quick summary via Microsoft Edge AI
The article discusses the potential threat of a new pandemic caused by the H5N1 bird flu virus. The virus has been spreading among birds and has recently been detected in dairy cattle, raising concerns about its ability to infect humans. The article highlights the importance of preparing for a potential pandemic by building on experiences from previous outbreaks, such as COVID-19, and emphasizes the need for effective immunization and communication strategies. Researchers are particularly worried about the virus adapting to new mammalian hosts, which could increase the risk of human-to-human transmission.
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Last few paragraphs:
After Barb Petersen helped solve the mystery of the outbreak in the panhandle, she spoke to the Associated Press and Bovine Veterinarian about what had happened. “My goal is that, hey, folks need to understand what’s happening. And the only way to do that is to tell your story,” she said. When the articles appeared, several clients cut ties with her. She said some of her colleagues lost business for taking farmworkers to get tested. “People are going through stages of grief,” she told me, “and some reactions that I got were anger and denial. Some of them were more severe than others.”
The future of this outbreak is still unknown. Rollins, the head of the USDA, has proved that she’s taking the problem seriously. And Trump recently named Gerald Parker, a veterinarian with experience bringing together public-health and agriculture interests, to run the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, a remarkably sane choice. The country’s animals will likely have access to a vaccine before its people do.
“When people ask me what worries me most,” said Hanage, “it’s very bluntly the fact that we don’t talk about what we will do when we actually see something really serious.” We may get lucky and H5N1 may never mutate to become pandemic-ready. But there are countless other viruses waiting to cross over, chasing us like Philip Larkin’s ship of death in “Next, Please”: “a black-sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back a huge and birdless silence.”
There’s no comfort in where we are. Our government has spent the past year allowing H5N1 to spread throughout the country and the past two months dismantling some of the best defenses we have against pathogens of all sorts. We’re beleaguered and suspicious and seemingly incapable of collective action for the common good. The only thing keeping us safe, for now, is the virus itself.
First few paragraphs
In February 2024, dairy farmers in the northwest corner of the Texas Panhandle noticed that their herds were getting sick. A cow’s temperature would spike, and she would stop eating. Soon, her milk would dry up or turn thick — tests would reveal the milk had twice the normal number of white blood cells. The feverish cows would barely drink any water. As they grew dehydrated, their eyes sank into their heads. Nearly all of them had mastitis: a swollen, painful udder and teats, which made milking difficult.
The disease seemed to be spreading; veterinarians in the region heard from colleagues in Kansas and New Mexico who reported the same constellation of symptoms. On March 14, a group of them got on a conference call with animal-health specialists from around the country, trading information on what they had begun calling “mystery cow disease.” “We made a master list of causes and just started checking it twice,” said Barb Petersen, a veterinarian who cares for 40,000 cows on several dairies near Amarillo. Was it heavy metals in the feed? That could explain why so many herds had gotten sick so quickly. But no, the feed was okay. A bacterial infection? A coronavirus? Every test they ran came back negative. Whatever this was, it wasn’t something any of them had seen in cows before.
Around the same time, some of the farmworkers Petersen saw on her rounds started to fall ill. Most had conjunctivitis, or pink eye, but some developed fevers bad enough to keep them home from work. “We felt like, Gosh, we don’t think this is a coincidence,” Petersen said. “We’ve got to get to the bottom of this.”
Petersen, 41, has the calm forthrightness you might expect in someone used to working with large animals. She spends most of her days on the road, traveling from dairy to dairy. During the early part of the outbreak, she was as busy as she’s ever been: fielding calls from farmers, coordinating lab tests, and tending to sick cows. She came home each day exhausted. “I’m taking off all my farm clothes in the garage,” she said. “I have animals at home, so I’m making sure I’m not trying to bring something home to them.”
A breakthrough came from Kay Russo, a veterinarian who had studied both dairy cows and poultry. Russo told Petersen that she’d been monitoring an outbreak of avian influenza that had spread from Europe to South America, where it had crossed over from birds into the sea-lion population, killing more than 20,000. Had Petersen noticed any dead birds at the dairies? She had. (“A ■■■■ ton of dead birds,” in Russo’s words.) Petersen gathered a few and sent them to a lab. The results came back positive for influenza-A subtype H5N1. Bird flu. With that diagnosis in mind, one of Russo’s colleagues tried to get some bovine samples tested for H5N1, but the lab refused. “They wouldn’t run it,” Russo said, “because it wasn’t on their list.” No cow had ever been infected with H5N1 before.
