Re: More farm workers infected by the dairy virus

On 7/19/2024 11:53 PM, erik simpson wrote:

On 7/19/24 4:59 PM, RonO wrote:

On 7/16/2024 9:29 AM, RonO wrote:

On 7/16/2024 9:06 AM, RonO wrote:

On 7/15/2024 11:44 AM, RonO wrote:

On 7/13/2024 9:04 AM, RonO wrote:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/three-presumptive-bird-flu-cases-reported-poultry-workers-colorado-rcna161686
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3 farm workers cleaning up an infected poultry farm were infected by the Dairy virus.  Where the Dairy virus goes poultry flocks start to go down.  In Michigan they found that some dairy workers at infected farms also worked at poultry farms, and around twice as many had close contacts that worked on poultry farms (17%).  They have known from Texas with the first poultry flock to go down with the Dairy virus that humans likely took the virus onto the poultry farm.  They tried to blame equipment because the virus is not infective off skin and clothing for more than half an hour, but can remain infective on a solid surface for 24 hours.  An infected person shedding virus is obviously the bests means to infect the poultry flock and other dairy herds that did not get infected cattle.  They already had an example of an infected dairy worker shedding virus in Texas, so it seemed obvious that infected humans were taking the virus to poultry farms by the time all the flocks in Michigan began to go down, but the USDA and CDC have been in willful denial mode.
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Infected humans have been transferring the virus to Dairy herds in states that did not get cattle, and have been infecting poultry flocks with the dairy virus.  The work determining how many dairy workers have been infected has never been done at this time, but everyone knows that more than 4 is not just likely but a given. Only 61 dairy workers have been tested of those 61 the CDC admits that over half were not tested correctly (only nasal swabs when most of the positive cases have been negative for nasal swabs but positive for eye swabs). There has been no attempt to identify all the infected herds in order to limit the infection and human contacts.
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The willful stupidity is likely politically driven.  Instead of trying to prevent the next pandemic the CDC has decided to monitor all states for influenza activity, and if there is an increase in influenza cases they will act.  This is so tragically lame. Instead of prevent the virus from evolving into a pandemic virus they will try to contain the issue after it becomes an issue in the human population.  Colorado demonstrates how stupid this strategy is.  The dairy worker infected in Colorado had respiratory symptoms.  The poultry workers had eye infections, but some of them also had respiratory symptoms.  The virus can obviously infect humans whether it comes from cows or birds, and in Colorado it is becoming a respiratory infection.  They need to identify all the infected herds and now poultry flocks in Colorado and quarantine the herds and farm workers.
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The more herds infected the more humans will be infected, the more chance that the virus will evolve into a pandemic virus.  Willful stupidity should not be allowed to continue.
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Ron Okimoto

