Re: California Dairy herds positive for the dairy virus

On 9/16/2024 8:18 PM, RonO wrote:

On 9/14/2024 8:27 PM, RonO wrote:

On 9/14/2024 6:12 PM, x wrote:

On 9/14/24 15:23, RonO wrote:

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.
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https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMc2405937
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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.
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Ron Okimoto
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https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/13/health/missouri-bird-flu-h5n1/index.html
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The CDC has admitted that the Missouri H5 virus is closely related to dairy virus and is likely part of the spread of the dairy H5N1, but they did not release any phylogenetic analysis which is pretty much done when you do the sequence comparison, so we do not know where the dairy virus may have come from.  The Colorado virus that infected all the farm workers in that state was most closely related to the virus isolated from a Michigan farm worker.  So somehow that virus got from Michigan to Colorado, and some dairy worker or their close contact likely was infected and took it to Colorado.  The virus doesn't survive on equipment or clothing long enough to make the trip.  The CDC is trying to down play the possiblity of human transmission, but it has likely been going on since the start of the dairy virus fiasco.  They have known since Texas and Michigan that human dairy workers likely took the virus to poultry farms because it doesn't survive on clothing long enough to go from farm to farm and no one takes equipment from a dairy farm to a poultry farm, and they found that some dairy workers and or their close contacts also worked on commercial poultry farms.  The most likely scenario was that these dairy workers were infected and took the virus to the other farms, but this has been downplayed from the beginning.
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Ron Okimoto

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Is there any reason why this might be different
from other types of flu?

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This is influenza A, but it has not fully adapted to infecting mammals at this time, and is still considered to be an Avian Influenza, but all human influenza A strains were once Avian Influenzas.  The dairy H5N1 strain that infected the Colorado workers seems to more easily infect humans, but it is claimed that it still lacks the usual mutations needed to become a human infectious virus.
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The Dairy H5N1 is related to the Asian Avian H5N1 virus that is associated with 50% mortality in the humans that it has infected, but the Dairy H5N1 is a recombinant.  It does have the same H5 and N1 genes as the Asian strain, but half of it's genome comes from a North American strain of Avian influenza.  Instead of having a 50% mortality in humans the dairy H5N1 has, so far, exhibited only mild symptoms in those infected.  The major fear is that it will coinfect with a human influenza A strain and recombine to become more of a hazard.
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Is there any reason why it would be difficult to
add to the next flu shot?

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They can add it to the next flu shot, but at this time they do not know what the sequence will be if it adapts to humans.  A current H5 vaccine strain of the virus does make neutralizing antibodies to the H5 antigen of the Dairy virus, but this latest Missouri strain has 2 additional amino acid substitutions in it that may compromise the neutralizing ability of that H5 vaccine strain.
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Is there any reason why they might not bother doing
that?

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They are already planning to make a vaccine, as soon as the virus adapts to humans and they know what they need to make a vaccine against.
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Are you purposefully suppressing the word 'influenza'
as a joke?

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Everyone should know that bird flu or dairy flu is influenza.
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Am I confused.  Is this a totally different type of
virus?

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It is currently classified as an H5N1 Avian Influenza virus, but it can obviously infect mammals.  As I noted before all human influenza A strains evolved from Avian influenza strains.  That is where the "A" comes from. H5 and N1 are just allele designations of the two main viral antigens used to classify viral subtypes.  The Dairy virus H5 gene is the same clade (2.3.4.4b) as the H5N1 Asian avian influenza virus that has killed 800 people (50% mortality), but it is genotype B3.13 because part of it's genome comes from another Avian influenza virus.  We are lucky that this is the case because, so far, there hasn't been any mortality among the infected humans (high mortality among infected cats) and only mild symptoms.
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Ron Okimoto

 https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-09-04/bird-flu-outbreaks- confirmed-in-three-california-dairy-farms
 The California dairy influenza is reportedly most closely related to the Colorado virus (which is most closely related to the virus isolated from one of the Michigan dairy workers).  Doesn't this mean that it is more likely that an infected dairy worker brought the virus from Colorado? They claim that it is due to transfer of cattle, but all lactating cattle have to be tested before interstate transfer.  Later in the article they claim that transfer of newborn calves is common, and my guess is that they do not fall under the new USDA guidelines for testing.  The calves could be infected if they are fed contaminated milk before shipping them out.
 I thought that they may have picked up evidence of earlier infection in the California herds, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

What the article does not mention is that 10 (11 if you count the Michigan dairy worker with the same strain) of the 14 known human infection cases were infected by the Colorado strain of the virus.  That should be an important consideration when they consider the possible infection of the California dairy workers.  Probably 1/5 of the dairy cattle in the US are in California.  The impact on human infections could be something to worry about.
Ron Okimoto