Re: California Dairy herds positive for the dairy virus

On 9/7/2024 2:17 PM, RonO wrote:

On 9/6/2024 5:34 PM, RonO wrote:

On 9/4/2024 8:23 PM, RonO wrote:

3 herds in California central valley have been found to be positive for the dairy virus.
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https://www.statnews.com/2024/08/29/california-nations-largest-milk- producer-discloses-possible-bird-flu-outbreaks-in-three-dairy-cow-herds/
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They claim that California workers are "usually" dedicated to just one herd so do not pick up shifts at nearby poultry farms, but months ago (before I retired in May) I noted that California had high levels of influenza virus in the waste water around the bay area.  At that time they had estimated that the virus first infected cattle Sept or Oct 2023, and they hadn't yet found viral sequence from herds infected that early in Texas.  When I looked into the avian influenza cases the Dairy virus was most similar to one isolated from a Peregrine falcon in California.  California had high levels of influenza virus in their waste water (associated with infected herds in Texas and Michigan) and Commercial poultry farms started to go down in the central valley in Oct 2023 (the flocks get infected by the dairy workers).  A number of flocks went down within a few months working their way up North and around the bay area.
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I contacted a person at the Avian disease ARS station in Georgia, and tried to get the name of the person that would have the sequence data of the California samples (they had not been included in any of the dairy virus studies) but I was told that the USDA did not give out that information.  I told the guy that they needed to check out those samples, but his comment was that they were busy.
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My prediction is that when they sequence the central valley virus they could identify the region where the initial dairy infection occurred and it spread from California to Texas.  The virus spread rapidly out of Texas, but it probably came from somewhere else.
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The CDC and USDA would have identified many more states with infected herds by now if they had acted on the waste water data and the FDA identification of states with virus positive dairy products.  The Dairy workers are not being protected from being infected in states that refuse to identify their infected herds.
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Ron Okimoto

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https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/person-infected-bird-flu- missouri-no-contact-animals-know-rcna170010
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There has been a case of H5N1 in a human in Missouri, but this person did not have contact with poultry or dairy cattle.  My guess is that it is person to person transmission.  Missouri is one of the states that has not verified any positive dairy herds (no one has been looking), but Kansas and Oklahoma have positive dairy herds.  They have known that it was likely human transmission into Kansas and North Dakota from Texas because neither states got cattle from Texas, but both states got the virus from Texas.  Human to human transmission has probably been going on for some time, but they never started contact tracing to identify possibly infected herds nor to determine how the virus was transmitted to the herds and poultry flocks that have been infected.
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Ron Okimoto

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 The virus is H5, but hasn't been confirmed to be the dairy virus.  The article notes that Missouri hasn't claimed to have positive herds at this time, but commercial poultry flocks have gone down and that usually happens when the dairies are infected and dairy workers take it to the poultry farms.  Previous human cases had mild symptoms, but this person was hospitalized.  The USDA and CDC are still not doing anything to identify all the infected herds in states like Missouri, so nothing much has been done to minimize the exposure of dairy workers.  My guess is that an infected dairy worker infected this patient, and it is a case of human to human transmission.
 Ron Okimoto
 

As stupid as it may be the CDC response to the latest human infection without contact with animals is worse than can be imagined.  They did not send a team to investigate, and have not started contact tracing and testing of close contacts.  It seems crazy when you think that the person was hospitalized, and this is obviously a serious case of infection.  What they do not want is the 50% human mortality associated with the H5N1 virus to become a reality for the dairy virus.  The CDC continues to do nothing but monitor the disease in two states, which is just nuts.  They are actually waiting for it to become a noticeable problem somewhere else before starting to do anything in other states.
https://www.statnews.com/2024/09/08/missouri-h5-bird-flu-case-questions-cat-raw-milk/
Ron Okimoto
R