Re: Guardian article on dairy influenza

On 2/25/2025 6:19 PM, RonO wrote:

On 2/24/2025 3:45 PM, RonO wrote:

On 2/24/2025 3:21 PM, RonO wrote:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/22/bird-flu-virus-trump
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They note that the US does not have a handle on the spread of the dairy epidemic, and claim that the virus is now endemic to cattle, as it should have been concluded with the first dairy to dairy infections. Their little diagram about how the virus is spread is inaccurate because the cow to poultry spread is obviously mediated through human dairy workers that work on both poultry farms and dairies.  That has been known since the USDA released their June 2024 report acknowledging that 2 dairy workers from infected dairies also worked at two poultry farms that got infected in Michigan.  They also note that the recent report (initiated in May 2024 and delayed for some reason until now) claimed evidence for human transmission of the dairy virus from dairy workers to their cats.
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The claim is that Trump's stupidity is just making the situation worse, but the USDA and CDC were already not doing much to contain the spread of the dairy virus before Trump started messing with the situation.  We have obviously known that there was human transmission of the virus since May and June of 2024, but nothing was done about it.  California confirmed by contact tracing that humans were spreading the virus in October 2024, and still they did nothing to restrict dairy worker movements between dairies and poultry farms and ended up with nearly all their dairies infected and 40% of their layer flocks lost.  The dairy worker testing that was supposed to have started in Nov. 2024 never happened, and the CDC is still claiming only around 700 total humans have been tested.  They have a pretty good idea that humans are spreading the D1.1 genotype in Nevada (all dairies have been infected with the same virus with the mutation to facilitate replication in mammals and one dairy worker has already been confirmed to be infected in early Feb yet they never started dairy worker testing in order to treat the infected dairy workers and stop the spread to other dairies.
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Ron Okimoto
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https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influenza-bird-flu/h5n1-strikes-more- poultry-4-states-cdc-updates-details-recent-human-cases
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Poultry flocks in 4 more states have gone down with avian influenza. The CDC has confirmed that Wyoming and Ohio recent human cases both had respiratory symptoms that required hospitalizations, but the CDC did not release sequence informaion on the two infections, nor provide the genotype of the virus infecting both cases.  Most likely this is the D1.1 genotype that displayed critical respiratory symptoms in the Canadian and Louisiana cases (the Louisiana patient died).  The Wyoming patient is still in the hospital, but the Ohio patient is now recovering at home.
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Another Dairy herd in Nevada has been found to be infected (8 total) and they still are not testing dairy workers nor restricting dairy worker movements, and more dairies continue to be infected.  It seems to be just nuts that no one wants to do what needs to be done in order to keep more poultry flocks and dairy herds from being infected.  At this point some of the dairy workers infected with the D1.1 genotype could be leaving Nevada to other states.  7 dairies in Nevada are now infected with the D1.1 genotype (1 dairy was found to be positive for the B3.13 virus several months ago).  Nothing is being down to stop that from happening.
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Ron Okimoto
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https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influenza-bird-flu/analysis-suggests- h5n1-d11-genotype-may-have-jumped-nevada-cows-weeks
 https://virological.org/t/timing-and-molecular-characterisation-of-the- transmission-to-cattle-of-h5n1-influenza-a-virus-genotype-d1-1- clade-2-3-4-4b/991
 The paper hasn't passed peer review at this time, and the USDA has not provided the source of the 4 cow samples, so they assume that the samples came from the same dairy because the sequences are so similar (one with several sequence variants and 3 nearly identical).  In the initial USDA annoucement the claim was that 4 dairies had been confirmed to be positive and that 4 milk samples had been sequenced and found to have the D1.1 genotype and that all 4 had the same PB2 mutation.  My take is that it is unlikely that the USDA would do a genome sequence on 4 samples from one dairy when they had 4 positive dairies producing those samples.  The study may be wrong about how many farms are represented by the sequences.  It could be that 3 of the farms just shared the same vector of infection.  This would have been unlikely to have been a cow shared between 3 farms, and my guess is that it was an infected dairy worker.  They claim evidence that the infection entered the Nevada dairy herds a month before it was first detected in early January.
 Ron Okimoto

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/us-bird-flu-funding-usda-secretary-rcna193826
The US may invest $1 billion to combat the spread of bird flu.  They note that 166 million birds have been lost since 2022, but what they do not note is that the majority of losses since March 2023 have been due to the dairy virus where dairy farms have infected poultry farms.  The USDA and CDC never did what needed to be done to prevent the poultry flocks from being infected by dairy workers that worked at both dairies and poultry farms.
https://www.wattagnet.com/poultry-meat/diseases-health/avian-influenza/news/15711767/which-states-lost-the-most-commercial-birds-to-hpai-in-2024
50 million birds were lost in 2024, nearly all of them to the dairy virus.  Some flocks were infected with the D1.1 genotype at the end of the year.  When I look at the USDA data from 2024 I get 57 million birds, and since Jan. 1 2025 21.7 million more birds.  A 6 million bird layer flock was added to the data 2/21/25.
Now that the D1.1 genotype is spreading in dairy herds the CDC and USDA should be doing something to prevent the spread to other farms of the D1.1 virus.  It has already killed one human patient and sent 3 others to the hospital.
The NBC article claims only 70 humans infected, but that is only the PCR confirmed numbers.  The antibody positive infected are not included nor are all the dairy workers that were likely infected but never tested. It is likely that around 10% of the dairy workers on infected dairy farms have been infected by the virus.  California was claiming that over 5,000 dairy workers worked on infected dairy farms when less than 70% of their dairy herd had been infected.  It is likely that most of the dairy herds in all other states that were ever infected were never claimed, nor tested to confirm that they were infected.  The number of infected humans is likely closer to 1,000 than to 70.
Ron Okimoto