Category: Flu Virus

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a health alert Friday to inform health care centers and the public of a confirmed human infection of the bird flu.

A worker on a commercial dairy farm in Texas developed conjunctivitis, commonly known as pink eye, on March 27 and then tested positive for the “highly pathogenic avian influenza” (HPAI), the CDC said.

HPAI viruses have been reported in the Texas area’s dairy cattle and wild birds, but before this incident, there have been no previous reports on the spreading of HPAI from cows to humans.

The patient did not report any other symptoms and was not hospitalized. The person received antiviral treatment and is recovering, and the patient’s household members have not become sick, the CDC said.

“No additional cases of human infection with the HPAI A(H5N1) virus associated with the current infections in dairy cattle and birds in the United States, and no human-to-human transmission of HPAI A(H5N1) virus have been identified,” the CDC said.

The CDC said it tested the patient’s virus genome and sequences from cattle, wild birds and poultry. It found minor changes, and they both “lack changes that would make them better adapted to infect mammals.”

The Department of Agriculture has confirmed infections of dairy cattle herds in four states — Texas, Kansas, Michigan and New Mexico — with results in a fifth, Idaho, “presumed” to be positive. The CDC said the spread has likely been due to the movement of cattle across state lines.

States like Nebraska have issued temporary restrictions on cattle imports because of the bird flu.

The patient in Texas is the second person in the U.S. to test positive for the disease. The first person to test positive was a patient in Colorado in April 2022 who had contact with infected poultry.

The CDC said the risk remains low, but recommended people with jobs or recreational activities that could expose them to infected birds, cattle or other animals are at higher risk and should take precautions.

The virus historically has shown to be deadly, killing more than 50 percent of its human victims from 2003 to 2016. The current outbreak has spread to affect 82 million birds in 48 states, the worst outbreak of bird flu in U.S. history.

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CDC issues bird flu infection health alert - The Hill

Bird flu outbreaks among dairy cows in multiple states, and at least one infection in farmworker in Texas, have incited fears that the virus may be the next infectious threat to people.

The influenza virus, called H5N1, is highly pathogenic, meaning it has the ability to cause severe disease and death. But while its spread among cows was unexpected, people can catch the virus only from close contact with infected animals, not from one another, federal officials said.

Its really about folks who are in environments where they may be interacting with cattle that are infected with this virus, said Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The risk for most everyone else is very low, he added. Right now, our risk assessment hasnt changed, but if it does change, were going be pretty quick and pretty transparent about that.

Avian influenza is often fatal in birds, but none of the infected cows have died so far. The only symptom in the patient in Texas was conjunctivitis, or pink eye, which was also reported in people infected during other bird flu outbreaks.

The C.D.C. and other agencies in the United States and elsewhere have tracked H5N1 for years to monitor its evolution. Federal agencies have stockpiled vaccines and drugs to be used in a possible bird flu outbreak.

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Is Bird Flu Coming to People Next? Are We Ready? - The New York Times

Cases of eggs from Cal-Maine Foods, Inc., await to be handed out by the Mississippi Department of Agriculture and Commerce employees at the Mississippi State Fairgrounds in Jackson, Miss., on Aug. 7, 2020. Rogelio V. Solis/AP hide caption

Cases of eggs from Cal-Maine Foods, Inc., await to be handed out by the Mississippi Department of Agriculture and Commerce employees at the Mississippi State Fairgrounds in Jackson, Miss., on Aug. 7, 2020.

Cal-Maine Foods, Inc., the largest producer of fresh eggs in the U.S., has temporarily halted production at one of its facilities in Texas after detecting bird flu there, the company announced Tuesday.

The company says it "depopulated" about 1.6 million laying hens and 337,000 pullets, or about 3.6% of its flock, as a result of the outbreak.

Bird flu also known as highly pathogenic avian influenza, or HPAI is a highly contagious virus typically spread by wild birds that is extremely deadly to avian populations. Human infections are rare.

Commercial farms sometimes euthanize part of their flock during bird flu outbreaks to limit the spread of the disease, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Mississippi-based Cal-Maine Foods said it was "working to secure production from other facilities to minimize disruption to its customers."

But it's possible that the depopulation at the Texas location could lead to higher egg prices at the grocery store, says Amy Hagerman, an associate professor of agricultural economics at Oklahoma State University.

"Any time you have an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza in a large poultry producer like this, it has the potential to impact the market, because you're taking a large number of egg-laying birds out of production all at once," Hagerman says.