A few days later, Petersen got a call from one of the dairies. The cats on the farm had become seriously ill after drinking milk from the sick cows: Some had gone blind and lost control of their muscles, mucus streaming from their noses and eyes. Many of them died. When Petersen mentioned the cats to Drew Magstadt, her former classmate at Iowa State’s College of Veterinary Medicine, he remembered that neurologic disease was a well-documented symptom of influenza A in cats. He offered to test for the virus if Petersen would send samples to his lab at Iowa State. “Those cats were really the key to finding this out as quickly as we did,” Magstadt said.
At Magstadt’s request, Petersen gathered milk from eight infected cows into plastic tubes and collected the bodies of two dead cats, wrapping them in plastic bags. She shipped it all in a cooler to Magstadt’s lab, more than 600 miles away in Ames. “I don’t want anything leaking,” she said, “so everything was triple bagged. I don’t want anybody at FedEx or UPS getting a surprise.” The samples arrived the morning of March 21, a Thursday, and by that night they had their results: The cats were positive for influenza A, as was the milk. The next day, Magstadt determined via PCR that it was H5N1, and there was a lot of it, especially in the milk. “I was very, very surprised,” he said, “particularly at the amount of virus.”
Magstadt sent Petersen’s samples across town to a lab run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which formally confirmed the presence of H5N1, and the massive apparatus of the federal government began to whir into motion. Petersen was suddenly receiving calls from multiple federal agencies. “Normally, I’m not going to talk to people who are in Washington, D.C., on the weekend,” she said. The response to the outbreak had transformed into a political problem.
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ANNAPOLIS, MD (March 12, 2025)— State laboratory testing has detected a case of highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza (HPAI) in an Anne Arundel County backyard flock. Department of Agriculture officials have quarantined all affected premises, and birds on the properties are being or have been depopulated to prevent the spread of the disease. Birds from the affected flock will not enter the food system.
Confirmation by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Veterinary Services Laboratory is pending with final results anticipated in the coming days.
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Big reason why I keep up with my Covid/Flu vaccines and went vegan.
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Linked page: “Vaccinating chickens could bring down egg prices. So why isn’t the US doing it?”
“ Although many influenza researchers contend that vaccination can help control spread of the deadly virus, the U.S. government has long resistedallowing its use because of politics and trade concerns that many contend are unscientific. The USDA approval may signal a shift in policy linked to the Trump administration’s worries about egg prices. Even with the conditional approval, USDA must still approve its use before farmers can start to administer the vaccine because special regulations apply to H5N1 and other so-called highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) viruses.
The vaccine, made by Zoetis, contains a killed version of an H5N2 variant that the company has designed to work against circulating variants of the H5N1 virus that have decimated poultry flocks and have even jumped to cows and some humans. (The “H” in both variants stands for hemagglutinin, the surface protein of the virus, and antibodies against it are the main mechanism of vaccine-induced protection.) Researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Preventionreported yesterday that three cow veterinarians harbored antibodies to the H5N1 virus in dairy cattle. None had symptomatic disease, they noted in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, suggesting the virus may be more widespread in humans than previously thought.”
https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-conditionally-approves-vaccine-protect-poultry-avian-flu
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That opinion piece is mostly about relitigating the COVID-19 lab leak claim, with basically nothing specific about the H5N1 influenza.
Yes apologies, should not have posted it here
People born before 1957 may have greater immune reaction to H5N1 viruses because such viruses may have circulated more back then before being displaced by other influenza viruses.
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Is he mentally ill or just irretrievably stupid?
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Yes
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One can be two (or more) bad things at the same time.
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After reading this article, all I can say is tell me you know absolutely nothing about raising poultry without saying you know absolutely nothing about raising poultry. As a full time farmer, I can tell you that plan is an absolute disaster and would lead to crazy disease spread because this virus is very contagious. On poultry operations, the biosecurity plans in place would completely amaze you with the depth and thoroughness of the plan. I don’t know how they can enhance it any more. What most people don’t understand is that chickens can get sick and die very easily. Even my chickens that have free range of my farm can contract and die from disease easily. Also I think people have a misconception about how you medically treat chickens. It’s not like treating a larger farm animal like a cow or horse or goat. There is usually very little you can do to treat poultry.
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Raw cat food and raw milk are mentioned as possible ways for cats (including indoor cats) to be infected.