Category: Flu Virus

Over 80 such cases have been reported in 9 other states

Bird flu has been detected in dairy cow herds in nine other states, but now the virus has been found in a Northwestern Iowa dairy herd, agriculture officials announced Wednesday.

While the U.S. Department of Agriculture has reported over 80 cases in dairy herds in South Dakota, Texas, Ohio, North Carolina, Michigan, Kansas, Idaho, New Mexico and Colorado, this is the first case of it affecting cattle reported in Iowa.

The dairy herd where it was found is located in OBrien County, northeast of Sioux City. Tests to confirm the virus are being conducted at the National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames.

Given the spread of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza within dairy cattle in many other states, it is not a surprise that we would have a case given the size of our dairy industry in Iowa, said Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig in a statement. While lactating dairy cattle appear to recover with supportive care, we know this destructive virus continues to be deadly for poultry.

Our team at the Department has been preparing for this possibility and will soon be announcing additional response steps to protect our flocks and herds, Naig said. Poultry producers and dairy farmers should immediately take steps to harden their biosecurity defenses, limit unnecessary visitors, and report symptomatic birds or cattle to the Department. This remains an evolving situation and we will continue to be in close communication with stakeholders, USDA, and other states as we evaluate our response. Our top priority is to protect our livestock and the farmers and people who care for them.

So far this year, the virus has been found in two Iowa poultry flocks leading to 4.2 million laying chickens being euthanized in Sioux County and 103,000 turkeys euthanized in Cherokee County.

While entire poultry flocks are killed to slow the spread of the disease, dairy cows seem to recover in about two weeks.

Iowa ag officials said that testing determined the virus found in the Sioux County chickens is consistent with the variant identified in affected dairy herds in other states. Testing is not yet complete on the virus detected in the Cherokee County turkeys.

Epidemiological investigations are ongoing to try to determine how the virus was introduced into the flocks and herd, the department said in a news release.

In addition to the virus being found in dairy herds, three farmworkers also have become infected two in Michigan and one in Texas. They all were responding to treatment.

Officials said dairy farmers who suspect their herds have been infected to contact a veterinarian immediately and report the possible case to the Iowa Department of Agriculture.

Go here to read the rest:

Bird flu found for first time in Iowa dairy cow herd - The Gazette

Jun 4

Please try again

Thousands of chickens gather and lay eggs in an organic hen house at Sunrise Farms in Petaluma on Aug. 25, 2010.(Paul Chinn/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

To learn more about the spread of bird flu, Bay Area disease detectives are once again turning to an unlikely source of information: sewage. And so far, at least, the news is promising.

After California food safety regulators detected avian influenza in two chickens at a San Francisco live-bird market at the beginning of last month, scientists at Stanford University tested samples daily from wastewater collected at treatment plants across the country as part of a national project called WastewaterSCAN.

In San Francisco, they tested frozen samples dating back several months and found evidence of bird flu from early May, around when the two chickens were identified in the live market, but they have not detected it in any daily tests in recent weeks.

This seems to have been a confined event associated with perhaps these birds being in the market there, said Alexandria Boehm, a professor and Stanford environmental engineer who also directs the wastewater research team.

Officials in San Francisco had discovered the two infected chickens during routine surveillance using a PCR test, which cant discern between live or dead virus. The chickens were asymptomatic.

They monitored the market employees who had contact with the chickens for several weeks, and no symptoms were reported. They believe the public was not exposed, and the market has since been sanitized and reopened.

San Franciscos health department would not disclose the location of the market to KQED.

The WastewaterSCAN project has found evidence of bird flu at more than a dozen locations, including two states Minnesota and Iowa that officials have yet to list as having infected herds. Last week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced the third human case of bird flu was reported in a farmworker in Michigan who experienced respiratory symptoms after exposure to an infected herd.

No human cases have been reported in San Francisco or elsewhere in California.

The work by Boehms team represents the first time researchers have tested for H5N1 in wastewater. It builds on a pandemic-era playbook for monitoring wastewater for COVID-19, which has since expanded to other diseases, even the use of illicit substances and drugs.

