Path: ...!2.eu.feeder.erje.net!feeder.erje.net!feeds.news.ox.ac.uk!news.ox.ac.uk!nntp-feed.chiark.greenend.org.uk!ewrotcd!news.eyrie.org!beagle.ediacara.org!.POSTED.beagle.ediacara.org!not-for-mail
From: RonO <rokimoto557@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: NIH is claiming to do something different with the dairy virus
Date: Mon, 6 Jan 2025 13:54:26 -0600
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
Lines: 260
Sender: to%beagle.ediacara.org
Approved: moderator@beagle.ediacara.org
Message-ID: <vlhcdj$1pahr$1@dont-email.me>
References: <vl49ud$2uh6m$1@dont-email.me> <vl7161$3h304$1@dont-email.me>
Reply-To: rokimoto557@gmail.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Injection-Info: beagle.ediacara.org; posting-host="beagle.ediacara.org:3.132.105.89";
	logging-data="16279"; mail-complaints-to="usenet@beagle.ediacara.org"
User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird
To: talk-origins@moderators.isc.org
Cancel-Lock: sha1:PxU05pwGP1MMMnByop86Zt0hT/I=
In-Reply-To: <vl7161$3h304$1@dont-email.me>
Content-Language: en-US
Bytes: 17317

On 1/2/2025 3:41 PM, RonO wrote:
> On 1/1/2025 2:52 PM, RonO wrote:
>> https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-officials-assess- 
>> threat-h5n1
>>
>> Published Dec 31.
>>
>> QUOTE:
>> In a commentary published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 
>> NIAID Director Jeanne M. Marrazzo, M.D., M.P.H., and Michael G. Ison, 
>> M.D., M.S., chief of the Respiratory Diseases Branch in NIAID’s 
>> Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, say people should 
>> find a balance between enhanced vigilance and “business as usual” with 
>> respect to HPAI H5N1.
>> END QUOTE:
>>
>> This is an indirect way of stating that the CDC and USDA haven't been 
>> doing their jobs.
>>
>> QUOTE:
>> Against this backdrop, Drs. Marrazzo and Ison say there are four keys 
>> to controlling the current outbreak. The first imperative is timely, 
>> effective collaborations among investigators in human and veterinary 
>> medicine, public health, health care, and occupational workers, such 
>> as dairy and poultry workers.
>>
>> This involves cultivating trust not only between numerous entities, 
>> but with people seeking care for symptoms of concern, including 
>> conjunctivitis, the authors write. Fortunately, so far most U.S. cases 
>> of HPAI H5N1 have been mild and resolved on their own without the need 
>> for treatment.
>> END QUOTE:
>>
>> This has not happened, and it is fortunate that the human cases have 
>> been mild.  The CDC still has not put out any information on their 
>> human dairy worker testing that they were supposed to start in early 
>> Nov, and California initally claimed that they were going to start a 
>> worker testing program early in their infection, but that never 
>> happened and out of the 5,000 workers that they could have tested they 
>> only tested 130 after essentially quiting after their initial success 
>> with their first 39 tested.
>>
>> QUOTE:
>> Their second key is a focus on the Canadian HPAI H5N1 patient, who 
>> developed respiratory failure and required life-saving medical 
>> intervention and treatment before recovering. The authors write that 
>> mutations found in the virus in this patient highlight an urgent need 
>> for vigilant disease surveillance to identify and assess viral changes 
>> to evaluate the risk for person-to-person transmission. Effective 
>> surveillance, they say, requires that complete genomic sequencing data 
>> from animals and people are made rapidly and readily available.
>>
>> Without information pertaining to where and when isolates were 
>> collected, the data cannot be linked phylogenetically to other 
>> reported sequences, limiting insight into how the virus is spreading, 
>> they write. These data would also provide opportunity for early 
>> detection of mutations that might portend avidity for human 
>> respiratory epithelium, which may require as little as one mutation in 
>> the virus.
>> END QUOTE:
>>
>> Even the NIH needs to differentiate the D1.1 genotype from the B3.13 
>> dairy genotype.  The Canadian and Louisiana patients both with severe 
>> symptoms were genotype D1.1.  In both cases the D1.1 genotype had the 
>> same mutations that were not found in the local virus in birds, so 
>> they claimed that these mutations that, apparently made the infections 
>> more severe had occurred within each patient independently.  The D1.1 
>> genotype should be tracked more diligently than the Dairy virus.  This 
>> is also the virus that they need to be checking the efficacy of the 
>> current H5 vaccine strain on.