The illnesses at Cal-Maine Foods come amid an outbreak of bird flu among livestock at multiple dairy farms across the U.S.

The USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service confirmed Tuesday that it had detected bird flu in dairy herds in Texas, Kansas, Michigan, New Mexico and Idaho.

Also, the Texas Department of State Health Services announced earlier this week that a person contracted bird flu through an outbreak of the disease among dairy cattle. It was only the second time in the U.S. a person was confirmed to have HPAI A, also known as H5N1.

Though the cattle appear to be experiencing only mild illnesses, bird flu is very deadly to avian populations, and poultry producers may depopulate large groups to prevent the disease from spreading.

Hagerman says the poultry industry tries to move quickly when an outbreak occurs, attempting to eradicate the virus from barns before bringing in new, healthy birds.

"But at least temporarily, you see that sharp decline in the total eggs laid and as a result you see a price increase usually at the grocery store," she says.

How much of an increase would depend on how many flocks contract bird flu at the same time and how many birds are taken out of production, Hagerman adds.

She also says the outbreak could lead to fewer cartons for sale and render some food items that contain eggs temporarily unavailable, but emphasized that she believed, "We're not going back to no-eggs-on-the-shelf levels of restricted supply."

The CDC says the likelihood of someone getting bird flu by eating contaminated eggs is very low, and that a person cannot contract it from eggs that are cooked and stored properly.

Officials say the rapid onset of symptoms in sick birds, combined with federal surveillance programs and other testing of poultry, make it unlikely that eggs from an infected bird enter the human food supply.

Read more here:

Bird flu has been detected at the largest chicken egg manufacturer in the U.S. - NPR

The recent bird flu infection in a dairy worker in Texas has public health officials on high alert, though experts say the virus hasn't become more contagious, either among cows or people.

Samples taken from the patient whose only symptom was pinkeye showed that the virus has not changed in ways that would make it easy for it to spread from human to human, and that currently available vaccines and medicines remain effective against it, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Our assessment of the risk of avian flu to the general public right now remains low, Dr. Nirav Shah, principal deputy director of the CDC, said in an interview Wednesday. However, make no mistake, we are taking this very seriously.

Upon learning from the U.S. Department of Agriculture last week that cows in a handful of dairy farms had tested positive for bird flu, the CDC contacted state health departments, asking them to work with farms to identify any person who may be showing symptoms.

The case that we found in Texas, we found it because we went to look for it. We knew to look for it, Shah said.

This current form of bird flu, a strain called H5N1, has been circulating in birds around the world since late 2021. It has infected and killed countless wild birds as well as led to the culling of tens of millions of birds on poultry farms across the United States.

The first human case in the U.S. was in 2022, in a prison inmate in Colorado who was working on a poultry farm. The case in Texas is the countrys second.

In a press briefing Wednesday, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said the agency is in close contact with the CDC.

Any case of H5N1 is concerning because it is highly dangerous to humans, although it has never been shown to be easily transmissible between people, Tedros said.

While the two U.S. cases have both been mild, H5N1 infections outside the country have had a high mortality rate. Four cases in Cambodia were reported in February; one patient died. In 2023, there were six cases in Cambodia, four of which were fatal.

Bird flu is a respiratory virus. In severe cases in humans, it can cause pneumonia, according to the CDC. Symptoms can include fever, cough, sore throat, runny nose, body aches, headaches, fatigue and shortness of breath or difficulty breathing.

Cases can also be mild: In the 2022 case in Colorado, the man experienced a few days of fatigue.

The only symptom that the Texas patient developed was conjunctivitis, or pinkeye, and the person is recovering, according to the CDC. The agency is not aware that any of the persons close contacts have developed flu-like symptoms, Shah said.

Still, what makes this particular case different is the link to cows; the fear is that the virus will mutate in a way that allows it to spread more easily among mammals and possibly humans.

I dont think that this news means that a flu pandemic is imminent, said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan.

I think that this means that we are getting yet another early warning signal that if H5N1 has enough opportunities to get into mammals, its going to do what viruses always do and its going to continue to adapt, to growing in them, because that is what viruses do.

Cows were likely exposed to the virus from some sort of interaction with a bird.

It could have been with bird feces. It could have been with a dead bird, Shah said.

Samples of the virus taken from the Texas patient as well as from a handful of infected cows have been sequenced.

Rasmussen said that the genetic sequencing of samples taken from cows showed that the virus was much more closely related to birds, suggesting it hadnt been transmitting in cows for very long and hadnt had the chance to mutate to spread more efficiently among them.