Although the CDC has tracked influenza A viruses in sewage using them as a barometer for the spread of bird flu because flu viruses that sicken humans circulate at low levels during summer months, that testing is not H5N1-specific.

Boehms team, working with San Francisco and California health officials, developed a precise marker for H5N1 bird flu last month as dairy cow outbreaks spread across the U.S.

Once we had the detection in the live bird market, that was an opportunity to look at wastewater for H5N1, said Dr. George Han, director of the San Francisco Department of Public Healths communicable disease prevention and control program.

Although researchers found fragments of bird flu material in the frozen bank of sewage from San Francisco, subsequent monitoring detected no further evidence in the city nor elsewhere in California, for that matter, Han said.

Thats potentially good news for the state, which boasts the largest dairy industry in the country with more than 1.5 million dairy cows. Federal officials had observed several jumps in influenza A viruses in California, which they thought could indicate that bird flu was circulating across its ranches.

San Franciscos health department does not believe that any of the wastewater hits for bird flu are related to human infection, Han said.

I think thats really important and the take home message, he said. No one really thinks at this point that the detections are due to human cases of H5N1.

San Francisco is one of only about 700 American communities with a combined sewer system, with stormwater and sewage flowing through the same pipes. Thats an issue for the city during bad storms when the system regularly overflows the city is fending off a lawsuit from federal and state environmental officials for discharging billions of gallons of untreated sewage into the San Francisco Bay each year because of it. However, it is a benefit for this disease research work.

San Franciscos health department has a working hypothesis: Migratory birds with avian flu may have passed through San Francisco, and their waste ended up in its combined sewer shed.

If there is any kind of bird feces in the street and somebody washes it off the street or the sidewalk, that material ends up in the sanitary sewer, Boehm said. Were able to use that wastewater to understand circulation of both human disease, but also, in some cases, animal disease.

That, Boehm said, could help scientists better understand the extent and duration of the H5N1 outbreak this spring in the United States.

Continue reading here:

Bay Area Researchers Tracking Bird Flu in Wastewater See No Evidence of Spread in SF - KQED

The USDAs strategy against bird flu in dairy cattle is to identify infected herds and wait for the virus to die out within the herds, said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on Monday. Im confident we have a good understanding of the virus and how it is being transferred, he added.

We are trying to essentially corner the virus within infected herds so it eventually dissipates, he said during a teleconference.

The H5N1 avian flu virus was confirmed in dairy cattle for the first time on March 25 in the Texas panhandle. It was found in eight other states through April 25. No other states have reported an outbreak since then.

Three cases of cattle-to-human infections, involving dairy farmworkers, have been identified. Last week, a farmworker in Michigan was the first to experience respiratory symptoms a potentially more serious condition. The CDC said genomic sequencing indicated H5N1 remained an avian virus and has not adapted to mammals. The risk to the general public was low, it said; people in contact with infected animals should wear masks, gloves, and other protective equipment.

The government has faced repeated questions about whether it knows for certain how widespread bird flu in cattle is. To date, H5N1 has been confirmed in80 herdsin nine states. The USDA requires dairy farmers to test lactating cows for bird flu before shipping them across state lines. It also offers money to dairy farms to improve their biosecurity standards against disease and will launch avoluntary programfor weekly testing of milk samples drawn from bulk storage tanks on dairy farms.

Vilsack said the voluntary testing program was expected to generate more information about conditions in the field. Literally thousands of tests have been conducted, he said.

The CDC says it has tested 40 people for bird flu and was monitoring around 300 people, most of them in Michigan, the state with the largest number of infected herds, 23. Idaho is second with 17, followed by Texas with 15.

Over the weekend, theIowa state Agriculture Departmentsaid highly pathogenic avian influenza was discovered on a turkey farm in Cherokee County in northwest Iowa. It was the second outbreak in a week in Iowa. The other was an egg farm with 4.2 million hens. Bird flu has killed 96.6 million birds, mostly hens and turkeys, in U.S. domestic flocks since outbreaks began in February 2022, according to aUSDA database.

