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From: *Hemidactylus* <ecphoric@allspamis.invalid>
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: OT? Dairy flu
Date: Sat, 25 May 2024 14:49:19 +0000
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RonO <rokimoto@cox.net> wrote:
> The CDC issued an alert yesterday that they were initiating planning for 
> "possiblity of increased risk to human health" from the dairy flu.  The 
> CDC has screwed up by the numbers in terms of evolution of the virus and 
> the threat to humans.  They knew from the first detections that humans 
> were being infected, but they didn't initiate testing and contact 
> tracing.  Humans had already likely spread the virus to other dairy 
> herds for some time.  They knew from the first sequencing results that 
> many states did not get cattle but ended up with the virus.  People were 
> the obvious vector for spread of the virus between herds.  We have known 
> for years that the flu virus only survives for around 5 hours on the 
> skin and maybe up to 12 hours on clothing, but we also know that you 
> have to be infected within a few minutes of getting it on your skin or 
> clothing because the virus doesn't seem to be infective after a few 
> minutes on those surfaces.  The virus survives the longest on hard 
> surfaces and is infective off those surfaces for up to 24 hours, but the 
> poultry farms that were infected by the dairy virus in the same counties 
> as the infected herds would have had little reason to exchange 
> equipment.  Infected humans likely took the virus to those poultry 
> farms.  The two known human cases were shedding infective virus.  The 
> CDC has understood this from the very beginning of their involvement, 
> but they failed to act on it.  They claim that it isn't their policy to 
> force testing onto farm workers, so they never checked to determine the 
> rate that humans were being infected even though there was ancedotal 
> evidence of other dairy workers with red eye (eye infection).  The crazy 
> thing is these red eye individuals can infect other humans.  They got 
> infected, and they are shedding virus.  If the CDC had started testing 
> and contact tracing they would already know how the other herds and 
> poultry flocks got infected.
> 
> What they needed to do was identify all the infected herds and 
> quarantine the herds and farm workers, but the USDA and CDC were not 
> interested in contact tracing and tracking down additional cases.  They 
> both claimed to rely on farm reporting.  This is stupid.  The FDA tested 
> milk products from 38 states.  They tested products that came from milk 
> processing plants in those states and found 17 states with H5N1 positive 
> milk samples, but would not release the names of the states because they 
> claimed to only be worried about the safety of the food chain. 
> Pasteurization was found to kill the virus.  When the FDA finally did 
> release the names of the states a couple weeks later it was found that 9 
> new states not yet identified as having positive dairy herds had 
> produced milk products that were positive for the dairy virus.  3 of the 
> states already known to have infected herds were not found to have 
> positive dairy products, so they likely missed some positive states of 
> the 38 tested.  The CDC could have predicted the results because they 
> started to monitor waste water and most of the new states that were 
> found to have positive dairy products had also shown flu virus in the 
> waste water.
> 
> The CDC knows that the longer that they allow humans to be infected by 
> the dairy virus the more likely that it will evolve into a strain that 
> will start killing people.  Currently the infected humans only have mild 
> eye irritation (the virus infects mammary glands and apparently tear 
> ducts).  The initial sequencing results indicated that there were 
> already variants of the virus with mutations that would make them more 
> infective in mammals, but they were minor variants at the time of the 
> sample collections.  As the virus adapts to cattle these variants are 
> probably the most likely to be selected for.  The virus is infecting a 
> lot more herds than they are tracking, and it is evolving in all those 
> herds and the dairy workers are exposed to that evolving virus.  I 
> should note that the cats that got infected by the dairy virus had high 
> mortality because the virus infected their brains.  Influenza virus is 
> normally a respiratory virus, but if this virus adapted to infecting 
> human brains that would be a real tragedy.
> 
> So instead of trying to limit the current spread, the CDC has decided to 
> prepare for human transmission of the next pandemic virus.  It doesn't 
> sound like they are preparing correctly because you want to limit the 
> first human cases with severe symptoms.  In order to do that you have to 
> identify them as soon as you can.  The humans currently being infected 
> are dairy workers, so you need to identify all the infected herds and 
> monitor the dairy workers and their human contacts.  The next pandemic 
> could have already started in one of the states with unidentified 
> infected dairy herds.  They need to track down the dairies that 
> contributed to the milk of the processing plants that produced positive 
> milk samples.  They need to go to the counties with positive waste water 
> (these include multiple sites in California that has not yet claimed to 
> have positive herds and several of these sites are in rural areas 
> surrounding the bay area, the CDC nightmare scenario) and identify 
> infected herds.  They need to track the contacts of the dairy workers so 
> that they can identify more infected herds in states that are already 
> known to have infected herds.  Once they identify all the possible 
> sources of infection they can monitor those herds and people and then 
> try to keep any virus from spreading and becoming a pandemic.
> 
My hot and possibly wrong takes are that they are dealing with a very
influential and somewhat litigious industry. Ask Oprah. They are also
dealing with a subset of the population induced with reactance. Tell them
not to drink raw milk and its popularity will rise. They should ramp up H5
based flu shot production but that’s a crap shoot for matching and
effectiveness and this virus is not friendly to eggs.