Post by RonOPost by RonOhttps://phys.org/news/2024-09-bird-flu-outbreaks-california-dairy.html
This Phys.org article has the most information on the Calif.
situation. It was written earlier this week and has the old number of
34 infected herds (it was actually 36 listed at the USDA site) but
now 6 more herds were added yesterday so the situation is even worse
than they describe in this article.
California is doing a better job of detecting herds at this time than
other states because they claim to be tracing contacts and testing
herds that share workers and equipment with infected herds. That
seems to be the reason that they are detecting so many herds, and
they are detecting them before the herds show signs of infection. It
has been known for a long time that dairy workers were likely
spreading the virus from farm to farm, but the USDA and CDC have been
in deep denial, and refused to do contact tracing to demonstrate that
they were wrong.
This article claims that Calif. has evidence that cattle were
illicitly brought back into Calif. from Idaho, but that doesn't make
sense because the virus is closest in sequence to Colorado, and Idaho
was infected before Colorado. The Colorado virus is most closely
related to the virus isolated from a Michigan dairy worker, so
Colorado likely was infected from Michigan (my guess the Colorado
virus was transmitted by a migrant infected dairy worker from
Michigan because Michigan should not have been exporting cattle at
that time due to USDA restrictions). It will all be worked out once
they do a phylogenetic assay of all the infected states.
They still are refusing to test dairy workers, but they are trying to
quarantine the farms and not allowing workers to move from an
infected farm to other farms.
Ron Okimoto
In today's update the CDC has announced that 4 more Missouri health
care workers that had contact with the hospitalized patient exhibited
respiratory symptoms and they are being tested for H5 antibodies.
https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/spotlights/h5n1-response-09272024.html
They should also test for N1 antibodies because they know that the
Missouri case had a virus with 2 amino acid substitutions in the H5
gene that researchers are claiming reduces H5 antibody neutralization
by 10 to 100 fold, so H5 antibodies may not be the best to test for in
Missouri.
The USDA is also listing another herd in California identified after
the 6 earlier this week bringing this weeks total to 7 in California.
Ron Okimoto
The CDC is acting like creationist scam artists. In their latest update
on the dairy H5N1 influenza they emphasize "To date, only one case of
influenza A(H5N1) has been detected in Missouri. No contacts of that
case have tested positive for influenza A(H5N1)." even though they know
that more contacts of the Missouri patient have exhibited symptoms. They
know that 6 contacts have had symptoms, but only one of them were
tested, and that is the reason that no contacts have tested positive.
https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/spotlights/h5n1-response-09272024.html
Missouri should start testing their Dairy herds. They already know that
poultry farms have gone down with the virus in Missouri, and they know
that poultry farms get the virus from dairies, most likely by dairy
workers or their close contacts also working on the poultry farms. They
have to start a program like they have in California where they are
testing dairies that have dairy workers in common with infected dairies.
California is currently identifying the most infected dairies. It has
been pretty obvious that dairy workers have been spreading the virus,
but the CDC and USDA keep claiming that there isn't any evidence because
they refused to start contact tracing like California. California isn't
even testing the dairy workers. They are just assuming that they can
transmit the virus, and determining that the workers are doing that by
the infected dairies that they are detecting before the herds start
showing symptoms.
Ron Okimoto
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/10/03/bird-flu-human-transmission-missouri-h5n1/
This Washington post article claims that the blood samples of the 6
medical personnel that exhibited symptoms after exposure to the Missouri
dairy virus patient only arrived in Georgia this week, and it will take
some time to do the testing because the CDC wants to grow up the virus
first. Initial claims were that they did not get virus from the
patient, and only fragmentary sequence, so what virus are they growing up?
They also have to consider previous work on the H5N1 virus that found
that infected human inidviduals did not have to produce neutralizing
antibodies to H5, but some H5 antibodies could be detected in their
blood. So if they do the neutralizing test that they did on the
Michigan samples that were negative they could be missing infections.
The Missouri virus also has 2 amino acid substitutions in the H5 gene
that are claimed to reduce H5 neutralizing antibody effectiveness 10 to
100 fold.
This article repeats the claim that the patient did not have the usual
influenza symptoms so likely did not transmit the virus to the medical
workers. If you look up the old papers on the Asian H5N1 infections
that were killing 50% of the infected, diarrhea is one of the symptoms
exhibited by infected humans as well as conjunctiva (eye infection) also
associated with the dairy virus. The CDC not disclosing that the
patient had symptoms that had been associated with the high mortality
H5N1 virus in Asia is not something that should be tolerated.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1865597/
QUOTE:
In humans, the possibility of intestinal infection is supported by
reports of H5N1-infected patients who presented with diarrhea as the
only initial symptom as well as by patients who reported consumption of
raw duck blood as the sole exposure to poultry (3, 8, 39). In addition,
the presence of infectious virus in fecal material may indicate virus
replication in the human gastrointestinal tract (39, 40, 240).
END QUOTE:
If I remember newspaper accounts of H5N1 Asian patients with these
symptoms someone at the CDC should remember the symptoms associated with
the H5N1 influenza virus. Most of the patients did exhibit upper
respiratory infections, but some of the Asian patients had the symptoms
exhibited by the Missouri patient.
Ron Okimoto