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
 

It should be noted that this trial had the Missouri patient as a positive control, and the antibody testing can still be considered to be a failure.  Both the Missouri patient and their household contact were only positive for one of the 3 antibody tests.  This was using antibodies made to a synthetic H5 gene with the two mutations found in the Missouri patient.
It looks like previous serum testing as was done in Michigan are suspect since they did not have the known positive dairy workers in the study as positive controls, and all the dairy workers tested were negative.  It looks like the infected are not mounting an effective immune response to the virus.  I recall that Texas dairy worker antibody testing researchers cited earlier testing of poultry workers exposed to the H5N1 avian influenza before it infected dairy cattle, and they found that the poultry workers did not mount an effective immune response, and were only positive for one of the antibody tests done on them.  This sounds like what the CDC is finding with the dairy virus.
The CDC updated their numbers yesterday, and did not include the second Missouri case among their infected humans, and they still do not acknowledge the two Texas dairy workers identified to have H5N1 antibodies indicating past infection.
https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/situation-summary/index.html
Ron Okimoto