Defective dairy H5N1 virus test

RonO

2024-07-29 17:03:50 UTC

Post by RonO
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-cdcs-test-for-bird-flu-works-but-it-has-issues/
Apparently the CDC admitted last week to congress that the test that
they first distrubuted to detect the dairy virus was defective. They
claim that it wasn't their fault, but that the company that they
contracted to make the test screwed up on one of the H5 tests. At this
point they are still trying to get the company to rectify their error
and create fully functional test kits. It turns out that they have been
working with the defective test for months.
It could be one of the reasons that they never started wide spread
testing for the virus, though they do not make that claim.
The Scientific American article notes how something similar occurred at
the start of Covid when the CDC produced a defective test that held up
getting the virus under control. This time the CDC claims that it
wasn't their fault, but it likely is their fault that they didn't
immediately get another company to make a functional test kit instead of
waste months trying to get the contract company to fix their mistake.
The article indicates that they are pretty sure that the company will
make fully functional test kits soon.
Ron Okimoto

https://www.sfchronicle.com/health/article/h5n1-bird-flu-california-impact-19592660.php

Chronicle article on H5N1. They claim that H5N1 is showing up in
poultry in the bay area. For some reason they are not testing dairy
herds in California. They know that multiple counties in the bay area
show elevated levels of influenza in their waste water and that this is
correlated with infected dairy herds in other states. When I looked
into this back in May I suspected that the Dairy Influenza likely first
infected dairy cattle in California. Poultry farms began to go down
with H5N1 in central California dairy counties in October when they
thought that the infection first started in Dairy cattle. Poultry farms
start to go down in states with infected dairy herds because of the
crossover with Dairy workers and their close contacts also working at
poultry farms. In the Bay area commercial Poultry farms started to go
down in October 2023 and it spread North to encircle the Bay Area
(counties showing influenza in waste water were among the counties with
infected flocks). The Dairy virus has been found to be most closely
related to a virus isolated from a Peregrine falcon in California.

I tried to get the sequencing results for the Poultry flocks, but I was
told that the USDA did not release information on people involved in
collecting and testing the California samples. I could not contact
anyone that would know what the sequencing results were. The California
sequences have not been included in any of the sequence analysis to
date. My guess is that they will find infected herds in California
because the virus likely hasn't burned through all the herds at this
time, and they will find that the initial infection predates the Texas
samples and that the Texas virus likely came from California.

Ron Okimoto