Bird Flu On The Rise!

The silent pandemic.

It's happening all over again.

A potential pandemic is coming and the U.S. is either too busy giving billions to Israel while Americans are paying more in groceries, rent, tuition, gasoline and services. The Biden Administration is prepared hopefully. Republican lawmakers and governors will wait til the last minute before they actually take the threat seriously.

Congress is an all time low.

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are at an all time low.

Former president Donald J. Trump is at an all time low.

The public perception of the junk food media is at an all time low.

Wondering why?

The dangers of an infectious disease spreading from wild animals to humans is concerning. 

The Drudge Report which turned on Trump and Biden has splashed Bird Flu Fears Rise.

CBS News is reporting that one man contracted the disease and refused to rat out his employer. Animals are contracting the disease and it could pose a threat to diary, meat and the consumer goods industry.

Bird flu continues to appear to pose a "low risk to the general public" for now, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. But the agency's scientists ran into roadblocks investigating a human case of this "pandemic potential" virus this year, they said in a new report.

Epidemiologists from the agency were ultimately unable to access a Texas dairy farm where a human was infected with the virus in March, they disclosed in attachments to the report published Friday by the New England Journal of Medicine. That prevented investigators from being able to investigate how workers might have been exposed to the virus on the farm. 

That is because the dairy worker who came to a Texas field office for testing "did not disclose the name of their workplace," said Lara Anton, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of State Health Services. 

They also were unable to collect follow-up samples from the dairy farm worker or their contacts, which could have revealed missed cases as well as tracking the virus and antibodies against it in the body after an infection.

The worker did not wear protective eye goggles or a face mask that could have protected them from the virus, the report said. The virus was likely transmitted through their contaminated hands or droplets of the virus from sick cows.

H5N1 was likely spreading through dairy farms via the high concentrations of the virus found in the raw milk of infected cows, authorities said previously. 

The virus had been circulating in cows for an estimated four months before it was confirmed by labs on March 25, according to a draft report from U.S. Department of Agriculture scientists released Thursday.

A mutation to the virus in wild birds, a specific "clade" of the virus that scientists call 2.3.4.4b, appears to have enabled bird flu to jump into cows. Multiple herds were likely infected during that initial spillover before the birds migrated north, officials have said.

Since then, at least nine states have detected cow infections from the virus. Cows largely recover from H5N1, unlike the mass die-offs seen in other species. Some herds with infected cows have also remained asymptomatic and are continuing to produce milk.

Experiments run by the Food and Drug Administration show that pasteurized milk remains safe to drink, despite traces of the virus found in samples from grocery stores. The outbreak has also prompted a renewed warning not to drink raw milk, which has been linked to deaths of other animals like cats. 

The ongoing outbreak is also in stark contrast to how the virus has spread in other mammals infected by the virus, which have generally resulted in what USDA scientists called "dead end hosts."

A handful of variants with potentially worrying mutations have also since been spotted in cows, the USDA analysis found. If those variants become dominant, it could change the disease caused by H5N1 or make spread to other animals or humans more likely.

The virus from cows has also been spotted spreading out of dairy farms into nearby wild birds and poultry, likely ferried by contaminated milk droplets and surfaces.

Questions also remain about the exact origins of the virus that infected the Texas dairy worker. While the H5N1 sequence from the human case is closely related to those found in dairy herds, the agency's analysis found it also differs in some key ways.

Those genetic differences suggest the human was infected by "an early, slightly different virus" that was circulating in cows before the current cases, or that multiple spillovers may have actually occurred. 

While sequences collected from sick cows on the worker's dairy farm could have helped CDC scientists answer those questions, samples were "not available for analysis."