Read the original post:

USDA aims to isolate, exhaust H5N1 virus in dairy herds - Successful Farming

On May 30, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported a third case of human infection with bird flu, the fourth in the U.S. since 2022.

The CDC says the virus is highly pathogenic avian influenza with a current strain identified as H5N1.

The latest two human infections occurred in the state of Michigan, and a previous case was recorded in Texas. All three people caught the virus after direct contact with infected cows.

None of those cases came through human-to-human transmission and the CDC assesses the human health risk from H5N1 bird flu as low.

Since news broke of those human infections in the U.S., accounts on X and other social media platforms widely shared a conspiracy theory piece by U.S.-based Natural News, a website that proclaims itself a science-based natural health advocacy.

But Harvard University Kennedy Schools Disinformation Review describes Natural News as far-right and pseudoscientific.

In a May 26 article, Natural News writer Lance D. Johnson wondered whether the human strain of the bird flu is being lab-developed for mass release into the population, because the U.S. government has already developed and stockpiled a bird flu vaccine that is not for birds or other animals.

Since a vaccine is already developed and stockpiled for a bird flu strain that hasnt even evolved yet, the economic and societal pressure to unleash a new pandemic is imminent, Natural News wrote.

Those claims are false.

Bird flu is nothing new and, like other strains of influenza, the virus is constantly evolving. Likewise, avian flu vaccines for humans have been around for more than a decade.

Researchers detected avian influenza in the 19th century and first identified H5N1 in domestic waterfowl in Southern China in 1996.

The first human case of H5N1 was detected in Hong Kong in 1997

Natural News claimed that the recent H5N1 strain results from genetic alterations that allowed the virus infect various animals and that its mutations are proof of DNA manipulations.

John Swartzberg, clinical professor emeritus of infectious diseases at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health, called that nonsense.

Influenza is what we call a promiscuous virus it has incredible plasticity. Its ability to change itself, to mutate with alacrity, is really phenomenal, Swartzberg told Polygraph.info.

Swartzberg said H5N1 follows the same pattern of other influenza viruses spilling over into other animal species once a previous host has developed immunity.

That is particularly true for avian strains of Influenza A viruses, which researchers call far more diverse and more easily generate novel strains than the more specialized human viruses.

The degree to which H5N1 has gained the capacity to infect different mammals, particularly dairy cows, came as a big surprise to those who study influenza viruses, William Schaffner, professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University, told Polygraph.info.

Its able to transmit, it is able to spill over to other mammals, and it does that by subtle mutations in its genetic code, Swartzberg said. And, when it does that, its often very virulent to the new host.

Calling lab-creation claims conspiratorial, Schaffner said the virus evolved through conventional, normal mutations in nature.

This did not happen in the laboratory, this did not happen through so-called gain of function research,' which involves genetically modifying viruses to give them new functions, like the ability to infect animals they previously could not infect.

Globally, the bird flu has infected less than 1,000 people since 2003. However, the mortality rate thus far was very high roughly 50%.

[H5N1] is surely not going to cause a 50% mortality rate once you start to see millions of people getting infected if that happens. The mortality rates will dramatically drop. Still, 1 or 2% of the population of the world would be an enormous number, Swartzberg said.

Public health experts have been increasing disease surveillance to help prevent an outbreak and readying readying new vaccines.

Conspiracy theorists have seized on those pandemic prevention efforts to spread fear: for example, Natural Newss false claim that the development of vaccines for a bird flu strain that hasnt even evolved yet is evidence of an imminent man-made pandemic.

And stockpiles of bird flu vaccines for humans are not new. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) licensed the first human vaccine for bird flu in 2007.

Other vaccines have followed, but not [yet] for the latest strain.

There are no vaccines specifically developed for preventing the current strain of bird flu, A(H5N1) virus clade 2.3.4.4b. However, some countries have human H5 vaccines, which WHO assesses to be effective against clade 2.3.4.4b, a spokesperson from the World Health Organization told Polygraph.info.

