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From: RonO <rokimoto557@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Dairy cattle mortality in California
Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2024 16:41:56 -0500
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On 10/14/2024 4:10 PM, RonO wrote:
> On 10/13/2024 9:49 AM, RonO wrote:
>> Second attempt to post:
>>
>> https://www.newsweek.com/disturbing-footage-reveals-bird-flu-infected- 
>> cattle-dumped-roadside-1967813
>>
>> As noted in previous posts the California strain of the dairy 
>> influenza virus has a higher mortality rate among cattle than the 
>> initial virus. Apparently dead cattle are piling up and not being 
>> disposed of in a biosecure manner.
>>
>> The esimate is that there are over 1,100 dairy herds in California and 
>> 100 have already been confirmed to be infected with more herds 
>> detected by California health officials and already submitted for 
>> verification.
>>
>> 20% of the dairy herd in the US is in California (over a million 
>> cattle).  The mortality rate was initially 2%, but around 15% of the 
>> infected cattle are dying in California.  Initially around 10% of the 
>> herd was infected at any one time, but now 50% of the herd is found to 
>> be infected in some cases.
>>
>> Ron Okimoto
>>
> 
> https://evrimagaci.org/tpg/california-confronts-bird-flu-cases-among- 
> dairy-workers-45706
> 
> This article claims that California has been contact tracing since the 
> start in late August.  After the first couple weeks the first claims 
> were that they thought that they had isolated the infected herds to 
> around half a dozen because they shared workers between the farms, but 
> the contacts obviously exploded out of those first half dozen and now 
> they likely have over a 100 infected dairy herds identified some of them 
> before the cattle showed symptoms.
> 
> The claim is that there is still no evidence for human to human 
> transmission, but that hasn't been true since late July.  A Texas study 
> released their data before peer review.
> 
> https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influenza-bird-flu/previously- 
> undetected-h5n1-avian-flu-cases-farmworkers-revealed-new-report
> 
> They released this data in late July, but the CDC has never incorporated 
> the data into the known human infections.  What they found was they 
> tested 14 dairy workers from two farms and two of the dairy workers from 
> one of the farms had antibodies to H5 indicating that they had been 
> infected by the dairy virus.  One of those workers only had contact with 
> other dairy workers, and did not have contact with cattle (cafeteria 
> worker).  Their submitted publication indicated that this was evidence 
> for human to human transmission (worker infected by dairy cattle, and 
> one worker infected that did not have contact with cattle).
> 
> The initial Texas data indicated that around 10% of a herd was infected 
> (showed symptoms), but when these researchers tested 39 milk samples 
> from the two farms they found 64% of the samples had H5N1 virus.  This 
> is closer to the 50% infection rate that California is experiencing, but 
> the mortality in Texas was only 2% while it is 10 to 15% of infected 
> animals in California.  So going by symptoms under estimated the rate of 
> infection in Texas herds.  They should have implemented testing like 
> they have in California, and they would have had a better estimate of 
> the actual infection rate.
> 
> One of the authors of this paper is quoted in the news article.
> 
> QUOTE:
> "I am very confident there are more people being infected than we know 
> about," senior author Gregory Gray, MD, MPH, a UTMB infectious disease 
> researcher, told NPR. "Largely, that's because our surveillance has been 
> so poor."
> END QUOTE:
> 
> It should be noted that the CDC never changed their minds, and 
> surveillance continues to be poor (except in California where they 
> implemented contact tracing) for the rest of the nation.
> 
> Ron Okimoto
> 

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influenza-bird-flu/california-reports-4-more-probable-h5-cases-dairy-workers

California is reporting 4 more cases of human infections.  This makes 
the total 11 for California.  It means that the other states have been 
severely under reporting cases, mainly because they are not testing and 
contact tracing.

The cases need to be confirmed by the CDC, but the previous ones were 
verified, and California is likely using the CDC PCR test.  It should 
have been fixed by now, and initially had issues with false negative 
results when the CDC first put it out, but they have had more than half 
a year to fix that test, and false negative results are not an issue for 
positive test results.

11 cases involving 9 farms.  2 cases were at the same farm, but it was a 
huge dairy farm (something like 5,000 cows) and the two workers worked 
at different parts of the farm, and did not have contact with each 
other.  So it looks like all of them were infected by cattle.  In a 
previous article California health officials claimed that they were 
tracing close contacts of the infected dairy workers, and would be 
testing those contacts if they exhibit symptoms.  It won't be any 
surprise if they find close contacts infected because in both Michigan 
and Texas where they asked the question they found that twice as many 
close contacts of dairy workers worked at poultry farms or other dairy 
farms as the dairy workers themselves, and both Texas and Michigan had 
infected poultry flocks with the dairy virus.  So they already have 
known for months that close contacts may have been spreading the dairy 
virus.  The CDC just never implemented testing and contact tracing.

Ron Okimoto