Re: Missouri antibody results

On 10/24/2024 6:10 PM, RonO wrote:

https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/spotlights/missouri-h5n1-serology-testing.html
 6 of the 7 hospital contacts had their serum tested, but all were negative.
 The patient and one family member that had shown similar symptoms tested positive for 2 of the 3 H5N1 antibody tests indicating that they had similar infections.  The CDC is claiming that there is no evidence for person to person transmission, and that both family members could have been infected from the same source.  This source is not known since they had no contact with sick birds nor cattle.
 So 2 people in Missouri were infected by the dairy influenza, but they do not know the source of the infection.  My guess is that they shared the same bottle of milk, and that dairy products in Missouri need to be tested in light of the recent CDC results indicating that the virus may survive the most common method of pasteurization.  Both family members exhibited evidence of gut infection.  The Asian H5N1 strain has been known to cause diarrhea in human patients that had injested infected goose blood.
 Ron Okimoto

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influenza-bird-flu/serologic-tests-rule-out-avian-flu-missouri-health-workers-cdc-confirms-2
This article reports the antibody test results in Missouri, but also notes that the dairy virus was confirmed by sequence results to have infected a 1.8 million bird layer flock in Utah.  Poultry flocks get infected by infected dairy herds (share workers) in the other states with infected dairy herds, and so Utah is starting bulk tank milk testing of dairy farms in the infected Utah county even though none of them have self reported being infected.  They likely should start contact tracing like in California.  Florida did not do this even after poultry flocks started to go down with the dairy virus and the virus was found in milk products produced in Florida by the FDA.  The infected dairy herds in Florida remain undetected.  Freely spreading the virus and infecting dairy workers in contact with infected animals.
Ron Okimoto