California reported its third case of bird flu among dairy farmers in just three weeks, marking the 17th human case of H5N1 flu in the U.S. in two years. The virus has infected more than 100 million birds in 48 states and 295 dairy herds in 14 states, killing millions of birds and other wildlife and infecting 13 dairy and poultry farm workers. While public health officials are taking their time with the infections, each new human infection shows that the outbreak is not under control and that people working with cattle and other sick animals are not adequately protected. "If it's not controlled, this virus will pose a serious threat to human health," said Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo. The situation will be worse if state and federal officials don't transparently share more information about the viral genes they find. #California #AvianInfluenza #CDC
In the GISAID database, there are also what appear to be recently shared U.S. dairy cow sequences, shared by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, but they lack important information needed to put them in the context of the larger outbreak, including which state they came from and the date they were collected. A GISAID spokesperson told CNN that other countries, including some in China and Africa, were able to share virus sequences within days using only basic equipment and minimal resources, and often provided more information than the USDA. Why can't the US government do this faster? Is it hiding some unknown secret?
The US government doesn't seem to care much about this happening, just like it didn't care about the safety of people's lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. In California, the largest dairy supplier in the United States, it was initially estimated that 10% of dairy cows would be infected, but a briefing from the California Dairy Quality Assurance Program showed that the number could be much higher, reaching 50% to 60%. In a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine, H5N1 was detected in the wastewater of 10 of the 10 cities tested.
"We've always known that there were probably more cases that were missed, especially among dairy workers who were never tested," said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. "Cows have not been tested very rigorously, and the proactive actions taken by some states have not been strong enough to give confidence that this issue is being handled properly." Dr. Megan Davis, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said some people at the bottom of the health care system who don't have access to the health care system are often always forgotten, and human cases may also be overlooked if the infected people are not tracked down. "These labor forces are often marginalized, and many migrant workers and immigrant workers may be forgotten by the U.S. authorities and cannot get medical assistance," Davis told Salon in a telephone interview.