between 1940 and 2021.

Using this comprehensive dataset, we discovered that the highest concentrations of antibodies in each sample generally corresponded with the dominant strain of influenza B virus that was circulating during that individuals childhood, says first authorPeta Edler, a research assistant in biostatistics at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity at Australias University of Melbourne.

Essentially, when it comes to influenza B virus infections, first impressions matter. The initial, early-life exposure to the virus appears to influence how the immune system responds to future influenza B viruses.

Influenza B viruses belong to either the B/Yamagata or B/Victoria lineages. They account for a substantial proportion of annual influenza cases and are the prominent circulating subtype of influenza every 4 to 5 years.

In the first 3 decades since its discovery in 1940, IBV circulated as a monophyletic lineage, referred to as Ancestral, the authors write in the study, which is published in Nature Microbiology.

In the early 1970s, a lineage (later designated as B/Victoria) appeared that was antigenically distinct from Ancestral viruses.

In the 1980s, a second antigenically distinct lineage emerged (designated as B/Yamagata), which predominated in the 1990s, with B/Victoria remaining confined to low levels within Asia.

Subsequently, the B/Victoria lineage re-emerged globally, and the two lineages co-circulated from the early 2000s until the putative extinction of B/Yamagata in 2020.

According to Marios Koutsakos, a Doherty Institute senior research fellow who led the study, establishing an immunological link between initial exposure to influenza B and long-term immune responses opens new pathways for vaccination and the public health response to manage risks.

Our research could help predict which populations are most at risk of disease during each flu season, which would guide the development of public health strategies targeting specific age groups, says Koutsakos.

Moving forward, we want to explore what drives this long-term immunity and find out whether our immune system behaves the same way following its first exposure to influenza A.

This work could uncover potential targets for the design of new vaccines, but also inform tailored immunisation strategies.

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Birth year impacts long-term protection from influenza B - Cosmos

Scientists at NIAID found that heat treatment significantly reduces infectious H5N1 virus levels in raw milk, although small amounts can remain under certain conditions. This discovery is important amid a reported H5N1 outbreak in U.S. dairy cattle.

Research shows that heating raw milk greatly lowers H5N1 virus levels, but traces might persist. Despite concerns from a U.S. cattle outbreak, ongoing FDA evaluations maintain that commercial milk is safe.

Laboratory experiments show that the amount of infectious H5N1 influenza viruses in raw milk rapidly declined with heat treatment. The research was conducted by scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

However, small, detectable amounts of infectious virus remained in raw milk samples with high virus levels when treated at 72 degrees Celsius (161.6 degrees Fahrenheit) for 15 secondsone of the standard pasteurization methods used by the dairy industry. The authors of the study stress, however, that their findings reflect experimental conditions in a laboratory setting and are not identical to large-scale industrial pasteurization processes for raw milk. The findings were published on June 13 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

In late March 2024, United States officials reported an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza virus called HPAI H5N1 among dairy cows in Texas. To date, 95 cattle herds across 12 states have been affected, with three human infections detected in farm workers with conjunctivitis. Although the virus so far has shown no genetic evidence of acquiring the ability to spread from person to person, public health officials are closely monitoring the dairy cow situation as part of overarching pandemic preparedness efforts.

Fresh milk on a farm. Given the 2024 multistate outbreak of H5N1 influenza among U.S. dairy cows, federal officials recommend against drinking unpasteurized (raw) milk. Credit: NIAID

Given the limited data on the susceptibility of avian influenza viruses to pasteurization methods used by the dairy industry, scientists at NIAIDs Rocky Mountain Laboratories sought to quantify the stability of H5N1 virus in raw milk when tested at different time intervals at 63 (145.4 degrees Fahrenheit) and 72, the temperatures most common in commercial dairy pasteurization processes. The scientists isolated HPAI H5N1 from the lungs of a dead mountain lion in Montana. Then they mixed these viral isolates with raw, unpasteurized cow milk samples and heat-treated the milk at 63 and 72 for different periods of time. The samples were then cell-cultured and tested to determine if live virus remained and if so, how much.

They found that 63 caused a marked decrease (1010-fold) in infectious H5N1 virus levels within 2.5 minutes and note that standard bulk pasteurization of 30 minutes would eliminate infectious virus. At 72, they observed a decrease (104-fold) in infectious virus within five seconds, however, very small amounts of infectious virus were detected after up to 20 seconds of heat treatment in one out of three samples. This finding indicates the potential for a relatively small but detectable quantity of H5N1 virus to remain infectious in milk after 15 seconds at 72 if the initial virus levels were sufficiently high, the authors note.