New vaccines to combat evolving strains of H5N1 are in the pipeline, with GlobalData identifying 13 such vaccines in active clinical development.

Beyond the development of new vaccines, public health authorities in the U.S. maintain the National Pre-Pandemic Influenza Vaccine Stockpile to prepare and respond effectively to future influenza pandemic threats.

Testing the efficacy of older H5N1 vaccines some stored for a decade or more is part of that effort.

Natural news also claimed that some form of gain-of-function research would have been necessary to manufacture and stockpile vaccines with certainty of their effectiveness.

Swartzberg says that is absolutely not the case.

What we know is the genetic structure of the currently circulating virus in cattle, and the genetic structure of the humans who have been infected with this particular sub-variant of H5N1, and thats what we would produce a vaccine for, Swartzberg said.

Christy Gray, director of the Division of Immunization in the Office of Epidemiology at the Virginia Department of Health, told Polygraph.info the creation of a candidate vaccine virus (CVV) for a novel bird flu virus "is a multistep process that takes months."

The CDC outlines the process for developing a CVV here.

The rest is here:

Conspiracy theorists seize on bird flu infections to accuse US of staging pandemic - Polygraph.info

This article has been reviewed according to ScienceX's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

fact-checked

reputable news agency

proofread

by Susanne Rust, Los Angeles Times

close

When researchers talk about their biggest bird flu fears, one that typically comes up involves an animallike a pigbecoming simultaneously infected with an avian and a human flu. This creature, now a viral mixing vessel, provides the medium for a superbug to developone that takes the killer genes from the bird flu and combines it with the human variety's knack for easy infection.

So far, domestic poultry and dairy cows have proved to be imperfect vessels. So too have the more than 48 other mammal species that have become infected by eating infected birds and then died.

But researchers say there is one population of animal floating under the radar: Pets. The risk may be low, but the opportunities for transmission are abundant.

"I think companion animals definitely need to be in the picture," said Jane Sykes, professor of medicine and epidemiology at UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, describing the viewpoint that diseases such as H5N1 should be viewed from a human, animal and ecosystem lens. None operates in isolation.

She pointed to our furry friends' penchant for eating dead things, other animals' poop andin the case of catswild birds. Add to that our primate compulsion to touch, kiss and caress these animals that live in our homes (and sleep on some of our beds), and you've got a situation in which germs could be swapped and mingled.

Now consider the sheer number of companion animals and people in the U.S.

"Two-thirds of households have a dog or a cat," said Jane Sykes, a professor of small animal medicine at the UC Davis veterinary school. "That's a lot of companion animals. There's actually more in this country than there are people in Australia and the U.K. combined."

She also pointed to new research showing H5N1 antibodies in a group of Washington state hunting dogs trained to retrieve waterfowl, a carrier of the disease.

Ian Redmond, a U.K.-based biologist and conservationist, agreed.

"It stands to reason that pathogen spillover [when a virus, bacterium or protozoon is transmitted from one species to another] is most likely when different species are in close contact," he said.

"While traditional companion animals such as dogs, cats and horses have a long history of such close contact with humans, giving thousands of years for us to develop natural immunity to commonly shared pathogens, it is the new situations that carry most risk," he said, including "raw pet food of uncertain origin."

It's an area that epidemiologists, food safety experts and veterinarians are warily watchinga situation akin to the dangers posed by drinking raw milk.

"There's at least one animal a day that we see on our service that's eaten some bizarre raw food diet," Sykes said. "It did not use to be like that at all."

Raw pet food typically consists of uncooked meat, bones, fruits and vegetables. The diets are often marketed as "natural" or similar to what animals would eat in the wild.

Calls and inquiries to several raw pet food companies including Jeffrey's Natural Pet Foods in San Francisco, BJ's Raw Pet Food in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Instinct Raw Pet Food in St. Louis went unanswered.