The virus sample taken from the patient had one additional mutation thats linked to spread in mammals. Shah said that the change has been seen in numerous other situations, going back 20 plus years and is not associated with sustained spread between people.

The mutation is only one of a constellation of these different mutations that have been associated with mammal to mammal transmission, Rasmussen said. So it really doesnt look like this is thoroughly adapted to mammal to mammal transmission, so thats good news.

On the other hand, she said, its still really early days. Weve only just appreciated that the extent of infection in cattle might be really, really underestimated. So theres a lot more research, I think, that we need to do to try to figure out how common this is in cattle and other people might potentially be at risk.

One of the big questions that will be key to preventing further spread, whether among cows or from cows to people, is understanding how cows themselves transmit the virus.

In birds, Rasmussen said, the virus grows in the gastrointestinal tract. Other birds get sick if they come into contact with infected saliva, mucous or feces.

Humans can get sick if they touch something with the virus on it and then touch their mouth, eyes or nose, the CDC says. They can also breathe it in if theyre in an area with a lot of virus particles in dust or droplets. According to Rasmussen, the virus can bind to receptors deep in humans lungs, but not higher up in the respiratory tract, like the nose or mouth, which makes it hard to spread from human to human.

It can also bind to receptors in the eyes. That the Texas patients symptom was pinkeye suggests that they didnt get it by inhalation, they got it from direct contact with cattle and then maybe from rubbing their eyes or something like that, she added.

Its unclear how cows are infected and shed the virus, though. Its really, really hard to try to assess what the risks are to people around cows, if we dont know where most of that virus is coming from on the cows, Rasmussen said.

Pasteurized milk is safe to drink, according to the Food and Drug Administration, because the process kills the virus.

Whats more, any milk from an affected cow is thrown out before it can enter the milk supply, another step in keeping it safe, Shah said.

Sara G. Miller is the health editor for NBC News, Health & Medical Unit.

Marina Kopf

Marina Kopf is an associate producer with the NBC News Health and Medical Unit.

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Should you be worried about the bird flu? What experts say after Texas dairy worker's infection - NBC News

The ongoing outbreak of bird flu has infected at least one person in the U.S. and has raised questions about how safe poultry and eggs are to eat right now.

So far, there have been no reported cases of spread among people, or of a person contracting this strain of avian influenza (also known as H5N1) from contaminated egg or poultry products, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC says that the current public health risk is low.

Here's what scientists know right now about bird flu and food safety.

The largest producer of eggs in the country, Cal-Maine Foods in Texas, temporarily stopped production at one of its facilities on Apr. 2 after H5N1 was identified there. The company also culled more than 3% of its flock in response to the outbreak.

Eggs from infected chickens are unlikely to be on supermarket shelves, the FDA says. Thats because in the time that it takes to detect an avian flu virus in a flock of egg-laying chickens, 99.99% of eggs would not have reached store shelves yet, since they would still be in the process of being distributed. That prediction comes from a model for estimating the risk of human exposure from avian flu outbreaks that was developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2010. According to that assessment, even if an infection among chickens was discovered after eggs had hit supermarket shelves, more than 98% of potentially contaminated eggs could be removed from stores after a recall was issued.

Read More: Is Eating a Plant-Based Diet Better For You?

Another safeguard: pasteurization inactivates viruses in eggs and therefore eliminates most risk to human health. Properly handling eggsincluding avoiding cross contamination of any raw products with other foodsand cooking them at least until the yolks and whites are firm will further reduce any risk of infection.

Like it is with eggs, the risk of buying infected chicken at the grocery store is very low, according to the USDA and FDA. The model predicted a 95% probability that infected poultry would not make it to stores, since the virus would lead to relatively high mortality among the chickens, and farmers would be aware of the infection before the poultry was prepared for sale. However, the scientists determined that there is a 5% chance that infected chickens reaching market size would be slaughtered and sold before the virus was detected.

Read More: Why Your Diet Needs More Fermented Pickles

The best way to prevent that from happening is to increase testing of flocks on farms, the risk assessment concluded. Farmers can also detect illness in their flocks by monitoring how much feed the birds eat, since birds tend to eat less when they're sick. According to the risk assessment, keeping track of feed consumption can lead to a 96% chance that an infected chicken is not processed for market, and can reduce the risk of human disease by 23 fold, while checking for signs of sickness leads to a 95.5% chance that infected chickens are not processed for market and reduces the risk of human illness by 8-fold.

