DAILY TRIFECTA: Bird Flu Circles The Cuckoo's Nest
"Each infection is like a pull of a slot machine lever"
THE SET-UP: Let’s face it, our reliance of factory farming and the antibiotics required to keep CAFOs afloat has essentially been one big dare. We’ve taunted Mother Nature for the better part of three decades and scientists have warned us it’s only a matter until Mother Nature responds to that epidemiological dare with some painful truth. The painful truth is that Mother Nature’s timing couldn’t be more … ironic? Darkly comical? Woefully apropos? Or, for those not inclined to anthropomorphism, strangely coincidental?
I prefer anthropomorphism, if only for dramatic effect. And there will be plenty of dramatic effect if a mutation or reassortment transforms Bird Flu into a full-blown, human-to-human virus. If so, Bird Flu will land in the Trump Administration’s cuckoo’s nest. Even without a mutation, raw milk enthusiast RFK Jr. will be faced with a virus that’s currently killing raw milk-drinking cats in Los Angeles and a vaccine that’s being stockpiled, but not distributed to at-risk dairy farmworkers. And just to add to dramatic staging, the state of Louisiana just forbid public health workers from promoting vaccines shortly after the US’s first “severe” case of bird flu put a man in a Louisiana hospital.
If timing is everything … Mother Nature’s timing is … impeccable. - jp
TITLE: How America Lost Control of the Bird Flu, Setting the Stage for Another Pandemic
https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/bird-flu-spread-cattle-poultry-pandemic-cdc/
EXCERPTS: “We are in a terrible situation and going into a worse situation,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. “I don’t know if the bird flu will become a pandemic, but if it does, we are screwed.”
To understand how the bird flu got out of hand, KFF Health News interviewed nearly 70 government officials, farmers and farmworkers, and researchers with expertise in virology, pandemics, veterinary medicine, and more.
Together with emails obtained from local health departments through public records requests, this investigation revealed key problems, including deference to the farm industry, eroded public health budgets, neglect for the safety of agriculture workers, and the sluggish pace of federal interventions.
Case in point: The U.S. Department of Agriculture this month announced a federal order to test milk nationwide. Researchers welcomed the news but said it should have happened months ago — before the virus was so entrenched.
“It’s disheartening to see so many of the same failures that emerged during the covid-19 crisis reemerge,” said Tom Bollyky, director of the Global Health Program at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“Even if there’s only a 5% chance of a bird flu pandemic happening, we’re talking about a pandemic that probably looks like 2020 or worse,” said Tom Peacock, a bird flu researcher at the Pirbright Institute in the United Kingdom, referring to covid. “The U.S. knows the risk but hasn’t done anything to slow this down,” he added.
Beyond the bird flu, the federal government’s handling of the outbreak reveals cracks in the U.S. health security system that would allow other risky new pathogens to take root. “This virus may not be the one that takes off,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, director of the emerging diseases group at the World Health Organization. “But this is a real fire exercise right now, and it demonstrates what needs to be improved.”
Virologists around the world said they were flabbergasted by how poorly the United States was tracking the situation. “You are surrounded by highly pathogenic viruses in the wild and in farm animals,” said Marion Koopmans, head of virology at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands. “If three months from now we are at the start of the pandemic, it is nobody’s surprise.”
Although the bird flu is not yet spreading swiftly between people, a shift in that direction could cause immense suffering. The CDC has repeatedly described the cases among farmworkers this year as mild — they weren’t hospitalized. But that doesn’t mean symptoms are a breeze, or that the virus can’t cause worse.
“It does not look pleasant,” wrote Sean Roberts, an emergency services specialist at the Tulare County, California, health department in an email to colleagues in May. He described photographs of an infected dairy worker in another state: “Apparently, the conjunctivitis that this is causing is not a mild one, but rather ruptured blood vessels and bleeding conjunctiva.”
Over the past 30 years, half of around 900 people diagnosed with bird flu around the world have died. Even if the case fatality rate is much lower for this strain of the bird flu, covid showed how devastating a 1% death rate can be when a virus spreads easily.
Like other cases around the world, the person now hospitalized with the bird flu in Louisiana appears to have gotten the virus directly from birds. After the case was announced, the CDC released a statement saying, “A sporadic case of severe H5N1 bird flu illness in a person is not unexpected.”
The USDA has so far put more than $2.1 billion into reimbursing poultry and dairy farmers for losses due to the bird flu and other measures to control the spread on farms. Federal agencies have also put $292 million into developing and stockpiling bird flu vaccines for animals and people. In a controversial decision, the CDC has advised against offering the ones on hand to farmworkers.
“If you want to keep this from becoming a human pandemic, you focus on protecting farmworkers, since that’s the most likely way that this will enter the human population,” said Peg Seminario, an occupational health researcher in Bethesda, Maryland. “The fact that this isn’t happening drives me crazy.”
Curtailing the virus on farms is the best way to prevent human infections, said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University, but human surveillance must be stepped up, too. Every clinic serving communities where farmworkers live should have easy access to bird flu tests — and be encouraged to use them. Funds for farmworker outreach must be boosted. And, she added, the CDC should change its position and offer farmworkers bird flu vaccines to protect them and ward off the chance of a hybrid bird flu that spreads quickly.