The scientists stress that their measurements reflect experimental conditions, should be replicated with direct measurement of infected milk in commercial pasteurization equipment and should not be used to draw any conclusions about the safety of the U.S. milk supply. Additionally, a limitation of their study was the use of raw milk samples spiked with H5N1 virus, whereas raw milk from cows infected with H5N1 influenza may have a different composition or contain cell-associated virus that may impact heat effects. The authors conclude that although gastrointestinal infections with HPAI H5N1 virus have occurred in several species of mammals, it remains unknown whether ingesting live H5N1 in raw milk could cause illness in people.

To date, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) concludes that the totality of evidence continues to indicate that the commercial milk supply is safe. While laboratory benchtop studies provide important, useful information, there are limitations that challenge inferences to real-world commercial processing and pasteurization. The FDA conducted an initial survey of 297 retail dairy products collected at retail locations in 17 states and represented products produced at 132 processing locations in 38 states. All of the samples were found to be negative for viable virus. These results underscore the opportunity to conduct additional studies that closely replicate real-world conditions. FDA, in partnership with USDA, is conducting pasteurization validation studies including the use of a homogenizer and continuous flow pasteurizer. Additional results will be made available as soon as they are available.

Reference: Inactivation of Avian Influenza A(H5N1) Virus in Raw Milk at 63C and 72C by Franziska Kaiser, Dylan H. Morris, Arthur Wickenhagen, Reshma Mukesh, Shane Gallogly, Kwe Claude Yinda, Emmie de Wit, James O. Lloyd-Smith and Vincent J. Munster, 13 June 2024, New England Journal of Medicine. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMc2405488

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Is Your Milk Safe? How Heat Battles the Infectious H5N1 Flu Virus - SciTechDaily

The American population has little to no pre-existing immunity to the H5N1 avian flu virus circulating on dairy and poultry farms, according to preliminary findings from ongoing testing by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In other developments, outbreaks in dairy herds continue to be reported at a steady pace, along with sporadic detections in poultry flocks.

The CDC based its serology findings on blood collected from people in all 10 US regions during two earlier flu seasons2021-22 and 2022-23.

Scientists challenged the blood samples with the H5N1 virus to gauge if there was an antibody reaction. They found that antibody levels were low in people who were or weren't vaccinated against seasonal flu, hinting at little to no pre-existing immunity and that most of the population would be susceptible if the virus changed to a form that more easily spreads among people.

"This finding is not unexpected because A(H5N1) viruses have not spread widely in people and are very different from current and recently circulating human seasonal influenza A viruses," the CDC said regarding the study findings, which it included in aregular update on its response activities.

The risk to the general public remains low, and so far only three human infections have been reported in connection to the dairy farm outbreaks. All involved people who worked closely with cows.

In late May, federal health officials contracted withCSL Seqirus to fill and finish bulk supplies of one of two candidate H5 virus, enough for 4.8 million doses. The CDC has said the vaccine is a good match to the circulating H5N1 strain.

Globally, the main threat from the 2.3.4.4b clade viruses seems to be to people who have been exposed to infected animals. In a related development, Finland's health ministry last weekannounced that it will offer avian flu vaccine to people who may be exposed to the virus, such as poultry and fur-farm workers and veterinarians.

The ministry said it will receive a supply of the vaccine as part of a joint procurement among 15 European Union countries and that vaccination will begin as soon as possible. The vaccine was developed by Seqirus UK, Ltd.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) hasconfirmed 6 more H5N1 outbreaks in dairy herds, lifting the US total to 102. The latest confirmations involved 5 farms in Colorado and 1 in Iowa.

Also, the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, in two separate statements, has reported three more outbreaks in dairy herds, two more inSioux County and one inPlymouth County, both in the northwestern part of the state.

Meanwhile, Minnesota reported another outbreak in commercial poultry, which involves a turkey farm that houses 33,100 birds in Stearns County in the central part of the state, according toAPHIS.

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Studies find little to no immunity to H5N1 avian flu virus in Americans - University of Minnesota Twin Cities

In the US, a dairy-farm worker develops itching, blood-shot eyes. In Australia, a young girl falls ill after a foreign holiday and is rushed to hospital. In Mexico, another man, already ill and bed-bound, becomes seriously unwell and dies.

