What they are telling us about the bird flu just keeps changing.
At first, they told us that humans were at no risk. But now the WHO says that there is “enormous concern” that H5N1 could potentially start spreading among humans. And when dairy cows in the U.S. started catching bird flu, we were assured that milk from infected cows was being kept out of the supply chain. So most Americans continued to buy milk, cheese and butter as usual.
But now two different rounds of testing have confirmed that massive amounts of milk from infected dairy cows is getting into the supply chain. In fact, on Thursday an update that was posted on the official FDA website openly admitted that approximately one out of every five samples of grocery store milk that they tested had “viral fragments” in them.
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Today, the FDA received some initial results from its nationally representative commercial milk sampling study. The agency continues to analyze this information; however, the initial results show about 1 in 5 of the retail samples tested are quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR)-positive for HPAI viral fragments, with a greater proportion of positive results coming from milk in areas with infected herds.
That is a bombshell.
But they are not the only ones that have been doing such testing.
A veterinary epidemiologist at Ohio State University tested “150 commercial milk products from around the Midwest,” and he found viral material in more than a third of them.
Andrew Bowman, a veterinary epidemiologist at Ohio State University, had a hunch. He had been struck by the huge amounts of H5N1 virus he’d seen in milk from cows infected with the bird flu and thought that at least some virus was getting off of farms and going downstream—onto store shelves.
He knew the Food and Drug Administration was working on its own national survey of the milk supply. But he was impatient. So he and a graduate student went on a road trip: They collected 150 commercial milk products from around the Midwest, representing dairy processing plants in 10 different states, including some where herds have tested positive for H5N1. Genetic testing found viral RNA in 58 samples, he told STAT.
What these tests indicate is that H5N1 is far, far more widespread in dairy cows than we had been told.
Originally, I wasn’t too concerned when I heard that there were a few dozen confirmed cases in herds across the country, because that was just a very small fraction of the total.
But now experts are acknowledging that these latest tests clearly show that a very large proportion of U.S. dairy cows have been exposed to the virus.
“The fact that you can go into a supermarket and 30% to 40% of those samples test positive, that suggests there’s more of the virus around than is currently being recognized,” said Richard Webby, an influenza virologist who has been analyzing the samples at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., where he heads the WHO Collaborating Center for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals.
The good news is that the FDA is reporting that “preliminary results” indicate that the pasteurization process kills off the bird flu that has been getting into our milk supply.
Preliminary results of tests run by the Food and Drug Administration show that pasteurization is working to kill off bird flu in milk, the agency said Friday.
“This additional testing did not detect any live, infectious virus. These results reaffirm our assessment that the commercial milk supply is safe,” the FDA said in a statement.
Hopefully those “preliminary results” will be confirmed.
Unfortunately, any milk that has not been pasteurized is at risk.
In fact, the USDA is telling us that deaths and neurological disease have been “widely reported” among cats that had been drinking unpasteurized milk from dairy cows.
Other animals have also not fared as well during the outbreak: the USDA said Friday that deaths and neurological disease had been “widely reported” in cats around dairy farms. Officials have said they suspect cats had been drinking leftover raw milk from infected cows.
Why are we only hearing about this now? And what else are they not telling us? It appears that we have a major crisis on our hands.
Sadly, more confirmed cases just keep rolling in. At this point, Colorado has become the ninth state where dairy cows have officially tested positive.
Avian influenza has been confirmed in dairy cows in Colorado, making the Centennial State the ninth in the U.S. to see the highly contagious virus jump from bird to cattle.
According to the state Department of Agriculture, the Colorado State Veterinarian Office was alerted on April 22 that a dairy herd in northeastern Colorado was exhibiting symptoms of H5N1, or the bird flu. In cattle, bird flu symptoms include decreased feed intake, decreased milk production, and abnormal milk when it is produced.
“Samples submitted to the Colorado State University Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory tested presumptive positive for HPAI on April 24 and were confirmed by the [U.S. Department of Agriculture] National Veterinary Services Laboratory on April 25,” the Colorado Department of Agriculture said.
Many scientists are deeply concerned about the possibility that H5N1 could jump from dairy cows to dairy workers.
So far, just one dairy worker in Texas has officially tested positive, but there may be a lot more cases out there. The following comes from an NBC News article entitled “Bird flu cases are likely being missed in dairy workers, experts say.”
During that same time, she said, dairy workers — including those who were never in close contact with the sick cows — also fell ill.
“People had some classic flu-like symptoms, including high fever, sweating at night, chills, lower back pain, as well as upset stomach, vomiting and diarrhea,” Petersen said. They also tended to have “pretty severe conjunctivitis and swelling of their eyelids.”
Petersen noted that the people were never tested for H5N1; it’s possible that their symptoms were the result of another illness.
If H5N1 mutates into a form that spreads easily from human to human, that would be a nightmare.
According to the official WHO website, more than 50% of all confirmed cases in humans since 2003 have resulted in death.
From 2003 to 1 April 2024, a total of 889 cases and 463 deaths (CFR 52%) caused by influenza A(H5N1) virus have been reported worldwide from 23 countries.
In my most recent book entitled “Chaos,” I warned that pestilences would be one of the major themes that we would be dealing with in 2024.
The bird flu has already killed millions upon millions of birds all over the globe, and now it has made the jump into mammals such as dairy cows and cats.
Many experts are convinced that it is just a matter of time before is starts spreading among humans on a widespread basis, and once that happens everything will change.
Michael Snyder’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
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