As an added safety measure, keep raw chicken away from uncooked foods and cook chicken to 165F, which likely inactivates any virus that could make people sick.

Read more:

Is It Safe to Eat Eggs and Chicken During the Bird Flu Outbreak? - TIME

A poultry facility in Michigan and egg producer in Texas both reported outbreaks of avian flu this week. The latest developments on the virus also include infected dairy cows and the first known instance of a human catching bird flu from a mammal.

Although health officials say the risk to the public remains low, there is rising concern, emerging in part from news that the largest producer of fresh eggs in the U.S. reported an outbreak.

Here are some key things to know about the disease.

Dr. Mandy Cohen, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that the agency is taking bird flu seriously, but stressed that the virus has already been well studied.

The fact that it is in cattle now definitely raises our concern level, Cohen said, noting that it means farmworkers who work with cattle and not just those working with birds may need to take precautions.

The good news is that its not a new strain of the virus, Cohen added. This is known to us and weve been studying it, and frankly, weve been preparing for avian flu for 20 years.

Some flu viruses mainly affect people, but others chiefly occur in animals. Avian viruses spread naturally in wild aquatic birds like ducks and geese, and then to chickens and other domesticated poultry.

The bird flu virus drawing attention today Type A H5N1 was first identified in 1959. Like other viruses, it has evolved over time, spawning newer versions of itself.

Since 2020, the virus has been spreading among more animal species including dogs, cats, skunks, bears and even seals and porpoises in scores of countries.

In the U.S., this version of the bird flu has been detected in wild birds in every state, as well as commercial poultry operations and backyard flocks. Nationwide, tens of millions of chickens have died from the virus or been killed to stop outbreaks from spreading.

Last week, U.S. officials said it had been found in livestock. As of Tuesday, it had been discovered in dairy herds in five states Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, New Mexico and Texas according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

This bird flu was first identified as a threat to people during a 1997 outbreak in Hong Kong. In the past two decades, nearly 900 people have been diagnosed globally with bird flu and more than 460 people have died, according to the World Health Organization.

There have been only two cases in the U.S., and neither were fatal.

In 2022, a prison inmate in a work program caught it while killing infected birds at a poultry farm in Montrose County, Colorado. His only symptom was fatigue, and he recovered.

This week, Texas health officials announced that a person who had been in contact with cows had been diagnosed with bird flu. Their only reported symptom was eye redness.

Symptoms are similar to that of other flus, including cough, body aches and fever. Some people dont have noticeable symptoms, but others develop severe, life-threatening pneumonia.

The vast majority of infected people have gotten it directly from birds, but scientists are on guard for any sign of spread among people.

There have been a few instances when that apparently happened most recently in 2007 in Asia. In each cluster, it spread within families from a sick person in the home.

U.S. health officials have stressed that the current public health risk is low and that there is no sign that bird flu is spreading person to person.

While its too early to quantify the potential economic impact of a bird flu outbreak, many of these latest developments are concerning, particularly the transmission of the virus from one species to another, said Daren Detwiler, a food safety and policy expert at Northeastern University.

We dont have a magic forcefield, an invisible shield that protects land and water runoff from impacting other species, Detwiler said. There is a concern in terms of how this might impact other markets, the egg market, the beef market.

If the outbreak is not quickly contained, consumers could ultimately see higher prices, and if it continues to spread, some industries could experience reputational strain, possibly affecting the export industry, Detwiler added.

The egg industry already is experiencing some tightening of supply following detections of bird flu late in 2023 and in early January, coupled with the busy Easter season, where Americans typically consume an average of 3 billion eggs, said Marc Dresner, a spokesperson for the American Egg Board.

Still, even with the outbreak in Texas and the nearly 2 million birds that were killed there, Dresner said there are an estimated 310 million egg laying hens in the U.S. and wholesale egg prices are down about 25% from a February peak.

Associated Press reporters Jonathan Poet in Philadelphia and Mike Stobbe and videojournalist Sharon Johnson in Atlanta contributed to this report.

See the rest here:

What to know about the latest bird flu outbreak in the US - The Associated Press

The discovery of H5N1 bird flu in U.S. cattle and the news that at least one person in Texas has been infected, apparently through contact with infected cows has taken scientists who study influenza by surprise.

But after absorbing their shock, several admitted there was evidence to suggest bovine infection could happen it just hadnt been reported with this particular strain of influenza virus until now.

The situation is evolving. But here are some questions we can answer now about the curious case of highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza in dairy cattle.

Cows from 12 dairy herds in five states have tested positive for H5N1. Those states are Texas (seven herds), Kansas (two), Michigan (one), New Mexico (one), and Idaho (one).

