After 3 months, where are we?The U.S. Department of Agriculture has stated that its goal is to eliminate the virus, known as H5N1, from cattle. But that messaging has left scientists scratching their heads about how exactly officials plan to stop further transmission given that the impediments persist. It’s also not clear whether the virus could burn out, or if cows are vulnerable to reinfection.
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Other countries are taking notice. Last month, a committee of scientific advisers alerted the French government to the “unprecedented situation” happening 4,000 miles away, saying that while the start of the virus’s spread among cows had not yet increased the threat to people, it was concerning enough that the government needed to take its own measures.
“The situation is serious,” Bruno Lina, a virologist and member of the committee, told STAT, noting that European countries were already expanding their surveillance systems to include cows. “It has to be taken seriously in the U.S., and that is what we expect from the U.S.”
But by just about all accounts, not enough is being done.
Note:To gauge the risk of the situation and assess the response, STAT spoke with a range of experts both in the U.S. and internationally. What emerges is a portrait of a threat that is steadily rolling along, yet also settling into what feels like a routine. Nearly every day, a few new herds are found to have infections, entrenching the virus deeper into the cattle population and expanding its footprint across more states. As of Tuesday, 126 herds in 12 states have reported infections, although those figures are widely assumed to be underestimates because many farmers are refusing to test. Three farmworkers, in Texas and Michigan, are known to have developed mild cases of H5N1, presumably from close contact with cows.
But if the dynamics of the outbreak haven’t changed, neither, experts say, has the forcefulness of the response.
That sounds oddly familiar...While the situation presents both scientific and logistical challenges, a chief concern is that neither the government nor outside scientists know just how far and wide the virus has spread because critical data have either not been collected or transparently relayed. The government still does not have an adequate surveillance system in place to keep up with the outbreak, scientists say.
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“If you still can’t determine the scale of the outbreak, and which states, what farms, what herds, are actually being affected, I don’t see how you can possibly think that it’s containable,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan.
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What absolutely amazes me about this is that the same people shouting from the mountaintops that CHINA released "the Covid virus" as a bioweapon aren't at all interested in noting that the United States is half-assing a response to another viral zoonotic outbreak. After all we've been through in the last 5 years, I wanted to think we learned something, but apparently not.But the government’s own data indicate the efforts have holes large enough for the virus to run through. In one USDA survey, 60% of farms acknowledged moving cows within a state even after the animals had started showing symptoms of infection. Federal officials have acknowledged they’re not getting much cooperation from dairy producers and workers.
“The more we learn about H5N1, the more we understand that good biosecurity is a critically important path to containing the virus,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack wrote last week in an op-ed in the media outlet Agri-Pulse, calling on farmers to step up the use of PPE, limit traffic onto their farms, and increase cleaning and disinfection practices in their barns and milking parlors
I want to blame some of this on Covid-19 backlash, but the truth is we weren't prepared before 2019. Sure, the pandemic has likely made this response worse, but that we're potentially sleepwalking into a bigger problem is just astounding to me.In some ways, experts say, the bird flu outbreak is exposing the same systemic obstacles that hobbled the U.S. performance during the Covid-19 pandemic. The response is falling on various local, state, and federal agencies with limited authorities and disparate, sometimes competing, agendas. In this case, it’s a balkanization compounded by the need for public health officials to collaborate with agricultural agencies, which are often tilted to supporting industry instead of prioritizing reining in threats to human health. State agricultural agencies are also underfunded and understaffed; meanwhile, some portion of the public is resistant to measures to track and control the virus.
“There seems to be a lot of issues between the agencies, the federal government, the states, the farmers,” said Florian Krammer, a flu virologist at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine in New York. “It’s not looking like everybody’s on the same side trying to get rid of the problem.”
Many scientists acknowledge the tightrope that government officials are treading. Fearful of overstepping, agencies are reluctant to use the full extent of their legal authority to demand testing on farms — something that could lead to a political backlash in an election year. Such a response would be perhaps all the more likely in a post-Covid pandemic world, and would impede whatever receptiveness farmers are showing.