>>
>> This seems to be a direct rebuke of the current policy of not 
>> releasing the conclusions of the sequencing efforts.  The last half 
>> month there has been suppression of the results.  The cat infection 
>> case in Oregon had been sequenced and they knew that the sequence was 
>> identical in the dead cat and in the pet food that the cat ate, but 
>> they would not state if it was the dairy virus or not.  The same goes 
>> for the Washington big cat cases and California cat cases, and also 
>> the Wisconsin poultry worker.  A phylogeny and epidemiological 
>> sequence analysis has not been done since early in the infection when 
>> they determined that some infected states had not gotten infected 
>> cattle, but had obviously been infected from Texas.  They refused to 
>> start testing dairy workers that had likely taken the virus to other 
>> states that did not get cattle. They could tell which farms in Texas 
>> had the most closely related virus sequence, but never initiated 
>> contact tracing between those farms and the states with infected dairies.
>>
>> The Colorado virus was found to be most closely related to the virus 
>> that had infected a Michigan dairy worker, so there wasn't much doubt 
>> as to how Colorado got infected with a Michigan strain, and they 
>> should not have gotten Michigan Cattle.
>>
>> The USDA is still not releasing the sequence information so that it 
>> can be effectively used to trace the spread of the infection.  They 
>> just give the sample submission date, date of sequencing, and claim 
>> the location is the USA.  This was determined to be inadequate with 
>> the first epidemiological sequence analysis, but the USDA never 
>> changed, and kept putting out nearly worthless sequence information.  
>> Before I retired I contacted the USDA avain lab in Georgia and asked 
>> for the contact information for the USDA researchers that were 
>> responsible for putting out the sequence data, so that I could get 
>> more information about the sequences that those researchers obviously 
>> would have.  I was told that they did not give out that information.  
>> The USDA should have been doing a weekly epidemiological sequence 
>> analysis from the beginning of the infection, but that has never been 
>> initiated (or the results have been suppressed) and researchers that 
>> are willing to do it, can't do it because of the nearly worthless way 
>> in which the sequence is annotated.
>>
>> QUOTE:
>> Third, researchers must continue to develop and test medical 
>> countermeasures—such as vaccines and therapies that eliminate or 
>> alleviate disease—against H5N1 and other influenza viruses. 
>> Fortunately, current vaccine candidates neutralize the circulating 
>> strains, which so far are susceptible to antivirals that could 
>> mitigate transmission and severity of illness, they write.
>>
>> Lastly, Drs. Marrazzo and Ison encourage people to take precautions to 
>> prevent exposure to the virus and minimize the risk of infection. For 
>> example, people who work with poultry and cows should use personal 
>> protective equipment and educate themselves about occupational risks 
>> when working with birds and mammals, as CDC and USDA have repeatedly 
>> recommended.
>> END QUOTE:
>>
>> They are testing countermeasures, but so what?  The statement about 
>> current vaccine efficacy is dated.  The virus tested was isolated from 
>> a dairy worker at the beginning of the dairy infection (March 2024), 
>> and was found to be neutralized by the then vaccine H5 antigen.  The 
>> virus has since mutated, and the CDC found that they had to make a 
>> synthetic H5 antigen with the Missouri amino acid substitutions in it 
>> in order to detect neutralizing antibodies in the Missouri patient's 
>> blood (Oct 2024) and still 2 of the three antibody tests failed.  The 
>> current vaccine strain of H5, likely has lost efficacy against the 
>> current virus.  The California virus is also supposed to have multiple 
>> amino acid substitutions in the H5 gene.
>>
>> A recent news article that I put up claimed that some infected dairies 
>> in California were not using personal protective equipment to protect 
>> their dairy workers.  It is only a "recommendation" by the USDA and 
>> CDC, just as it was voluntary (and still is in most states) to test 
>> your herd for infection.  Workers were only "recommended" to not go to 
>> other farms if they worked with infected animals and that obviously 
>> was not enforced even in California when they knew that the workers 
>> were likely spreading the virus.  All the infected dairies and poultry 
>> farms in California is a testament to the fact that the denial of 
>> workers transmitting the virus should have been dealt with long ago 
>> when the USDA determined that it was likely worker transmission to 
>> poultry farms and other dairies in Michigan back in June.
>>
>> Since they never wanted to identify all the infected herds even their 
>> "recommendations" did not have to be followed on farms that would not 
========== REMAINDER OF ARTICLE TRUNCATED ==========