Re: A child tests positive for H5N1

On 11/22/2024 1:51 PM, RonO wrote:

The California health authorities did the right thing in contact tracing to identify infected herds, but they now seem to be gun shy at being so successful.  There seems to be a shell of denial that the USDA and CDC are casting over everything.
 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bird-flu-pandemic-potential/https:// www.cbsnews.com/news/bird-flu-pandemic-potential/
 QUOTE:
Dr. Gounder: This is important because we are wondering, how did this child get infected? The other two most likely sources would be a wild bird or a human. If it's a human, that means that there is human-to- human transmission going under the radar, and that is one of the signs a virus could be on the verge of becoming a pandemic — when you have human-to-human transmission.
END QUOTE:
 Everyone wants to ignore the fact that the infection could have come from dairy products.
 https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/30/11/24-0772_article
 I found the above article in October.  It claims that the dairy virus can survive the most common method of pasteurization in an infective form and survive in milk for 4 days.  This is the CDC's own research, but they have suppressed it from the public.  It has been published in their November EID Journal, but they have not publically offered it to the general population in any news briefing on the subject.  The FDA did respond and decided to do another round of testing, but their protocol is deficient.  They want volunteers when what they need to do is test the milk coming into the plant, and test it after it goes through pasteurization.  They need to test multiple truck loads and multiple pasteurization methods (the 30 minute treatment was effective, but the 15 to 20 seconds at 72 degrees C was not totally effective).  If they only test plants using the 30 minute pasteurization method they will fail at testing the milk supply.
 https://www.fda.gov/food/alerts-advisories-safety-information/ investigation-avian-influenza-h5n1-virus-dairy-cattle
 You have to scroll down to Research Studies and open the "Silo Study".
 The bad science involving the dairy influenza fiasco is just crazy.
 They can't ask for volunteers, they have to go into multiple random plants using the various pasteurization methods, they can't tell the plant ahead of time and give them a chance to reset their equipment, and these plants need to be targeted as plants likely to be getting infected milk.  It won't do them any good to go somewhere that has no infected herds.  They need to test the milk coming out of the trucks and after pasteurization.  They need to check the equipment and the process.  How often is the system recalibrated.  How far out of specs does the system get?  Is the process as effective 7 hours after the shift starts as it is at the start of the shift?  All you need is a few bottles of milk a shift with enough infective virus to cause an infection, and you have an issue.
 The initial articles that I saw on the Missouri case claimed that the patient had ingested dairy products, and that would be the primary source of infection if anyone was aware of the CDC research on pasteurization.  They should have been testing the milk processing plant and the dairies contributing to that plant.  The California child needs to have the virus sequenced and determined if it is the dairy H5N1.  If it is, dairy products would again be the primary source for infection. Pasteurization may be effective 99.9% of the time, but some employee lapse or equipment failure and infective virus is probably always a possibility.  Just that fact coupled with the CDC's research indicating that some virus can survive the most common pasteurization method and the inaction of the CDC and FDA is just stupid.
 Ron Okimoto

https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/situation-summary/mammals.html
4 more herds were added to the USDA totals for California, so there are now 402 herds confirmed.  It looks like more samples are in the que to be confirmed because the highest sample number seems to be 434, and the USDA seems to only be able to confirm around 60 samples a week.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influenza-bird-flu/cdc-confirms-h5n1-california-child-hawaii-details-testing-results
The genotype for the Hawaiian human case is a wild bird avian H5N1, but is A3 and not D1 as is the genotype of the Canadian H5N1 infection.
California is contact tracing in the child infection case.  They likely should be tracing milk products.  They keep claiming that there is no evidence for human to human spread, so why not look at the dairy products?
Ron Okimoto