The dairy flu is only one mutation away from efficiently binding to the Human receptor

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-12-05/just-one-mutation-can-make-h5n1-a-threat-to-humans
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt0180
The Times is reporting research done in California on the dairy virus. This research was just published in Science.  This study is calling the virus bovine influenza.  That should help wake up the USDA and CDC. They have been lying about the situation from the beginning.  Their continued use of Avian Influenza has just allowed the cattle industry to let the virus spread across the nation.  Voluntary testing has been an absolute fiasco.  Washington still has not tested their dairy herds, and are still in denial of how their poultry farm got infected by the dairy virus.  Utah understood immediately where the virus had to have come from to infect their poultry farm, and quickly identified 8 infected dairies in the same county that had not self reported the dairy influenza infection.  Utah's problem was they went into denial and did not implement contact tracing like California, and now poultry farms in other counties (hundreds of miles from the initial infected county) have gone down with the dairy virus.
Apparently only a single amino acid change from a glutamine to a leucine will alter the receptor binding properties of the virus to the human receptors and stop the virus from being able to use the Avian receptors.   This likely one of the variants that the CDC has been watching out for.  The report indicates that there is a second amino acid substitution that improves human receptor binding capability, but it isn't needed like the CDC has been claiming (they claimed the virus was two substitutions away from using the human receptor).
Just the receptor switch isn't enough to get the virus to transmit between humans.  The current dairy virus has pretty mild symptoms in humans.  Other mammals have not been so lucky.  It seems to be lethal to sea mammals, cats, and animals around the farms like skunks and foxes. The mortality in dairy cattle has gone up to 10 to 15% of infected in California when it started out as 1 or 2%.
They did the research on the virus isolated from the first Texas patient infected.  This virus was known to have branched off early in the Dairy infection, and the current virus in California is likely more closely related to the virus isolated from the Michigan dairy workers.  They need to repeat the work on a current viral sequence.  They did not get a complete genome sequence from the Missouri patient and that patient had antigen changing substitutions in the H5 gene so that avaliable H5 antibodies did not bind to it effectively.
Ron Okimoto