A query to Emma Kumbier, veterinary outreach coordinator at Primal Pet Foods in Fairfield, California, also went cold after The Times asked about the kinds of processes or procedures taking place to ensure that pets are not inadvertently exposed to bird flu via infected poultry or cattle.

Jay Van Rein, spokesman for the California Department of Food and Agriculture, said the state's Meat, Poultry and Egg Safety Branch licenses and inspects businesses that produce raw meatas well as those that import raw products for pet food manufacturing.

"Raw meat pet food legally sold in California comes from USDA- or CDFA-inspected facilities," he said.

Inspections are focused on sanitation, proper product labeling, storage, control of inedible byproducts, pest control and record-keeping. He noted that "cooking meat has been shown to effectively kill bacteria of concern and also has now been shown to kill HPAI [bird flu], so if an owner wants to ensure their pet is not exposed to these pathogens, they should cook the meat."

Janell Goodwin, a spokeswoman for the Food and Drug Administration, said "all animal food must be safe, wholesome and not misbranded."

She cited the Preventive Controls for Animal Food requirements, which state that pet food manufacturers are responsible "for ensuring that raw materials and other ingredients" are received only from approved suppliers "whose raw materials are subject to verification activities."

But with only limited testing of dairy cattle currently taking place, and uncertainty about the spread of the disease in the U.S. cattle industry, determining H5N1 status in cows destined for slaughter is murky at best, experts said.

Van Rein said that people can take measures to protect their petsand themselvesby avoiding raw meat. But if they insist on purchasing it for their pets, state health officials said, these precautions can lessen the risk: Keep it frozen or refrigerated until ready to use; thaw under refrigeration or in a microwave just prior to use; keep raw meat and poultry products separate from other foods; wash working surfaces, utensils (including cutting boards and preparation and feeding bowls), hands and any other items that touch raw meat or poultry with hot, soapy water.

Finally, Van Rein said, refrigerate leftovers immediately or discard them.

Veterinarians "really don't recommend feeding raw food diets to dogs and cats," Sykes said. "It definitely increases the risk of certain infectious diseases like salmonella and listeriosis."

She said people can reduce their pets' exposure to avian flu and other pathogens by keeping cats indoors, keeping dogs on leashes, and possibly avoiding raw pet food.

She said veterinary societies and outreach organizations are urging vets to be on the lookout for signs of H5N1 infection, which could include listlessness, conjunctivitis, blindness, neurological symptoms and/or difficulty breathing.

She noted that during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, pets were also infected. In response, diagnostic labs added specific tests for COVID into their PCR panels, "and that was a good way to monitor for it in companion animals."

She said similar diagnostic tests should be made for H5N1.

"I think the sooner we get those types of diagnostic tests, the better it will be in terms of preparedness," she said.

2024 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

More:

Are pet dogs and cats the weak link in bird flu surveillance? - Phys.org

The World Health Organization (WHO) said today that a person in Mexico has died after contracting a strain of bird flu that hasnt been seen in humans before

A new strain of bird flu never seen before in humans has killed a man in Mexico.

The patient had been hospitalised in Mexico City with a strain of bird flu known as H5N2, the WHO said in a statement. The strain has largely gone under the radar, with the outbreak raising questions about how much damage it could cause.

In a report about the situation, the WHO explained that they were notified of a human infection on May 23. It was related to a 59-year-old resident of Mexico who had no history of exposure to poultry or other animals. He also had several other underlying medical conditions.

He had already been bedridden for three weeks prior to the onset of acute symptoms of avian flu. On April 17, he started experiencing "fever, shortness of breath, diarrhea, nausea and general malaise". On April 24, he died due to complications from the condition.

The WHO said that it carried out an epidemiological investigation into the 17 people who came into close contact with the deceased. Only one of them reported having a runny nose.

It comes shortly after Australia marked its first recorded human case of a virulent strain of bird flu in a child who fell sick after returning from overseas.