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https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/15/health/colorado-bird-flu-humans-confirmed/index.html
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Two more Colorado poultry workers from the same farm have tested positive for H5N1 dairy influenza.  All 5 of the infected poultry workers came from the same farm and were working with the same infected birds.  This likely should tell everyone how many dairy workers have likely been infected since dairy cows shed virus for over 4 weeks, and these workers were likely only exposed for a few days cleaning out the infected flock.  They do not say how many had respiratory symptoms, but the state that some did.  The Colorado virus may have mutated to better infect humans, but still produces mild symptoms.  The CDC is waiting for sequencing results to tell them how bad the situation may be.
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These poultry workers could have infected other flocks and herds if they worked on other farms, but the CDC isn't doing any contact tracing.
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Ron Okimoto
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Oklahoma has finally admitted to having infected dairy herds so the number of positive states have become 13.  Oklahoma is one of the states identified by the FDA back on May 10th as having H5N1 positive dairy products, but the USDA and CDC never followed up.  The fact that it has taken this long for the infection to be detected in Oklahoma is due to the willful stupidity of how the dairy virus has been handled by the USDA and CDC.  It is obvious that the USDA and CDC could have just started sampling dairy products in the lower 48 states, identified dairies that contributed milk to those processing plants and identified most of the infected herds.  They could have started contact tracing to idenify more herds that could have been infected by the known infected herds.
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Oklahoma hasn't been announced by the USDA, you have to go to their web site and find out that 2 Oklahoma dairy herds were reported positive July 11th.
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https://www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-poultry-disease/avian/avian-influenza/hpai-detections/hpai-confirmed-cases-livestock
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There were 9 other states where the FDA idenitfied H5N1 positive dairy products that were not then known to have infected herds, but no one followed up.  3 of the last 4 states added to the positive list were among the 9 identified by the FDA as having positive dairy products back in May.  By now the virus has likely spread to many other states because no one identified the infected herds, and tried to limit infection by limiting dairy worker contacts with other farms.
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As tragically stupid as it may be Florida was one of the states identified by the FDA as having postive dairy products and it was very far from other known positive states (the closest state was North Carolina) and yet no one bothered to identify the infected herds in that state (There has been no admission to having positive herds in Florida).   The CDC also knew that one Florida county had absurdly high waste water readings for influenza and yet they didn't check the dairies in that county.  Florida has a high population and is not where you want this type of virus to fester and evolve.  The Dairy virus has been allowed to spread in Florida unchecked for months.
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Ron Okimoto
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https://www.statnews.com/2024/07/15/bird-flu-snapshot-h5n1-infected-herds/
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Reality is worse than I depicted.  STATnews has an article on it.  The Oklahoma samples were collected by the dairy farmer in April, but he didn't submit them for testing until the USDA offered compensation. So his positive dairy herds may have contributed to the positive FDA results in May, and his herds have been allowed to spread the virus for months.  The recommendation to protect dairy workers did not apply to this farmer because his herds were not known to be infected, so his dairy workers were likely exposed for months as the virus burned through his herd.
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The STAT article also has something from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health "gave voice to a rising pessimism about the prospects of containing the H5N1 outbreak in cows in a recent report."  The CDC and USDA haven't even tried to identify all the infected herds, and definitely haven't tried to restrict the spread of the virus among the herds and poultry flocks.  They have recommendations that only are for known infected herds, and so they obviously are not working due to the fact that they refuse to identify all the infected herds.
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The USDA already has a milk testing program in place for things like taking cell counts to identify mastitis, but they refuse to test milk samples for H5N1.  They could just test milk products produced in every state, and identify herds that contribute to positive samples. They could obviously be pooling samples and not testing every cow. The willful stupidity has just allowed the virus to spread out of control.
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Ron Okimoto
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https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/spotlights/h5n1-response-07192024.html
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2 more poultry workers (6 total for the same infected flock) have been confirmed to be positive for H5N1 by the CDC.  This should tell anyone that the virus can easily infect humans at this time.  Some of the workers are experiencing respiratory symptoms, and the CDC should be at an all out alert, but they are still passing out the fictional beliefs that the danger remains low.  It has been that way because they simply have refused to identify all the infected workers.  They have tried as hard as they can to not identify infected herds and all the farm workers being exposed to the virus.
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This virus is obviously easily infecting humans at this time, but the major conclusion from the sequence data is that it does not show the mutations that would make it resistant to the current antiviral medications.  This is only reassuring that if it does start killing people that some people might be saved if they are given antivirals soon enough to matter.  What they should be worried about is the fact that the more humans infected, the more chance the virus has of mutating into a more pathogenic form among humans.  They have done pretty much nothing to reduce the number of humans being infected.
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The poultry farm got infected from the dairy cattle, and it is obvious that farm workers took the virus to that poultry farm.  They would likely have had to be infected with the virus and shedding.  The Colorado virus infecting the poultry workers is closely related to the virus that infected the Michigan dairy worker.  No one has to guess how the virus infected the Colorado herds with a virus known to infect humans in Michigan.
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Ron Okimoto
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It would appear from the 12Jul24 issue of Science that world attention is being directed at this problem.  Our world seems to be pretty disfunctional.
 

  The FDA, CDC and USDA are dysfunctional.  The FDA was not going to release the locations that produced the H5N1 positive milk samples, but pretty much everyone told them that, that was stupid, so they eventually released the states that had positive milk samples, all the time claiming that the dairy products were safe to consume while disregarding the danger to dairy workers working at the positive dairy farms, and the real danger of initiating the next pandemic.  The CDC and USDA have done everything that they can do to avoid identifying the infected herds. They refused to identify the infected herds contributing to the FDA data.  Their recommendations apply to infected herds, but since they refuse to identify all the infected herds they are letting the virus spread unchecked in the dairy herds and it has spilled over onto poultry farms in those states with infected herds.  If you find poultry flocks with H5N1, you should check the dairy farms because everyone knows where the virus is coming from at this time.  The USDA and the FDA refuse to act on the affected poultry farms, and the FDA data to identify more positive herds.  The CDC refuses to act on their own waste water data that they know is correlated with infected herds in those counties.
When the FDA data came out identifying 9 new states with positive dairy products there were 9 known positive states.  The USDA and CDC have refused to act on that data and other data indicating more positive states.  Since the FDA release their data only 4 more states have admitted to having positive dairy herds and 3 of them were already known to have positive milk products in the FDA data.  The situation really is that sad.
The Colorado dairy virus is most closely related to the virus that was in an infected dairy worker in Michigan.  It has been likely that the virus has been spread by humans to other herds from the beginning of detection in Texas, and is likely how Colorado herds were infected by the Michigan strain.  We have known that the virus does not survive long on skin and clothing (less than 30 minutes in an infectious form).  They tried to claim that equipment exchange was the cause, but it was pretty obvious that infected workers were taking the virus to other states and other farms.  Human workers shed the virus and infect the animals.  How else are the poultry farms being infected by the dairy workers? Michigan found that some dairy workers at infected farms also worked on poultry farms, and double that number (17%) of the dairy workers had close contacts that worked on poultry farms.  The dairy workers were the obvious vector for transmission of the virus to poultry.  That is the most likely mode of transmission at this time, but the CDC and USDA refuse to deal with reality.  The CDC and USDA have the delusion that equipment transfer is the cause, but humans have to take that equipment between farms.  The virus is infectious off solid surfaces for up to 24 hours.  It is infectious off clothing and skin for less than 30 minutes.   For humans to take the virus onto another farm or to another state (as happened in Kansas and South Dakota that were states that did not get cattle from Texas but were infected by the Texas strains) the human has to be infected and shedding virus.  How did the virus get from an infected herd involving a dairy worker in Michigan to Colorado without the transfer of cattle?
Ron Okimoto
Previously sent this morning.