Each of these recent cases was caused by a different strain of influenza virus. In each case, it was an animal virus, which should not normally have turned up in humans at all. Should stories like this worry us?

When stories like this hit the news (and for influenza viruses, this happens quite often), journalists write to virologists and ask: how worried are you about this one?

The honest answer is that how any virologist really feels about a story depends on a lot of things, including our personalities: some of us are natural optimists, while others tend to catastrophise.

But our professional background does give us an idea of what to look for in a news story about a novel virus. When you next read about a novel virus in the news yourself, these are the questions that can help you decide how much of a worry it might be.

This is usually the first question. It's actually really hard for a virus to adapt to growing well in a new host species. Even influenza viruses basically bird viruses, but notorious for causing repeated human pandemics only manage it every few decades.

For a virus, crossing into people from a different animal host is a staged process. (I'm writing "people", but it's the same logic if you're worried about a virus crossing between any two host species, say, bird flu adapting to spread in cattle.)

Have people been exposed to the new virus and developed immune responses, but with no signs of infection? If there has been a "spillover" infection of a human (whether or not this caused serious illness), is there any sign that the virus has adapted enough to spread onwards to other people? And if the virus is now spreading among people, is that spread still at a point where it can be contained?

Surveillance is hard work that requires resources and cooperation, but it is hugely important in understanding and controlling outbreaks. So what do we look for?

Testing people for immune responses to a virus (serology) tells us who has previously been exposed. Sequencing viral genomes (from infected people or from the environment) tells us where the virus is now, but it also lets us work out how it is spreading and how it is changing.

We can do this because viruses mutate quickly. Lining up the differences in their genetic sequences lets us build family trees ("phylogenetic trees"), which we can use to reconstruct how the virus got to particular places at particular times.

Are we looking at one big outbreak or lots of separate outbreaks? Family trees can show us this. Looking at the changes in the virus' genome also lets us look for any telltale signs that it is adapting to a new species assuming we understand the virus well enough to work that out.

The better we understand a virus, the more we can anticipate what it might do next. For some very well-studied viruses, like the influenza viruses, we know some of the genetic changes that are warning signs of adaptation to a new host species.

What else can we look for? We worry more about viruses jumping between similar host species, because this is easier for the virus to do. Influenza that's already in a mammal is closer to being able to infect us than influenza from a bird.

We can look at likely routes of transmission a respiratory virus is likely to spread more quickly than a virus spread through sexual contact. We can also try to guess at the outcomes of infection viruses that cause serious disease are concerning, but in terms of spread, we also worry about less serious cases, which could lead to people spreading the virus without realising it.

However, viruses are tricky things, and in practice, it's really hard to predict what they will do.

The current outbreak of H5N1 influenza A viruses in cattle is a good example of this. An influenza A virus infecting cattle and then spreading through milk were both huge surprises. And while H5N1 is known to be capable of causing very severe disease, it seems that some cattle are carrying the virus without serious illness.

Experimental virology, in which animals and cell cultures are infected and studied under controlled conditions in secure laboratories, can be essential for understanding what a virus is really capable of.

Adapting to humans is hard for a virus, so anything that gives a virus more chances to pull this off is a concern. Sustained outbreaks are more of a risk than one-off cases.

We worry more about viruses in animals with close contact with humans. H5N1 spreading in North American cattle is more worrying than H5N1 spreading in South American elephant seals.

We worry about viruses taking shortcuts to adapting. For influenza viruses, this can happen in hosts like pigs that can pick up more than one virus at the same time and allow them to swap bits of their genome with each other.

And we worry about people doing anything that gives a virus more chances to get used to them. Things like drinking unpasteurised milk in areas where it could carry H5N1 influenza viruses, for example.

What would happen if things did get worse? Do we already have vaccines to this virus or to one very like it? Is there the capacity for making large numbers of those vaccines and distributing them to large numbers of people? Do we already have antiviral drugs? Do we know what's needed to manage the symptoms caused by the virus effectively?

Here, at least, it helps to face a virus like influenza that we've already been trying to fight for a long time.

The spread of a new strain of influenza virus around the world is just one of many viral threats, but the H5N1 strain of the virus has been doing a lot of things recently that cause us, as virologists, to watch it with concern.

While isolated cases can be devastating for the people involved, the bigger risk to society comes from viruses that spread and H5N1 influenza is now spreading, in US cattle as well as in birds around the world.

Importantly though, what it is not doing at the moment is anything that we would associate with it spreading among humans.