Just a few mutations could allow the bird flu to spread between people. Because viruses mutate within human and animal bodies, each infection is like a pull of a slot machine lever.
TITLE: Wisconsin DHS Reports Presumptive Positive Human Case Of Bird Flu In Barron County
https://drydenwire.com/news/wisconsin-dhs-reports-presumptive-human-case-of-bird-flu-in-barron-county/
EXCERPT: The Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) has detected the first presumptive positive human case of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza A (H5N1), also known as bird flu, in Barron County.
The human case follows an infected flock of commercial poultry identified in Barron County. The person had exposure to the infected flock. The case was identified through testing at the Wisconsin State Lab of Hygiene (WSLH) and is pending confirmation at CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).
DHS, in coordination with Barron County Health and Human Services, is monitoring farm workers who may have been exposed to the virus and has provided them with information to protect their health. The risk to the general public in Wisconsin remains low. People who work with infected animals, or have recreational exposure to them, are at higher risk.
Symptoms of bird flu in people include:
Sore throat
Fever
Muscle aches
Cough
Eye infections (Conjunctivitis)
Anyone who develops symptoms of flu or an eye infection and has been in contact with animals who may have been infected should stay home (not go to work, school, shopping, or use public transportation) and call their doctor's office or clinic before visiting so they can take precautions to ensure other patients are not exposed to the virus. Treatment for bird flu may include hospitalization, supportive care, and/or the use of antivirals.
TITLE: America’s Bird-Flu Luck Has Officially Run Out
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/12/america-bird-flu-severe-case/681115/
EXCERPTS: There are a few reasons the latest news shouldn’t cause alarm. The virus hasn’t found a way to efficiently infect humans; its receptors prefer animal hosts. This means the virus doesn’t enter the body at high levels. “It’s kind of forcing its entry using a jackhammer right now, so cases have generally been mild,” Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious-diseases expert at UC San Francisco, told me.. Higher levels of virus generally make people sicker. The Louisiana patient was infected with a strain of the virus related to the one that sickened the Canadian teen but different from the one spreading among dairy herds, poultry, and farmworkers. The mutations in this strain “represent the ability of the virus to cause serious disease, but these instances should be isolated in humans for the time being,” Chin-Hong said.
But just because America is in the same place of steady precarity that it has been in for months doesn’t mean that’s a good place to be in. As I wrote in September, we are in an awkward state of in-between, in which experts are on high alert for concerning mutations but the public has no reason to worry—yet. “Right now, I agree that the risk to the general public is low, but we know avian influenza mutates quickly,” Anne Rimoin, an epidemiology professor at UCLA, told me. The more transmissions among animals—in particular from birds to mammals—the more chances the virus has to mutate to become more threatening to the public. The longer the virus persists in the environment, “the greater potential to mutate, resort, and become more infectious and virulent to humans,” Maurice Pitesky, an animal-infectious-diseases expert at UC Davis, told me.
America is giving the virus a lot of chances to infect people. Although efforts to control the virus, such as regular testing of herds and bulk testing of raw milk, are under way, they have clearly not been enough. The spread of the virus geographically and across mammalian species is unprecedented, Pitesky said. He believes that more efforts should be directed toward shifting waterfowl—ducks, geese, and other wild birds responsible for spreading H5N1—away from commercial farms, where the virus is most likely to be transmitted to humans. A shot for bird flu exists, and experts have urged the government to vaccinate farmworkers. “Farmers need help,” Pitesky said. As of this month, the Biden administration has no plans to authorize a human vaccine, making it likely that that choice will fall under the purview of Donald Trump.
Just as a severe case in America was inevitable, continued mutation is a given too. At this rate, the virus will adapt to infect human hosts, cause more serious disease, and result in human-to-human transmission “at some point,” Chin-Hong said. Earlier this month, a study published in Science by researchers at the Scripps Research Institute showed that a single mutation in the virus strain spreading among dairy herds could switch its preference from bird to human receptors. “In nature, the occurrence of this single mutation could be an indicator of human pandemic risk,” the paper’s editor wrote.
[R]ight now, the future trajectory of bird flu points to the real possibility that the U.S. will have to weather the virus’s spread among people, with leadership that’s shown little interest in addressing it. Trump has not said anything about his plans, but he has picked Robert F. Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic and raw-milk enthusiast, to lead the country’s health agencies. In the absence of more stringent controls, the public can take steps to prevent the situation from worsening: avoiding raw milk and dead birds, for starters. Getting a regular flu shot decreases the chances of getting infected simultaneously with human and bird flu, which would create conditions for the viruses to combine into a virus that prefers humans. But what America needs is a plan, Pitesky said. The previous four flu pandemics had their origins in avian influenza. There is still time to prevent the next one.
SEE ALSO:
Louisiana forbids public health workers from promoting COVID, flu and mpox shots
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/12/20/nx-s1-5223440/louisiana-ban-public-health-promoting-covid-flu-mpox-vaccines-landry-rfk-jr-anti-vaccine