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Discussion thread: H5N1 avian flu in US dairy cows including human cases (poultry, dairy workers) - March 24, 2024 +
Update: @USDA
confirmed 2 new #H5N1#birdflu infected dairy herds today from Texas, but TX doesn't show here as having new outbreaks in the past 30 days. Why? Because those herds were infected in May. The samples were only recently submitted for testing. There's federal $$ available now.
MIT Technology Review Why virologists are getting increasingly nervous about bird flu
By Jessica Hamzelouarchive page
September 19, 2024
Bird flu has been spreading in dairy cows in the US—and the scale of the spread is likely to be far worse than it looks. In addition, 14 human cases have been reported in the US since March. Both are worrying developments, say virologists, who fear that the country’s meager response to the virus is putting the entire world at risk of another pandemic.
-snip-
“It’s really troubling that we’re not doing enough right now,” says Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. “I am normally very moderate in terms of my pandemic-scaredness, but the introduction of this virus into cattle is really troubling.”
-snip-
And the virus is already spreading from cows back into wild birds and poultry, says Lakdawala: “There is definitely a concern that the virus is going to [become more widespread] in birds and cattle … but also other animals that ruminate, like goats.”
-snip-
So far, it is clear that the virus has mutated but hasn’t yet acquired any of these more dangerous mutations, says Michael Tisza, a bioinformatics scientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. That being said, Tisza and his colleagues have been looking for the virus in wastewater from 10 cities in Texas—and they have found H5N1 in all of them.
Tisza and his colleagues don’t know where this virus is coming from—whether it’s coming from birds, milk, or infected people, for example. But the team didn’t find any signal of the virus in wastewater during 2022 or 2023, when there were outbreaks in migratory birds and poultry. “In 2024, it’s been a different story,” says Tisza. “We’ve seen it a lot.”
Together, the evidence that the virus is evolving and spreading among mammals, and specifically cattle, has put virologists on high alert. “This virus is not causing a human pandemic right now, which is great,” says Tisza. “But it is a virus of pandemic potential.”
One of the mutations, called A156T, has been identified in fewer than one per cent of samples collected from dairy cows.
Previous research by Jesse Bloom at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Washington state and his colleagues suggested this mutation can diminish the ability of antibodies to recognise and neutralise the virus.
As the New Scientist explains, this has implications for vaccine development. Both the CDC and the World Health Organization have been creating weakened versions of H5N1 that can be used to manufacture vaccines if a wider outbreak ever occurs in humans.
Professor Bloom and his team have shown A156t - one of the newly identified mutations - causes a 10-to-100-fold drop in the neutralisation ability of antibodies from ferrets treated with vaccine candidates.
This means vaccines made with strains that have this mutation won’t be viable – only one potential vaccine strain has remained effective.
“This mutation is not changing our assessment of the risk that this virus will take off in humans, per se,” Professor Bloom told the New Scientist.
“It is just showing that we need to think carefully about which vaccine candidates we want to have ready in case that should happen.”
The first human case with no link to infected animals is nonetheless concerning.
“This is how pandemics start,” Krutika Kuppalli, a spokesperson for the Infectious Disease Society of America and former WHO medical officer, told The Telegraph.
“We need to scale up preparedness and response efforts.”
Is bird flu spreading among people? Data gaps leave researchers in the dark
Mysterious US bird flu case in person without any known contact with an infected animal raises spectre of human-to-human transmission.
By Heidi Ledford
...
More concerns were raised about the Missouri case on 13 September, when the CDC announced that two people who had close contact with the hospitalized person had also become ill around the same time. One of them was not tested for flu; the other tested negative.
...A key next step will be to test all three people for antibodies against the strain of H5N1 bird flu that has been infecting cattle. Such antibodies, particularly in the two contacts, would be definitive evidence of past infection.
...
While researchers await the antibody results, they are combing through patchy genome-sequence data from virus samples from the hospitalized person. This could yield any signs that the virus might have adapted to human hosts. The search is a challenge, however: the samples contained very low levels of viral RNA — so little that some researchers have shied away from analysing the sequences altogether.
...
Even if the sequences were available, researchers know little about which genetic changes might allow bird flu viruses to better infect humans or to become airborne, says virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Previous studies1,2 had suggested that changes to a gene encoding a protein responsible for copying the viral genome could be crucial for allowing the virus to replicate in mammalian cells. But researchers were unable to sequence that gene from the isolate from Missouri.
...
Avian flu outbreak devastates Michigan dairy
Nathan Brearley’s dairy herd is still recovering six months after an infection.
Chris Torres, Editor, American Agriculturist
September 23, 2024
With a closed herd and all his heifers artificially inseminated — no outside bulls needed — Nathan Brearley was confident his 500-cow dairy farm in Portland, Mich., would be spared from the avian flu strain that’s affecting dairies.
He was wrong. Nearly six months later after an infection on his farm, milk production still hasn’t recovered.