The current mood among virologists is definitely not what it was in, for example, February 2020, when it became clear that SARS-CoV-2 was spreading uncontrollably among humans.

But bird flu is doing enough concerning things at the moment to make us pay close attention to it. Hopefully, if we do that, we can all prevent things becoming a lot more worrying than they are now.

Ed Hutchinson, Senior Lecturer, Centre for Virus Research, University of Glasgow

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Should We Be Worried About News of New Viruses? Here's What to Consider. - ScienceAlert

Blood tests show there is extremely low to no population immunity among Americans to the H5N1 avian flu virus, said theCenters for Disease Control. Most of the population would be vulnerable if the virus mutated to become more readily contagious, said the CDC, but it has identified two candidate vaccines that would offer good cross-protection against it.

Meanwhile, theAgriculture Departmentsaid H5N1 bird flu was confirmed in 102 dairy herds, up from 94 herds at the end of last week. Outbreaks have been identified in 12 states, from Idaho to North Carolina. Michigan has the most, with 25.

In an update posted on its website, the CDC said its ongoing tests of blood samples collected in two recent flu seasons suggest that there is extremely low to no population immunity to the H5N1 virus, regardless of whether people had received a vaccination against the seasonal flu.

This means that there is little to no pre-existing immunity to this virus and most of the population would be susceptible to infection from this virus if it were to start infecting people easily and spreading from person-to-person. This finding is not unexpected because A[H5N1] viruses have not spread widely in people and are very different from current and recently circulating human seasonal influenza A viruses, said the CDC.

However, earlier analyses found the virus is susceptible to antiviral medications used against the flu, and two candidate vaccines have been identified that would offer good production. The Department of Health and Human Services has ordered 4.8 million doses of vaccine as a precaution and says it has no plans at present to use them.

Federal officials said the bird flu risk to the general population is low. Three farmworkers contracted mild cases of bird flu since April 1. To date, more than 550 people have been monitored for bird flu as a result of exposure to infected or potentially infected animals, and at least 45 people have been tested for the H5N1 virus after developing flu-like symptoms, said the CDC.

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Little to no U.S. immunity to H5N1 avian flu virus, CDC says - Successful Farming

A "small but detectable quantity" of infectious H5N1 bird flu virus was able to survive a common approach to pasteurizing milk, according to new research co-authored by scientists at the National Institutes of Health.

The findings, published Friday in The New England Journal of Medicine, were based on experiments run at the agency's lab. The researchers note this is not the same as finding infectious H5N1 virus in milk from grocery stores.

So far, officials have not detected infectious virus in any supermarket milk samples.

click to expand

The finding comes as authorities are still identifying new infected herds in this year's unprecedented outbreak of H5N1 bird flu in dairy cattle.

Infections have been detected in cows across farms in at least a dozen states, with most of the positive tests coming from raw milk samples that were teeming with the virus. Authorities have called on states to curb raw milk sales that could spread the virus, and have warned consumers against drinking raw milk.

"The study reflected experimental conditions, and should not be used to draw any conclusions about the safety of the U.S. milk supply," a Food and Drug Administration spokesperson said in a statement.

In the real world of commercial dairy processing, milk from infectious cows is likely being mixed with milk from healthy cows, diluting the virus and making it less likely there would be enough of it to survive. Technical details of how the milk is pasteurized, as well as additional steps to treat the milk, also cut the risk. Pasteurization involves treating the milk at high temperatures for a period of time to kill contamination.

Results from previous FDA studies of 297 samples of retail dairy products like milk and yogurt did not turn up any infectious virus. Earlier tests found only some harmless fragments of the virus leftoverfrom pasteurization.

"These are more or less experimental laboratory conditions. And we think that mechanical pasteurization in dairy farming will probably be more effective than what we do," said Vincent Munster, chief of the virus ecology unit at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Munster's lab in Montana has done work for years studying the ability of viruses to stay infectious in various conditions, including previous work pasteurizing pathogens in milk, like from an outbreak of coronaviruses in camels from Jordan.

In this study, they looked at two approaches of pasteurization, tested on milk with concentrations of H5N1 they added at levels similar to what has been seen from some highly infectious cows.

One pasteurization method they looked at heated milk to 72 degrees Celsius (about 161 degrees Fahrenheit) for 15 seconds, similar to the "high temperature short time" method that is used widely across the dairy industry. That yielded milk with what Munster said still had "minute amounts of infectious virus."

