Re: Analysis of the 38 California human cases of dairy virus infection

On 3/13/2025 6:16 PM, RonO wrote:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/74/wr/pdfs/mm7408a1-H.pdf
 All were infected by the B3.13 dairy genotype of the H5N1 influenza. They seem to be purposefully messing with their reported results for what tests were positive in order to make it look like there were more oral and nasal positive tests than there actually were.  37 of the 38 were tested with eye swabs and 35 of them were positive (only 2 negative for eye swabs).  Only 5 of the 37 had positive nasal swabs.  29 were tested with nasal and oropharyngeal swabs and 8 were positive (the picked up 3 oropharyngeal positives.  The other claims do not make sense as they had sub categories of what had already been claimed.  The one positive oralpharyngeal positive was probably the sick child with gut infection symptoms that had already been claimed to be positive for the oralpharyngeal test in news articles.  This just means that all the tests that did not involve eye swabs were likely underestimating the number of infected.
 California only tested 170 dairy workers to find 37 positives.  They relied on voluntary reporting in order to determine who got tested. Antibody results indicated that around 10% of the over 5,000 dairy workers at the infected dairies would have likely been infected.  So they missed around 500 infected dairy workers. Both the CDC and California claimed in October that they were going to test the dairy workers at infected farms, but that never happened.
 Their phylogeny figure is pretty worthless because they do not have all the dairies on it nor all the multiple infections at 4 of the dairies. There were 5 dairies with multiple infections (2 with 2 infected workers and 3 with 3 infected workers).  They also do not have an outgroup in their phylogeny so all you get is an unrooted tree so you can't tell how the infections on all the farms are related to each other and it is pretty worthless epidemiology data.
 California lost 92 commercial poultry flocks, and it is because they would not keep dairy workers off the poultry farms.  Everyone understood that dairy workers were taking the virus to poultry farms, but the CDC and USDA only recommended that workers at infected farms not go to other farms, and California never made it more than a recommendation.  A recommendation that had never been enforced in any state.  Most states didn't even try to identify all their infected herds so that the workers would know not to go to other farms.  The result is that nearly all the dairy farms in California (over 675 out of around 900) got infected, and they lost 92 commercial flocks that included over 40% of their commercial layer flocks.  Just due to stupidity and denial and an unwillingness to do the right thing.  Why don't they have that in the CDC report?
 Ron Okimoto
 

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influenza-bird-flu/h5n1-dairy-cow-study-finds-sustained-milk-production-drop-extensive
A study on just one Ohio herd has come out, but hasn't yet passed peer review.  777 of 3876 cows in the herd showed symptoms, but 89.4% of them (over 3,400 of them were seropositive for H5).  Economic loss due to decreased milk production was estimated to average $950 per symptomatic cow (a loss of $737,500 for that dairy).  Ohio was infected when the mortality was only around 1 or 2% of infected.  The losses in California were likely higher because they had more infected cows and over 10% mortality.  They did not list any mortality for the Ohio herd studied, so that was not a factor.
One bad sign was that 42 dry cows that were not milking got infected and were seropositive.  This likely means that dairy workers that work at feed lots or beef cattle ranches could have infected beef cattle.  Old Dairy cows are sent directly to slaughter and not to feed lots.  We now know that veterinarians got infected and could have spread the virus.
The article has the two new Idaho dairy herds as being confirmed, but Idaho is claiming that it has 3 herds under quarantine.  They are not revealing the genotype of the Idaho infections.  More domestic cats are going down in Idaho, kansas, and New Jersey.  Some mice in Missouri have tested positive.  They aren't releasing the genotype of those infections.
Ron Okimoto