Is that the full extent of the problem?

Some experts believe its unlikely if only because people havent been looking for bird flu infections in cattle before now. It could have been infecting dairy cattle a year ago. We just never thought about looking for it, said David Swayne, an avian influenza expert who is now a private consultant after having worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture for nearly 30 years.

Probably not, Swayne admitted.

In the 1990s, there were reports from the United Kingdom of cows that were infected with human flu viruses. And there is a type of influenza known as influenza D that cows are susceptible to. (Humans mainly contract influenza A and B viruses.)

As to infection with H5N1 specifically, there has been evidence for a while that it could occur at least in a laboratory setting. Scientists from the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut, in Greifswald-Insel Riems, Germany, reported in 2008 that they had experimentally infected six calves with an H5 virus retrieved from an infected cat. All remained healthy but all sero-converted they developed antibodies that indicated that an infection had taken hold.

The list of species that this virus has been shown to be able to infect has grown substantially in the past couple of years, as widespread infection in wild birds has brought the virus to new parts of the globe.

As early as 2003 the virus was seen to be able to infect big cats, having infected tigers and snow leopards in a zoo in Thailand. Later it was seen to infect domestic cats and small carnivorous mammals like martens and mink. More recently, infected black bears, brown bears, polar bears, raccoons, skunks, and coyotes have been found; aquatic mammals like sea lions and seals have also been infected. USDA keeps a list of animal species in which infections have been detected here.

For some of these mammals, the route of infection is pretty obvious. Scavengers that feast on dead bird carcasses can become infected that way.

But cows? Experts believe the more likely route of infection here is via water or grasslands contaminated with virus by infected birds.

There is massive (unprecedented) exposure of wild carnivores (feasting on sick/dead birds) and potentially also other mammals (through contaminated water and surface areas, including grasslands), Ron Fouchier, an influenza virologist at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, told STAT via email. The infected mammals get infected upon feeding/drinking, which is an alternative route of infection of mammals.

Richard Webby, an influenza virologist who heads the WHO Collaborating Center for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals at St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., said infected birds and mammals shed large amounts of H5N1 virus, increasing the risk to other species. There is this elevated exposure, he said.

There have been no reports to date of infected herds, but people should be on the lookout, Swayne suggested.

Yes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published alengthy analysisof the genome of the virus from the infected person. The CDCs conclusion: The small changes seen in the virus are similar to those seen in other instances where this H5N1 has infected people. Viruses with those changes havent been seen to trigger ongoing person-to-person spread.

Overall, the genomic analysis of the virus from this human case does not change CDCs risk assessment, the agency said. The overall risk to human health associated with the ongoing HPAI A(H5) outbreaks in poultry and detections in wild birds and cattle remains low.

First, the CDC said the pattern of infection in the person who only had conjunctivitis or pink eye and the low levels of virus in the collected sample suggest the individuals respiratory tract was not infected. Viruses that are spread by coughs and sneezes are easier to transmit than viruses that are not.

Second, the virus taken from the individual was very closely related to two candidate vaccine viruses seed strains for vaccine production that are already available to vaccine manufacturers. That suggests if a virus like this one started spreading among people, those seed strains could be used to produce vaccines that would be protective.

Third, the virus showed none of the genetic changes that are known to confer resistance to flu antiviral drugs. That means antivirals likely would be effective against this virus.

Yes, in theory. In practice, though, it shouldnt be an issue.

Infected cows shed virus in their milk. Farms that have detected H5N1 in their cows are supposed to destroy the milk produced by infected cows, so it should not make its way into the food chain. Even if some did, inadvertently, pasteurization would kill the viruses, the USDA says.

Unpasteurized milk from affected cows would pose a risk to people. But unpasteurized milk poses multiple risks to people and public health authorities recommend against its consumption.

Thats suspected, but it is uncertain at this point. The infected herd in Michigan had received cows recently from Texas.

Bird flu viruses are genetically structured to infect birds. They can occasionally spill over into mammals, but typically those infections should dead-end in those new hosts. The viruses would need to adapt to be able to transmit efficiently in the new species.

Viruses that mutate to be able to transmit in one species of mammals could find it easier to infect people. Thats why particular attention is paid when bird flu viruses are seen to infect people, or mammal species with which humans interact. An animal of particular concern is pigs.

