OT? Dairy flu

The CDC issued an alert yesterday that they were initiating planning for "possiblity of increased risk to human health" from the dairy flu.  The CDC has screwed up by the numbers in terms of evolution of the virus and the threat to humans.  They knew from the first detections that humans were being infected, but they didn't initiate testing and contact tracing.  Humans had already likely spread the virus to other dairy herds for some time.  They knew from the first sequencing results that many states did not get cattle but ended up with the virus.  People were the obvious vector for spread of the virus between herds.  We have known for years that the flu virus only survives for around 5 hours on the skin and maybe up to 12 hours on clothing, but we also know that you have to be infected within a few minutes of getting it on your skin or clothing because the virus doesn't seem to be infective after a few minutes on those surfaces.  The virus survives the longest on hard surfaces and is infective off those surfaces for up to 24 hours, but the poultry farms that were infected by the dairy virus in the same counties as the infected herds would have had little reason to exchange equipment.  Infected humans likely took the virus to those poultry farms.  The two known human cases were shedding infective virus.  The CDC has understood this from the very beginning of their involvement, but they failed to act on it.  They claim that it isn't their policy to force testing onto farm workers, so they never checked to determine the rate that humans were being infected even though there was ancedotal evidence of other dairy workers with red eye (eye infection).  The crazy thing is these red eye individuals can infect other humans.  They got infected, and they are shedding virus.  If the CDC had started testing and contact tracing they would already know how the other herds and poultry flocks got infected.
What they needed to do was identify all the infected herds and quarantine the herds and farm workers, but the USDA and CDC were not interested in contact tracing and tracking down additional cases.  They both claimed to rely on farm reporting.  This is stupid.  The FDA tested milk products from 38 states.  They tested products that came from milk processing plants in those states and found 17 states with H5N1 positive milk samples, but would not release the names of the states because they claimed to only be worried about the safety of the food chain. Pasteurization was found to kill the virus.  When the FDA finally did release the names of the states a couple weeks later it was found that 9 new states not yet identified as having positive dairy herds had produced milk products that were positive for the dairy virus.  3 of the states already known to have infected herds were not found to have positive dairy products, so they likely missed some positive states of the 38 tested.  The CDC could have predicted the results because they started to monitor waste water and most of the new states that were found to have positive dairy products had also shown flu virus in the waste water.
The CDC knows that the longer that they allow humans to be infected by the dairy virus the more likely that it will evolve into a strain that will start killing people.  Currently the infected humans only have mild eye irritation (the virus infects mammary glands and apparently tear ducts).  The initial sequencing results indicated that there were already variants of the virus with mutations that would make them more infective in mammals, but they were minor variants at the time of the sample collections.  As the virus adapts to cattle these variants are probably the most likely to be selected for.  The virus is infecting a lot more herds than they are tracking, and it is evolving in all those herds and the dairy workers are exposed to that evolving virus.  I should note that the cats that got infected by the dairy virus had high mortality because the virus infected their brains.  Influenza virus is normally a respiratory virus, but if this virus adapted to infecting human brains that would be a real tragedy.
So instead of trying to limit the current spread, the CDC has decided to prepare for human transmission of the next pandemic virus.  It doesn't sound like they are preparing correctly because you want to limit the first human cases with severe symptoms.  In order to do that you have to identify them as soon as you can.  The humans currently being infected are dairy workers, so you need to identify all the infected herds and monitor the dairy workers and their human contacts.  The next pandemic could have already started in one of the states with unidentified infected dairy herds.  They need to track down the dairies that contributed to the milk of the processing plants that produced positive milk samples.  They need to go to the counties with positive waste water (these include multiple sites in California that has not yet claimed to have positive herds and several of these sites are in rural areas surrounding the bay area, the CDC nightmare scenario) and identify infected herds.  They need to track the contacts of the dairy workers so that they can identify more infected herds in states that are already known to have infected herds.  Once they identify all the possible sources of infection they can monitor those herds and people and then try to keep any virus from spreading and becoming a pandemic.
Ron Okimoto