Re: NPR article on the dairy virus

On 7/31/2024 3:57 PM, RonO wrote:

https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/07/31/nx-s1-5059071/bird-flu-human-cases-farm-workers-testing
 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.07.27.24310982v1
  This article paints a pretty grim picture.  It includes information on an draft paper that has not yet been peer reviewed indicating that as was already known dairy worker infections have gone undetected and under reported.  They tested 17 dairy workers that had reported flu like symptoms.  As expected nasal swabs were negative for all 17 (nasal swabs were negative for the first two known infected humans, but they had positive eye swabs).  14 of the 17 had serum samples tested for neutralizing antibodies to H5N1 and 2 of them were positive indicating previous infection with H5N1.  In Michigan 35 dairy workers had serum samples tested, but they were apparently selected because they had not shown symptoms.  All 35 were negative, and Michigan did not include the two known positive dairy workers in the study.
 The article also has information from Dairy workers indicating that they have not been informed of the issue, and have not been issued protective equipment.
 Indications are that the USDA and CDC are failing to limit the exposure of humans to the dairy virus, and that many more herds are infected in many more states than are now known, and many more dairy workers have been infected than the CDC is aware of.  The CDC claims that a pathetic total of 117 humans (most of them dairy workers) have been tested for H5N1 and only 4 tested positive, but over 30 of those tests were only nasal swabs, that are known not to identify infected individuals.  There should have been a testing program in place in March of this year, but of the thousands of farm workers that are likely affected by the spread of the dairy virus only 117 have been tested.  No contact tracing, nor program to identify infected herds has been initiated, so the virus has been allowed to spread unchecked in states that refuse to acknowledge that they have the issue because they refuse to test the dairy herds in their state.
 The CDC has just admitted that they have been working with a defective detection test that has likely been used for most of the human tests from the start, and haven't yet resolved the issue with the company they blame for producing the defective test kits.
 Everyone has known that all the USDA and CDC needed to do was start testing pooled milk samples since the FDA identify H5N1 in dairy products from 15 states when only 9 were known to have infected herds at that time.  They could have used the FDA detection protocol.  4 more states have been identified with infected herds since then and 3 of them had been identified as producing positive dairy products by the FDA in early May.  There are 6 more states that were found to produce positive dairy products by the FDA that have not yet admitted to having infected herds.
 Ron Okimoto
 

One thing that should be noted about the paper is that one of the serum positive dairy workers did not work with cattle, but was only exposed to dairy workers exposed to cattle.  That worker was infected indirectly, and it could have been human to human transmission.  The infected humans are shedding live virus.
Ron Okimoto