Pigs are traditionally referred to as mixing bowls or mixing vessels for flu species, because they can be infected with bird flu viruses and with the flu viruses that infect people. If pigs become co-infected with various types of flu, the viruses can swap genes and form hybrids that can then spread from pigs to people. The 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic was caused by a virus that jumped from pigs to people.

Swayne said back in the early 2000s there were occasional reports from Asia of pigs being infected with the virus, but those events appeared to die out. Pigs are not among the list of mammals that have more recently been seen to be susceptible to the virus.

However, scientists have tried infecting pigs in laboratories, with differing results. German scientists reported in 2023 that only one of eight pigs they infected with a strain of H5N1 from a chicken developed antibodies that indicated there had been an infection. Those scientists used the same strain of H5N1 as was found to have infected the cows in the U.S., which goes by the awkward moniker 2.3.4.4b.

But more recently, scientists from the USDA reported that they were able to experimentally infect pigs, and some of the infected pigs transmitted the virus to uninoculated pigs housed with them, when using sample viruses taken from mammals raccoons and red foxes.

Almost undoubtedly.

Were doing science here. And science changes. And when the science changes, then our assessment may change, said Nirav Shah, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This article has been updated to include findings from the CDC analysis of the virus that infected the Texas person, and that testing confirmed a cattle outbreak in Idaho.

Read the original:

What we know about H5N1 bird flu in cows and the risk to humans - STAT

Texas cows are believed to have directly transmitted an avian flu to other cows and one person, according to state agriculture and health officials.

The new evidence of mammal-to-mammal transmissions of a virus that is highly infectious and deadly for domestic birds is a troubling development in the yearslong outbreak. Research published last month by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that the occurrences need to be closely monitored to prevent a potential health crisis.

The virus may be changing and adapting to infect mammals, researchers concluded. Continuous surveillance is essential to mitigate the risk for a global pandemic.

The Texas Department of State Health Services announced the human infection Monday. The person worked closely with dairy cows that are thought to be infected, and he was likely infected directly by them.

We believe thats how it happened, said Lara Anton, a spokesperson for the department.

The persons only symptom is conjunctivitis commonly known as pink eye and he has been told to avoid contact with other people while he recovers, Anton said.

We think that the risk is low for public health in general, for people who are not working with sick cows, Anton said.

There is no evidence that the virus has changed in a way that makes it more transmissible to humans, federal officials have said.

It was the second infection of a person in the United States by the currently circulating bird flu, according to CDC data. The first was in Colorado in 2022 of someone who was directly exposed to infected poultry. That persons only symptom was fatigue.

The bird flu outbreak in dairy cattle in Texas, Kansas and potentially New Mexico was first reported last week by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Migrating birds are the apparent sources of the initial infections, which were noticed, in part, because sick cows were producing thick and discolored milk.

On Friday, the USDA confirmed the disease in a Michigan dairy herd and said it was the result of sick cows from Texas being transported there before they showed symptoms.

There has not yet been evidence of cow-to-cow transmission of the virus in the Michigan herd, said Jennifer Holton, a spokesperson for the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development.

But in Idaho, where another dairy herd received cows from Texas, at least eight cows of the preexisting herd have been infected, according to preliminary test results.

That leads us to assume cow-to-cow transmission, said Sydney Kennedy, a spokesperson for the Idaho State Department of Agriculture.

The most significant impact so far on the affected dairy farms is a drop in milk production while infected cows recover. Federal rules forbid milk from sick cows to be processed for human consumption.

Early herd infections in Texas resulted in milk losses of up to 40% in herds for a week or more, the Texas Department of Agriculture said. However, those losses are too small to cause national milk shortages or higher prices for consumers, the USDA said.

The current bird flu outbreak started February 2022 in the United States and has since resulted in the culling of about 82 million birds in commercial and backyard flocks in 48 states, according to CDC data. Its effects have been most profound during spring and fall migrations of wild birds.

Despite the spring migration being underway this year, only seven U.S. flocks were infected in the past month for a total of about 32,000 birds. Nearly all of those were part of a commercial turkey flock in South Dakota.

This article first appeared in theIowa Capital Dispatch,a sistersite of the Nebraska Examiner in the States Newsroom network.

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Bird flu spreads cow-to-cow and to one human in Texas Nebraska Examiner - Nebraska Examiner

A strain of avian influenza that has killed millions of birds in recent years has now been detected in dairy cows in several states, prompting concerns about the safety of the U.S. dairy supply.

Federal health and agriculture officials released a statement last week stressing that there continues to be no concern about the safety of the commercial milk supply, while underscoring that the agencies are continuing to monitor the situation as it evolves.

