Re: Layer farms in Arizona going down with H5N1

On 6/4/2025 8:18 AM, RonO wrote:

On 6/4/2025 8:09 AM, RonO wrote:

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influenza-bird-flu/h5n1-avian-flu- strikes-another-arizona-layer-farm
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Arizona is known to have infected dairies, and if they did not restrict dairy workers from working on the poultry farms they were just tragically stupid.  The USDA is still refusing to say what genotype of H5N1 infected the poultry farms, and have not released that information since the D1.1 virus was found to also infect dairy herds in Nevada and Arizona as well as people in Wisconsin, Louisiana, Wyoming, and Nevada. They have known since mid May that they had an issue with poultry flocks, and should know what genotype is infecting the birds by now, but the USDA refuses to release the genotype information so that people will know what virus they are dealing with.  The USDA's own report noted that dairy workers from infected dairies also worked on the commercial layer farms that got infected in Michigan back in early 2024, but they refused to do anything to protect poultry farms from being infected in other states with infected dairies.  California lost over 40% of their commercial layer flocks to the dairy virus.  Arizona has just lost more than 5 million birds.
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Ron Okimoto
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 It should be noted that the infected dairy herds are in the same county with the infected layer flocks.  The first Arizona herd was confirmed to be infected in Feb., but it looks like they refused to restrict dairy worker movements again because more Arizona herds were infected in April and early May before these poultry flocks went down.
 Ron Okimoto
 

https://www.azfamily.com/2025/05/30/hickmans-family-farms-loses-95-arizona-chickens-bird-flu/
This article claims that the Arizona layer company shut down all movement between it's farms after the first one showed symptoms, but their other farms still went down with the virus within the next two weeks.  They likely did not limit employees coming from the infected dairies, and only limited their employees to working on one farm.
The USDA and CDC only recommends that dairy workers on infected farms not work on other farms.  They have never tried to enforce a real quarantine.  The result is poultry farms go down and the virus spreads between dairies and to poultry farms even when movement of cattle is restricted.
The USDA and CDC still refuse to implement dairy worker testing.  Even though the CDC claimed that it was going to start such a program Oct 2024.  They have never wanted to know how many dairy workers are actually getting infected when their own initial results indicated that 10% of the dairy workers on infected farms had H5 antibodies.  They never counted the antibody positive dairy workers as having been infected (They are not included among the 70 cases that the CDC admits to).  The real number is likely closer to 1,000 than to 70.
This has been a major goof up since they know that they need to find the workers infected with the D1.1 genotype (the one in Arizona) as soon as possible because two of the hunans infected by that genotype evolved virus that could spread among humans and ended up in critical condition (one patient died) in the hospital.  They need to detect the infected before the virus evolves to be more virulent again.
Ron Okimoto