Re: California dairy influenza infects 170 herds?

On 10/30/2024 11:12 AM, x wrote:

On 10/30/24 06:34, RonO wrote:

On 10/30/2024 6:17 AM, x wrote:

On 10/28/24 07:47, RonO wrote:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-10-28/bird-flu-cases- in- dairy-cows-roil-farmers-in-california
>
This Bloomberg article cites a dramatic increase in the number of dairy herds infected in California, but the normal internet sources do not back up this number at this time.  The claim of 170 infected herds is much higher than the USDA claim last Friday of 137.
>
The Bloomberg article notes that this is 40% of all infected herds confirmed in the US at this time, but they do not note that this is because no other state began contact tracing in order to identify the infected herds.  It is likely that the majority of infected herds in all the other states were never identified because no one wanted to determine that they were infected.  Contact tracing was never implimented anywhere else, and that is still the case.  The increased efforts to assist contact tracing to identify infected herds undertaken by the USDA applies only to California at this time.
>
The California contact tracing is likely responsible for the identification of two more herds in Idaho last week.  These herds were likely not identified by the current means that Idaho is employing because they are relying on self reporting, hadn't self reported an infected herd for over a month, and California had tracked contact back to Idaho.
>
Ron Okimoto

>
So.
>
Pasteurization does NOT destroy the virus?

>
The CDC researchers tested the two most common pasteurization methods. The most common method of heating milk to 72 degrees C for 15 to 20 seconds failed to reduce the detection of live virus to below detection level.  Infective virus was surviving that method, but the 63 degree C for 30 minute method did reduce the live virus to below detection levels.  The CDC methods did not fully replicate the pasteurization methods, but the article recommended that the milk supply should be tested in a more thorough manner than the FDA had done to claim that the milk supply was safe.  The CDC has never made a big deal about this research and just published it in their Nov 2024 newsletter.  It sounds like the USDA is going to redo the pasteurization analysis at milk plants, at least, in California.  The claim is that they were going to do live virus assays at milk plants.
>

>
Avoid drinking milk or eating cheese?

>
Cheese is likely safe.  The CDC did find that the virus survived in refrigerated milk for at least 4 days.
>

>
There is now a clearly testable way of showing that this
baby died because it drank that milk?

>
How the Missouri patient was infected is not known, but the patient had the same symptoms exhibited by individuals that had ingested the Asian H5N1 virus (drank goose blood) so milk cannot be ruled out.  The CDC refuses to acknowledge these symptoms of H5N1 infection that occurred in Asia.  They also refuse to accept that the antibody detection screen confirmed that the household contact of the Missouri patient that had the same symptoms had been infected by the dairy virus.  They note that the antibody assay "failed" even for the patient that had been confirmed to be infected, and do not count the close contact as "confirmed" infected.  Like the infected patient their close contact was only positive for one of the 3 antibody assays, so that test can be considered to be a failure and it determined that the Missouri patient and contact did not mount an effective immune response against the virus.  This just means that the current antibody tests are not reliable for detecting past infections, so there may not be an effective means of identifying people that have been infected, but are no longer shedding virus.  Previous research on the Asian H5N1 virus indicated that some people were not mounting an effective immune response to the virus, and had not produced neutralizing antibodies though some H5 antibodies could be detected.
>
All of this would be less of an issue if the CDC and USDA had started contact tracing and testing at the very beginning of the dairy epidemic.   California has demonstrated that contact tracing is very effective in identifying more infected herds, and the USDA is now assisting in that effort, but only in California.  Contact tracing and testing needs to be done in all states with known infected dairies, or that have dairy virus infected poultry flocks because it has been known from the start in Texas that the poultry farms get infected by proximity to infected dairies (probably because some dairy workers on infected farms also work on poultry farms).
>
The more infected dairies that are allowed to remain undetected the more dairy workers will be infected, and the more poultry flocks and poultry workers will be infected, but the USDA and CDC refuse to do what needs to be done to identify the infected herds.
>
Ron Okimoto

>
Got it.

 Are there many flu shots that generate H5N1 antibodies now?
 

The US government has produced around a million doses of vaccine made using an H5N1 virus that they had in culture, but it was not the dairy virus H5N1 genotype B3.13.  Initial tests indicated that it would neutralized the virus isolated from one of the first dairy workers to be infected.  The CDC's current plan is to detect the influenza infection after it jumps to better infect humans and try to contain the virus to a limited region by unspecified containment protocols and vaccinating the isolated population.  It sounds like it will never work.  They have to be able detect the spread of the infection in time for them to be able to restrict movement out of the region where the infection has been detected.  A populated state like California with two international airports would have to be shut down and not allow any infected people to get on any planes or otherwise leave the region.  I do not know how they expect to do that.
The dairy virus has mutated since then, and the two amino acid substitutions found in the H5 gene of the Missouri patient decreased H5 antibody neutralization enough so that they had to make a synthetic H5 gene with those substitutions, produce antibodies to that sequence in order to do their antibody assays.
The efficacy of the existing H5N1 vaccine is in question if the virus does mutate into the next pandemic virus.
I've claimed all along that the CDC and USDA should have made a concerted effort to identify all the infected herds so that they could try to contain the virus, but they refused to implement contact tracing and bulk milk tank testing that has been so successful in California. The California "success" in identifying so many infected herds using contact tracing just tells everyone how poorly all the other states have done that did not implement contact tracing.  Idaho has been known to be infected for months before California, but the two Idaho herds associated with infecting California were never identified as being infected until after California tracked back the contact information.
They need to identify all the infected herds in order to protect the workers.  The CDC recommendations to use protective gear only applies to infected herds.  The workers at undetected but infected dairies continue to be unprotected.
Ron Okimoto