Scientists know that bird flu can spread to humans when they come into contact with infected animals, including dead ones, without wearing protective gear, which seems to have been the case with a person recently infected in Texas. So far, there isnt any evidence to suggest that humans can contract bird flu by consuming food that has been pasteurized or cooked, said Benjamin Chapman, a professor and food safety specialist at North Carolina State University.

Thats not to say it couldnt happen, he said. Its just that we have a pretty robust history of it not happening. And thats good news.

However, there are a few key points that researchers are still working to understand, Dr. Chapman and other experts said, like just how widespread the current outbreak is in cows, or exactly how the virus spread to them. Public safety agencies have said that its not clear what risks surround unpasteurized products.

In the column of known versus unknown, theres a lot more in the unknown part, said Dr. Gail Hansen, a veterinary public health expert and independent public health consultant.

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Is Milk Safe to Drink? What to Know About Bird Flu and Food Safety - The New York Times

News that H5N1 avian influenza has breached another mammalian species this time dairy cows has taken the flu science community aback. Though cows previously had been seen to be susceptible to human flu viruses, and could be experimentally infected with H5 in a lab, the absence of cow involvement until now in H5s nearly 30-year history lulled scientists into thinking the species was outside the viruss remit.

Further elevating the concern this discovery has triggered is the fact that a dairy farm worker in Texas was infected with H5N1, though the unnamed individuals only symptom was conjunctivitis.

To put these developments in perspective, STAT turned to Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier, a leading expert on H5N1, for his assessment of these latest twists in the H5 saga. Fouchier, who studies avian influenza at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, was at the center of a controversy about H5N1 in 2012, when a U.S. scientific advisory group moved to restrict publication of research he and a team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison had done separately to see what mutations would be needed for the virus to be able to spread efficiently among people, so-called gain of function research.

Fouchier takes little solace from the fact that current versions of H5N1 seem to infect people less frequently, and to cause mostly mild illness when they do. The global range of H5 viruses the sheer volume of the virus in nature and the numbers of mammals H5 has shown itself capable of sickening is unprecedented, he said, making anticipating its future path harder than ever to gauge.

A transcript of the conversation is below. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

(Note: A zoonosis or zoonotic event is the infection of a person with an animal virus, in this case H5N1. Reassortment is a process by which flu viruses swap genes in an infected species, giving rise to hybrid viruses that could behave differently than their parent viruses.)

Is it possible that weve seen the H5N1 evolve to become more dangerous to a bunch of other species, but less dangerous to us?

Its what Id like to think.

In the years after the first human cases of infections in Hong Kong in 1997 right up to 2015, we saw relatively large numbers of zoonotic events with H5N1, ending in 2015, with very large numbers in Egypt. There were quite large numbers of human cases, despite restricted replication of the virus around the globe.

Then, from 2014 onwards, the virus really started to spread massively with wild birds into Europe, crossing over into the U.S. two times now, also landing in Africa, spreading throughout Asia, all in wild migratory birds. Weve never seen such big outbreaks all across Europe and the Americas. And we see the number of zoonotic events decrease.

You have massive outbreaks in wild birds. It spreads over into poultry quite easily. But in humans we see lower numbers, and that to me suggests that the zoonotic risk has decreased. And I am more or less supported by that by noticing that in the Western world in England, in Russia, and in the U.S. most of the [human] cases that we have seen were not particularly severe.

After 2015, one thing that has happened is that these H5 viruses have continuously reassorted with wild bird avian influenza viruses. So what I think has happened is that these viruses are now better adapted to wild birds, but less adapted to poultry and to humans.

That increases the environmental load of virus on occasion. Theres different species, time and time again, where you see massive bursts of virus. And carnivores, they feast on [dead birds]. It could also increase the environmental virus load on grasslands where birds poop or in surface waters. And that could increase the risk even to non-carnivorous mammals like goats or cows.

That kind of gives me a feeling of reassurance.

It just provides an explanation where you wouldnt have to really take into account yet an increased zoonotic risk.

Of course, when we see this virus in a milking farm and you see incredibly high virus load in some milk cows and their milk, that is a new risk. Because Im not sure how familiar you are with the milking procedures, but theres very little that people do to prevent human contact with milk. During the milking process, theres massive generation of aerosol formation. If you have high amounts of aerosol with virus, the chances increase that you will get conjunctivitis.

Theres very little hygiene to protect the farmers that are milking. If people arent washing their hands a lot and somebodys infected with conjunctivitis, you could see how that could spread, couldnt you?

