Post by RonOPost by RonOhttps://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-
breaking/2024/12/06/ pinal-county-workers-confirmed-as-first-human-
cases-of-bird- flu/76827272007/
This hasn't been confirmed to be the dairy virus, nor have the cases
been confirmed by the CDC, but if it is the Dairy virus they should be
looking for infected dairy herds in Arizona. Poultry farms get
infected by nearby dairies. The Dairy virus is spreading among dairy
cattle and not among wild birds. Wild birds have been infected, but
they seem to die around the farms where they got infected.
Ron Okimoto
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influenza-bird-flu/nevada-reports-its-
first-avian-flu-detection-dairy-cattle-virus-hits-iowa
Nevada is admitting to it's first dairy infection. There are only 20
dairy herds in the state, but the largest herd has 32,000 cows on it.
One herd North of Las Vegas went down. Two more commercial poultry
flocks went down in Iowa and California. California doesn't have much
of an excuse. They know that they need to keep dairy workers off the
poultry farms, but my guess is that quarantine is still "voluntary" and
not enforced. Dairy workers have rights, but they have to keep other
herds and poultry flocks from being infected. Poultry flocks get
depopulated, but infected dairy farms keep producing milk.
Still no results from the CDC's claims to start testing dairy workers
back in early Nov. in order to detect infected and isolate and treat
them with anti-viral drugs.
Ron Okimoto
The dairy herd count is now up to 742 nationally with over 520 of those
from California. 21 California herds were added today and the one herd
from Nevada.
https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/situation-summary/mammals.html
California is just sad. Once they had confirmed contact tracing was
identifying more infected herds they should have restricted movement of
dairy workers from working at more than one farm. They would have
obviously prevented a lot of poultry infections and other dairy herd
infections. They had already restricted movement of cattle between
farms, but refused to restrict dairy worker movements between farms.
Now 40% of the dairy herds have been found to be infected. The same is
likely true for all other states with infected dairy herds that did not
try to identify all their infected herds and did not restrict the
movement of dairy workers between farms.
California should also not have stopped testing dairy workers, and the
CDC program for increased testing of dairy workers seems to have never
started after announcing it in early November in response to the
findings that 7% of dairy workers had been found to be or have been
infected in the Michigan and Colorado study. It was actually more than
7% because the CDC included 39 individuals that were tested because they
had not shown symptoms. These 39 were the first group tested. The 8
positives came from the random sample collected as they came to workers
on various farms with out regard to whether they had shown symptoms or
not. So the positive rate was closer to 10% than 7%.
The virus has been mutating in cattle for so long, that they likely have
to create new H5 antigens to test for antibodies, like they had to do
for the Missouri case.
If it is taking weeks to get results confirmed by the CDC it is
senseless to use the test results to start treating the infected with
antivirals, as the CDC claimed that they were going to do.
Ron Okimoto