Re: New CDC guidance on H5 dairy influenza

On 11/8/2024 8:53 AM, RonO wrote:

The CDC is still calling this bird flu when that hasn't been true of human infections since the beginning.  Birds have infected humans, but only after the birds were infected by the dairy workers.  This has been a dairy influenza epidemic from the beginning, but the CDC has never treated it as they should have.
 It should also be noted that the absence of symptoms among infected could explain the unexplained H5 virus in city waste water.
 It sounds like the CDC is finally going to do what they should have done from the start.  They are going to try to identify the infected herds and test dairy workers so that they can treat the infected humans with antivirals and try to limit the multiplication of the virus in human hosts.  The more virus replicating in humans the more chance that mutations will be selected for that better infect humans.  That has been known from the beginning, but the CDC decided to only "monitor" the situation and recommend that workers working on infected dairies should use protective equipment.  The stupid thing was that they knew that more herds were infected than were being admitted to, but allowed the workers at those farms to remain unprotected.
 That seems to be finally changing and the extent of the dairy infection is finally going to be determined, but the measures are still inadequate.  The USDA is only testing all herds in states that have confirmed infected herds when they know that there are other states with infected herds that they should be testing.  This is just stupid and has been stupid from the beginning.  At the very least they should be testing the herds in Missouri.  They should also test dairy herds in all states where poultry were infected by the dairy virus.  In all verified cases the poultry farms get the dairy virus from nearby dairies, likely due to some dairy workers also working on poultry farms.
 https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2024/t1107-mmwr-telebriefing.html
 

The CDC wants to start testing dairy workers, but the claim is that Trump getting elected is going to impede that effort.  The dairy workers have always avoided testing, but now a lot of them have to worry about deportation since they are often undocumented aliens.  The dairy industry is going to have to deal with Trump.  They survive with the workers willing to do the jobs around the farms, and the dairy industry doesn't much care about their immigration status.
Ron Okimoto