"You're really talking about like 10 virus particles, whereas the initial starting dose would be something like 10 million or 100 million virus particles," said Munster.

He also pointed to differences between the lab study and real-world industry practices which give commercial milk pasteurization a step up against the virus.

"There is an initial period in the dairy milk pasteurization that the milk needs to get from let's say 4 degrees to 72 degrees [Celsius]. And obviously once it starts hitting around 56 degrees, it already starts inactivating the virus," he said.

The second pasteurization approach a half hour at 63 degrees Celsius was more effective. Infectious virus was undetectable within minutes, long before pasteurization was over.

"Pasteurization methods were developed to actually reduce the amount of viable bacteria in milk to prolong fridge life, so to speak. And they're not necessarily initially designed to inactivate viruses," said Munster.

Munster thinks that even adding 5 to 10 more seconds of pasteurization could offer the dairy industry a "safety buffer," ensuring that there's no active virus leftover in milk even if their raw milk supply turns out to have greater concentrations of infectious virus than the lab's .

"If you really want to make 100% sure there's no active virus, increasing the duration even by like 5 to 10 seconds of pasteurization would allow you to actually increase that safety margin," Munster said.

But an FDA spokesperson said that their testing data so far shows the pasteurization processes used by U.S. dairy companies are effective at killing H5N1. Many companies "use temperatures that are greater, often much greater than the minimum standards," the spokesperson said, and equipment that more consistently heats milk.

"[T]he United States would hesitate to change pasteurization parameters without data to demonstrate a public health need," the spokesperson said, warning that changing the standards would affect the flavor of dairy products.

The agency has so far not released results from its own study to validate the pasteurization of raw milk for H5N1, first announced earlier this year. Last month, it cited "the totality of the evidence" in reiterating that "the commercial milk supply is safe."

The spokesperson said the FDA's study "is a top priority for the agency" and that they were working to share the results in the near future. The agency is looking to validate "real-world processing conditions" with equipment used in commercial facilities.

"Sound science is critical to informing public health decisions like those made by the FDA related to food safety and we take this current situation and the safety of the milk supply very seriously," the spokesperson said.

Munster said the FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture also have studies looking at pasteurization, among a number of groups that have confirmed heating up milk is often able to fully inactivate the threat from H5N1 virus.

"Fortunately, they do actually inactivate viruses very well. But I think the focus point should be two fold: making sure that pasteurization is up to the task we're asking from it, and the data suggests that it is, but also that we should minimize any H5N1 positive milk actually coming into these dairy pasteurization," he said.

Alexander Tin is a digital reporter for CBS News based in the Washington, D.C. bureau. He covers the Biden administration's public health agencies, including the federal response to infectious disease outbreaks like COVID-19.

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Infectious bird flu survived milk pasteurization in lab tests, study finds. Here's what to know. - CBS News

Over the past few months, a bird flu outbreak has spread swiftly through dairy cows in the United States, infecting more than 90 herds in 12 states. Along the way, the virus has caused collateral damage in several other species, spreading from dairies to poultry farms and from cows into at least three farm workers, who developed symptoms of mild illness.

It has also caused mounting casualties in cats. On some dairy farms, sick or dead cats have provided an early signal that something was amiss. Theyre a bit of a canary in a coal mine, Dr. Kammy Johnson, a veterinary epidemiologist for the Agriculture Department, said at a news briefing on Thursday.

Since the dairy outbreak was first detected in late March, at least 21 cats in nine states have caught the virus, according to the department, which recently began tracking the feline cases.

Scientists have long known that cats are vulnerable to being infected by avian influenza, a group of flu viruses typically found in birds. In 2020, a new version of a bird flu virus, known as H5N1, emerged. It has spread rapidly around the world, infecting many wild birds and repeatedly spilling over into mammals, including cats.

Domestic cats are actually highly susceptible to avian influenza, and especially H5N1, said Kristen Coleman, an infectious disease researcher at the University of Maryland. But there has been a recent uptick in domestic cat infections, a drastic uptick.

There have been sporadic reports of infected dogs, too.

While bird flu infections of pets remain rare overall, they can be severe, especially in cats. It results in very severe illness and oftentimes death, Dr. Coleman said. So its very serious, and it should be taken seriously.

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Bird Flu Is Infecting Cats (and the Occasional Dog). Here's What to Know. - The New York Times

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Little to no U.S. immunity to H5N1 avian flu virus, CDC says - Food & Environment Reporting Network