Re: California Dairy herds positive for the dairy virus

On 9/12/2024 11:59 AM, RonO wrote:

On 9/11/2024 12:05 PM, RonO wrote:

On 9/8/2024 6:55 PM, RonO wrote:

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.
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Ron Okimoto
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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.
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https://www.statnews.com/2024/09/08/missouri-h5-bird-flu-case- questions- cat-raw-milk/
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Ron Okimoto
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https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-09-missouri-resident-bird-flu- livestock.html
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This ariticle seems to be trying to downplay the possibility of human to human transmission.  The Texas antibody testing of dairy workers have already come out with evidence for human to human transmission because one of the workers positive for H5 antibodies did not have contact with cattle, and only had contact with other dairy workers.  There was also the case of the indoor cat in Colorado that was probably infected by humans.  The states that did not get cattle from affected states, but still got the dairy virus were likely infected by human dairy workers migrating to those states.  Kansas got infected from Texas, and then Dakota got infected with the strain in Kansas, and Kansas did not get cattle from Texas, and South Dakota did not get cattle from Kansas.  The CDC has known this since about the beginning of detecting the infections in April, but they never started human contact tracing to determine how all the dairy herds and poultry flocks were being infected.
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Humans have been transmitting the virus since the start of this fiasco. Humans could have brought the virus into Texas.  The Texas Dairy worker that was the first infection had a virus that had branched off earlier than the strain that infected Texas.  They never got the name of that dairy worker, so they couldn't ask him where he could have been infected.  He could have been infected in the state that was the origin of the dairy infection.  One of his fellow dairy workers could have been infected in that same state, but brought in the Texas strain (one with more substitutions than the strain that infected the first dairy worker).
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Ron Okimoto
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 New Texas Waste water data indicates that H5N1 seems to have started to be detected in 10 Texas cities monitored in March 2024 (when the Texas Dairy infections were first detected) but were not found in samples taken earlier in the year.  This study used a detection method that uses a probe to pull out the influenza RNA from the waste water, so they can get the sequence of RNA and determine what strain of influenza they are picking up.  Even though there was no indication of human infections (no increase in influenza cases) the waste water for these cities were positive.  The high levels of influenza in various Texas county's waste water has been attributed to dairy farms, but these samples were from city waste water.  It could still be due to milk products in the waste water, but it might also mean that there were undetected human infections (the letter claims waste water results are due to "multiple animal" infections).  Most of the infected humans have had mild symptoms, and the infection was not respiratory, but involved their eyes.  The virus was not detected in nasal swabs, and only in eye swab samples.
 https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMc2405937
 It could be that human infection was already wide spread in March. Since contact tracing and testing was never implemented, no one knows how wide spread the human infections have been and how much they have contributed to the infection of dairy herds and poultry flocks.  One dairy worker that did not have contact with cattle was found to have been infected by the dairy virus, and may have been infected by human contact (the antibody positive dairy worker worked in the dairy cafeteria).  My take is that the infections may have gone unnoticed because the symptoms are just itchy eyes, and it was the spring pollen season.  People touching infected surfaces and then rubbing their eyes would be infected.
 Ron Okimoto
 

Other close contacts to the Missouri case showed symptoms.  One recovered and was in the same household as the positive patient, but was not tested.  A second health care worker showed symptoms, but tested negative.  The issue is that the health care worker was likely tested by local medical and not the CDC so the collection was not done as it should have been.  The CDC knows that the patients eyes should be tested, but the Missouri doctors likely only tested them by taking the usual nasal or bucal swabs.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cdc-says-no-clear-source-bird-flu-infection-missouri-patient-rcna170871
They do not think that the Missouri patient had a severe case of influenza because she did not have the usual symptoms, but she did have Nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and weakness that have been symptoms exhibited by the humans infected with the Asian H5N1 high mortality virus.  They do not acknowledge that fact in claiming that the patient did not have the usual influenza symptoms.  This almost seems like some type of cover up instead of trying to get the answers that need to be gotten out of Missouri.  The CDC still does not have a team in Missouri running down contacts, and trying to get to the source of the infection.   They only admitted that someone else in the household may have been infected, and would have likely been infected by the hospital patient.
Ron Okimoto