"I was quite surprised. I never saw any other disease this widespread affect the cattle like it did," Brearley said during a recent webinar on dairy avian flu, put on by the Pennsylvania Center for Dairy Excellence.
-snip-
Brearley said the first signs of problems were in April when the SmaxTec boluses in his cows, which keep track of temperature and other health parameters, started sending high-temperature alarms to his phone and computer. Half the herd looked like it was getting sick.
“Looking at data, the average temperature rise was 5.1 degrees above normal,” he said. “Outlying cows were even higher with temperature.”
-snip--
The cows were lethargic and didn’t move. Water consumption dropped from 40 gallons to 5 gallons a day. He gave his cows aspirin twice a day, increased the amount of water they were getting and gave injections of vitamins for three days.
Five percent of the herd had to be culled.
“They didn’t want to get up, they didn’t want to drink, and they got very dehydrated," Brearley said, adding that his crew worked around the clock to treat nearly 300 cows twice a day.
-snip-
Brearley said an egg-laying facility a mile and a half away tested positive for H5N1 and had to depopulate millions of birds. The birds were composted in windrows outside the facility, “and I could smell that process.”
Whether the disease moved from that farm to his has not been confirmed, but multiple farms in his neighborhood also tested positive for the disease, Brearley said.
Experiment confirms that bird flu in the US is spread by milking procedures
Controlled infection of cows in a high-security Kansas lab sheds light on the H5N1 transmission route, while experts call for ‘mass surveillance’ to stop an outbreak in Europe
NUÑO DOMÍNGUEZ
SEP 25, 2024 - 11:53 EDT
...
American and German scientists experimentally infected calves and dairy cows in a level 3 security laboratory to determine the transmission route of the highly pathogenic avian influenza, which is affecting animals on 231 farms in 14 U.S. states. The results confirm that the H5N1 virus accumulates in the udders and milk of cows, and is probably being transmitted by industrial milking systems.
...
The new study, published in Nature, a leading source of world science, compared the infectivity of the H5N1 variant circulating in cattle in the United States by injecting viruses into the udders of dairy cows and the snouts of calves. The results show that animals infected via the respiratory route barely suffer symptoms and did not transmit the disease to other animals. Meanwhile, dairy cows infected via the udder did suffer severe illness, with high fever and lack of appetite, and their milk production plummeted.
The study also infected dairy cows with a variant of H5N1 isolated from wild birds in Europe. The animals also became ill, showing that the American variant is not the only one capable of causing a large epidemic in cattle. The symptoms were so severe that some animals had to be euthanized early. Although the experiment cannot exactly reproduce the conditions found on farms, its results are consistent with the fatality rate of up to 5% of animals observed on livestock farms, the authors explain.
...
Controlled infection of cows in a high-security Kansas lab sheds light on the H5N1 transmission route, while experts call for ‘mass surveillance’ to stop an outbreak in Europe
Related to: US - Human H5N1 bird flu case confirmed in Missouri - September 06, 2024+ GO TO POST
Four healthcare workers show symptoms after bird flu exposure
14 hours ago
BBC News, Washington
Four more Missouri healthcare workers are experiencing mild respiratory symptoms after coming in contact with a bird flu patient, health officials said Friday.
A total of six healthcare workers have now developed symptoms after having contact with the patient, who is the first confirmed person to contract the disease with no known animal exposure.
...
Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, told the health publication STAT that he was concerned about how long Missouri was taking to figure out who else may have been infected by the original patient.
“Public health credibility is really on the line here,” Mr Osterholm said.
...
No fast answers in Missouri bird flu case
by Helen Branswell
If you’ve been waiting anxiously for answers about whether the person in Missouri who was infected with bird flu passed the virus on to others or not — sorry, we still don’t have that information. A CDC official said yesterday that the answer won’t be known for at least a couple weeks.
The agency is testing for antibodies in blood samples from several health workers and a household contact of the original case. But first it had to develop a new test, since key genetic changes in the virus mean existing options may not have been reliable, Demetre Daskalakis, director of CDC’s National Center on Immunization and Respiratory Disease, told STAT’s Helen Branswell.
The delay will likely fuel concerns about the possibility that there has been human-to-human transmission.
He suggested it will be mid-October before the work can be completed.
“The antibodies that would grow in the person exposed to that virus would then be different then the antibodies that would grow in a person who had a virus without those mutations,” Daskalakis said.
Developing the new test has been challenging because the sample from the patient contained so little viral material that the CDC was not able to grow whole viruses from it. Instead its scientists have had to reverse engineer H5N1 viruses that contain the changes to use them as the basis for the new serology test, he said.
more....
U.S. health officials have run into obstacles in their efforts to determine whether a Missouri person infected with H5N1 bird flu passed the virus on to others.
Last edited by sharon sanders; October 3, 2024, 07:18 AM.
Reason: link format
This is coming out of Oregon. Poster was worried about Marburg virus. But it's looking like H5N1. There is much more conversation . Link https://twitter.com/ObservingAngel/s...