The child contracted the H5N1 strain of the disease, which has been spreading globally and causing widespread deaths among birds, upon returning to the Australian state of Victoria. The youngster reportedly suffered a severe infection after returning from India in March, but has since made a full recovery, Victoria's chief health officer confirmed on Wednesday.

This is the first human case of H5N1 avian influenza in Australia, Dr Clare Looker said. The avian influenza virus was detected through further testing of positive influenza samples that takes place to detect novel or concerning flu virus strains, as part of Victoria's enhanced surveillance system.

Contact tracing has not identified any further cases of avian influenza connected to this case," she added. Avian influenza does not easily spread between humans so the chances of additional cases in people was low, Dr Looker said.

On the same day, agricultural authorities revealed a different strain of bird flu had been detected in another part of Victoria at an egg farm. Authorities were alerted after a number of poultry deaths at the farm near Meredith, about 40km northwest of Geelong. Agriculture Victoria has ordered urgent testing after avian influenza was detected at the site.

That outbreak likely involved the H7N7 strain, not the highly pathogenic H5N1 variant, Chief Veterinary Officer Graeme Cooke said. There is a type of virus which is causing great concern in the USA and other parts of the world and has behaved unusually in that it has infected dairy cattle and some other marine mammals,' Dr Cooke told the ABC's Country Hour.

This is not the strain that we're dealing with. This is a strain that's occurred in Australia before. It's likely not new. H7N7 is the most common type of bird flu in Australia and a H7 strain was one of those in the last bird flu outbreak in the country in 2020 which affected a third of egg farms in Victoria.

More:

Bird flu: First human in world dies of H5N2 virus in Mexico, WHO confirms - The Mirror

The World Health Organization on Wednesday said a person's death was caused by the first laboratory-confirmed human case of infection with the A(H5N2) subtype of bird flu reported globally, and the first human infection with the H5 strain of the virus reported in Mexico.

The 59-year-old, who had been hospitalized in Mexico City, died April 24 after developing a fever, shortness of breath, diarrhea, nausea and general discomfort, WHO said.

"Although the source of exposure to the virus in this case is currently unknown, A(H5N2) viruses have been reported in poultry in Mexico," WHO said in a statement.

The victim had no history of exposure to poultry or other animals, but had multiple underlying medical conditions and had been bedridden for three weeks, for other reasons, prior to the onset of acute symptoms, the United Nations agency said.

In March, Mexico's government reported an outbreak of A(H5N2) in an isolated family unit in the country's western Michoacan state, but said at the time this did not represent a risk to distant commercial farms, nor to human health.

After the April death, Mexican authorities confirmed the presence of the virus and reported the case to the WHO, the agency said.

Based on available information, WHO assesses the current risk to the general population posed by this virus as low.

No further cases have been reported during an investigation that tested people who had come into contact with the victim for types of influenza, as well as for COVID-19, it said.

Cases of bird flu have now been identified in mammals such as seals, raccoons, bears and cattle, primarily due to contact with infected birds.

Scientists are on alert for changes in the virus that could signal it is adapting to spread more easily among humans.

The United States has reported three cases of human infection after exposure to cows since an outbreak was detected in dairy cattle in March. Two just had symptoms of conjunctivitis, while the third also had respiratory symptoms.

Australia reported its first human case of A(H5N1) infection in May, noting there were no signs of transmission. It has however found more poultry cases of H7 bird flu on farms in Victoria state.

Go here to see the original:

WHO confirms first-ever human death of bird flu in Mexico - CTV News

The World Health Organization has reported the first person has died of a new strain of bird flu in Mexico.

A 59-year-old individual has died after testing positive for the bird flu strain H5N2.

The strain has not previously been recorded in humans. The individual had no history of exposure to poultry or other animals.

Just yesterday H5N1 bird flu was detected in California.

Two chickens had tested positive for bird flu at a San Francisco market and "fragments" of the virus had been found in the city's wastewater.

The animals were asymptomatic and no human who was in close contact with them reported any signs of illness.