When we had an outbreak of [H7N7] bird flu in the Netherlands in 2003, we had 89 cases of human infection.

Is that when a veterinarian died?

Yes. The majority of cases then were conjunctivitis cases. There were very few respiratory illnesses, except for that one fatal case. But the cases of conjunctivitis were linked to direct contact with poultry, and not with human-to-human transmission.

There was only one investigation where two household members got conjunctivitis, and they shared a towel to wash their face. I think it is not very likely that you will see massive spread of conjunctivitis due to avian influenza. I dont think that its likely that it will spread human to human. Its more likely that it will spread from the animal source into humans.

I think you disagreed earlier when I used the word reassuring. But to me this pattern of becoming much better at infecting wild birds, and seemingly less inclined to infect people seems reassuring.

Well, let me explain why I dont think its too reassuring.

We have never seen this scale of infections in mammals, and in such diversity of mammals. We have now seen more than 40 species of mammals infected during the last outbreaks, which is unprecedented. We know that flu is unpredictable. But we also know that adaptation of virus to mammals is not a good thing.

Many of the adaptive mutations that you see occur when H5 has infected marine mammals, or foxes or martens or minks have been seen with the viruses that caused previous human pandemics. And that I find not reassuring. And with 40 species happening at the same time all over the world, sometimes with little option to intervene, that is not so reassuring to me.

What do you mean by options to intervene?

Well, if there are infections in cows, we can offer personal protective equipment to the milkers and we can offer antiviral drugs to people who start to develop symptoms or conjunctivitis. But when tens of thousands of seals wash up on your shore, what are you going to do? And how are you going to prevent onward spread?

And these are the animals that we see. What about the animals that we dont see so easily, like rats or mice? Whats happening? The large species we now know get infected easily. But the small species, we dont even know.

And so the high presence in nature, and the large number of infections I find concerning, despite the fact that we think current zoonotic risk is low. And thats because these viruses are changing. And we have no experience [of how H5 behaves] in all these species. We cant predict whats going to happen.

One of the things H5 has taught me is that its ever-changing, and just because it seems to infect people less frequently right now, that doesnt mean its always going to be that way.

Also the fact that the first human now is diagnosed with conjunctivitis is not a guarantee. Theres a small chance that if you have an infection in the eye, that you will actually get virus also in your respiratory tract. And then we know that if the virus ends up in your lower airways, you could develop pneumonia.

One case in a farmer who only develops conjunctivitis is not a reason to celebrate the fact that this virus is not virulent. Lets be careful now, and monitor the people and treat them with drugs as soon as you see that theres something more happening.

What are you working on now? What are you looking for?

I would like to know if there is indeed decreased zoonotic risk through the reassortment patterns.

How do you investigate that question? We identified reassortment patterns. And then we take one of the earlier parental viruses that didnt spread so well in wild birds and compare it to the current versions and inoculate different bird species, including ducks, or cell cultures. And you can look for all of the different variants, and how they vary in their replicative capacity in wild birds.

We can inoculate human organoid cells and see how permissive the cells are to the different variants, whether the early Asian variants that caused many zoonoses, whether they were, in fact, more prone to infect human tissue than the current viruses.

And if you see those same opposing patterns so more adaptation to wild birds, less efficient in infecting human cells that would explain the current situation compared to what weve seen before.

But of course, its important to note that were all doing our research with our hands tied behind our back because of the gain-of-function issues. We have to be careful in what we do and how we design the experiments. So we can take natural viruses and show that the old viruses were less likely to infect wild birds and more likely to infect human cells, and the current virus is the other way around. But really getting to the bottom of things is getting harder and harder.

Is there anything youve been waiting for a chance to say but I havent asked the right question to elicit it?

Well, the questions are really about whats going on with the cows. And U.S. scientists and officials are hopefully going to resolve that quickly. How does this virus enter cows?

If there is cow-to-cow transmission, how does it work? Its clear that its dairy cows, and it could be that its due to the milking instruments that do not get cleaned enough. Its human driven cow-to-cow transmission. And if thats the case, you can stop it. You can try to actually clean your machine. So Im really looking forward to in-depth investigations, epidemiological investigations of how the cows get this disease.

It could also be from a common feeding source. So what are these cows being fed? Do they eat fresh grass? Do they eat hay from a common source that has been contaminated by birds being out there? I think this is really crucial information, because this is going to lead to what are the options to stop this outbreak.

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Avian flu expert Fouchier not convinced threat to people has abated - STAT - STAT