Last edited by Commonground; October 7, 2024, 05:58 AM.
Reason: Adding link
Excerpt:
October 4, 2024 ‘More serious than we had hoped’: Bird flu deaths mount among California dairy cows
Since the end of August, the Central Valley has suffered multiple heat waves, with daytime temperatures exceeding 100 degrees.
“Heat stress is always a problem in dairy cattle here in California,” he said. “So you take that, you add in this virus, which does have some affinity for the respiratory tract ... we always see a little bit of snotty noses and heavy breathing in animals that are affected ... and for some of them, just the stress takes them.”
Indeed, most of the deaths are not directly the result of the virus, he said, but are “virus adjacent.” For instance, he has seen a lot of bacterial pneumonia, which is likely the result of the cow’s depressed immune system, as well as bloat.
Although dairy operators had been told to expect a mortality rate of less than 2%, preliminary reports suggest that 10% to 15% of infected cattle are dying, according to veterinarians and dairy farmers.
“I was shocked the first time I encountered it in one of my herds,” said Maxwell Beal, a Central Valley-based veterinarian who has been treating infected herds in California since late August. “It was just like, wow. Production-wise, this is a lot more serious than than we had hoped. And health-wise, it’s a lot more serious than we had been led to believe.”
-snip-
He said that when the cows aren’t feeling well, they often don’t eat.
“The digestive tract, or rumen, basically requires movement. There has to be things moving out of that rumen constantly in order for the pH balance and microbiome to stay where it should be,” he said. So, when they’re not eating, things in the digestive tract stagnate.
That, in turn, causes them to “asphyxiate because their diaphragm has too much pressure on it.”
In addition, he and others are seeing a lot of variation in the duration of illness.
Although early reports had suggested that the virus seemed mild and lasted only about a week or two, others are seeing it last several weeks. According to the industry newsletter, at one dairy, cows were shedding the virus 14 days before they showed clinical signs of illness. It then took three more weeks for the cows to get rid of the virus.
They’re also noticing the virus is affecting larger percentages of herds — in some cases, 50% to 60% of the animals. This is much more than the 10% that had been previously reported.
Some say the actual rate may be even higher.
“I would speculate infection is even higher; 50[% to] 60% are showing clinical signs due to heat stress or better herd monitoring earlier in infection. Unfortunately, few or no herds have been assessed retrospectively through serology testing to determine actual infection rates,” said John Korslund, a retired U.S. Department of Agriculture veterinarian epidemiologist.
US H5N1 Dashboard Update: California Sees Record-Breaking 26 New Affected Herds
USDA confirmed 26 new affected dairy herds in California (15 on 10/3, 11 on 10/4) taking the nationwide total to 282.
The actual total may already be over 300, however, as one of the California herds is numbered 101, so there may be 19 herds in California awaiting confirmation by USDA (great spot by FluTrackers).
No cases outside of California in a week and none outside of the Western US in over a month
The show goes on at World Dairy Expo despite threat of avian flu
The Dairy Summit is scheduled for Nov. 20 in Madison.
As a kid, Josh Gerbitz was last in the show ring at the World Dairy Expo. This year, he is at the annual event to watch the children of a family friend show his jersey cow, Captain.
-snip-
But Gerbitz said the emergence of avian influenza in dairy herds across the country caused some initial concerns for himself and other Expo participants. “(Disease is) always something we’ve had to be aware of, but there was probably a little bit of heightened awareness for it this year,” he said. “But since everyone has tested, and our cow came back negative. We felt really good about still being able to come this year. And I’m glad it didn’t do anything to hinder this show from happening.”
-snip-
Emily Yeiser Stepp, a member of the World Dairy Expo Board of Directors, said they began discussing how the new disease in cattle could affect the event back in March. She said they worked with the federal and state agriculture departments to make sure participants were following required testing for influenza.
The World Dairy Expo had more than 3,000 entries this year, which Yeiser Stepp said is likely to be a record for the event.
“It didn’t necessarily impact the numbers to the detriment that maybe we had anticipated,” said Yeiser Stepp, who also works for the National Milk Producers Federation. “I think that’s just a huge testament to everybody kind of pulling together and working to find solutions while also protecting the animal health component.”
In addition to running the lab that does influenza testing for Wisconsin cows, Poulsen is one of veterinarians on the expo grounds keeping an eye on cow health. He said he was happy to see that participation numbers weren’t affected by fear of the virus.
“I think it’s really important that the dairy industry needs to keep moving, and then understand how can we use best practices to minimize our risk,” he said.
After the event, Poulsen said ongoing wastewater surveillance will monitor for avian flu in the state, in addition to tests done through the state lab. He said researchers need more data from farms to understand how the virus is spreading in other states. But many farms continue to be cautious about testing because of concerns that a positive test would hurt their business.
-snip- “There’s this sense of being able to overcome those challenges as an industry,” she said. “Making sure that that sense of positivity is rejuvenated at this event year over year, I think is the reason people come to Expo.”
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