Symptoms of bird flu in humans can range from mild to severe and may include:

Bird flu can also present with less common symptoms such as headache, chills, and general malaise. In severe cases, the disease can progress rapidly, leading to severe respiratory illness and complications.

View post:

First human in the world dies of new bird flu strain - Irish Star

A third farmworker in the United States has been found to be infected with bird flu, heightening concerns about an outbreak among dairy cattle first identified in March.

The worker is the first in this outbreak to have respiratory symptoms, including a cough, sore throat and watery eyes, which generally increase the likelihood of transmission to other people, federal officials said on Thursday.

The other two people had only severe eye infections, possibly because of exposure to contaminated milk.

All three individuals had direct exposure to dairy cows, and so far none has spread the virus to other people, Dr. Nirav Shah, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a news briefing.

That suggests that the virus, called H5N1, has not acquired the ability to spread among people and that the threat to the general public remains low, Dr. Shah said.

This newest case does not change the C.D.C.s H5N1 influenza risk assessment level for the general public, he added. We should remain alert, not be alarmed.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit andlog intoyour Times account, orsubscribefor all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?Log in.

Want all of The Times?Subscribe.

Go here to read the rest:

Bird Flu Has Infected a Third U.S. Farmworker - The New York Times

Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center have isolated human monoclonal antibodies against influenza B, a significant public health threat that disproportionately affects children, the elderly and other immunocompromised individuals.

Seasonal flu vaccines cover influenza B and the more common influenza A but do not stimulate the broadest possible range of immune responses against both viruses. In addition, people whose immune systems have been weakened by age or illness may not respond effectively to the flu shot.

Small-molecule drugs that block neuraminidase, a major surface glycoprotein of the influenza virus, can help treat early infection, but they provide limited benefit when the infection is more severe, and they are generally less effective in treating influenza B infections. Thus, another way to combat this virus is needed.

Reporting in the journal Immunity, the VUMC researchers describe how, from the bone marrow of an individual previously vaccinated against influenza, they isolated two groups of monoclonal antibodies that bound to distinct parts of the neuraminidase glycoprotein on the surface of influenza B.

One of the antibodies, FluB-400, broadly inhibited virus replication in laboratory cultures of human respiratory epithelial cells. It also protected against influenza B in animal models when given by injection or through the nostrils.

Intranasal antibody administration may be more effective and have fewer systemic side effects than more typical routes -; intravenous infusion or intramuscular injection -; in part because intranasal antibodies may "trap" the virus in the nasal mucus, thereby preventing infection of the underlying epithelial surface, the researchers suggested.

These findings support the development of FluB-400 for the prevention and treatment of influenza B and will help guide efforts to develop a universal influenza vaccine, they said.

Antibodies increasingly have become an interesting medical tool to prevent or treat viral infections. We set out to find antibodies for the type B influenza virus, which continues to be a medical problem, and we were happy to find such especially powerful molecules in our search."

James Crowe Jr., MD.,paper's corresponding author

Crowe, who holds the Ann Scott Carell Chair, is University Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics and director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center, which has isolated monoclonal antibodies against a host of viral infections, including COVID-19.

The paper's first author, Rachael Wolters, DVM, PhD, is a former graduate student in the Crowe lab. Other VUMC co-authors are Elaine Chen, PhD, Ty Sornberger, Luke Myers, Laura Handal, Taylor Engdahl, Nurgen Kose, Lauren Williamson, PhD, Buddy Creech, MD, and Katherine Gibson-Corley, DVM, PhD.

This study was supported in part by National Institutes of Health grants T32AI112541, K01OD036063 and U01AI150739, NIH-HHS contracts 75N93019C00074 and 75N93019C00073, and the Collaborative Influenza Vaccine Innovation Centers program of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Source:

Journal reference:

Wolters, R. M., et al. (2024). Isolation of human antibodies against influenza B neuraminidase and mechanisms of protection at the airway interface.Immunity. doi.org/10.1016/j.immuni.2024.05.002.

Read more:

VUMC researchers discover potent antibody against influenza B - News-Medical.Net