Kathleen Bachynski: “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.”

“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.”

Three months into bird flu outbreak in U.S. dairy cows, experts see deep-rooted problems in responsewww.statnews.com Three months into the H5N1 bird flu outbreak in U.S. dairy cows, experts see deep-rooted problems in the government's response.

“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”

“It doesn’t appear that the overall animal outbreak is changing in character, as of yet, but it’s difficult to know because we have so little data,” said Tom Inglesby… [who] argued that if this outbreak were playing out in another country, U.S. officials would be calling the response unacceptable.”

“It’s not [being] managed as a zoonotic disease that is a potential dynamic threat,” said Marion Koopmans, chief of viroscience at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands. “It may well not become a pandemic. But I think it’s playing with fire.”

“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.”

“Thijs Kuiken, a pathologist at Erasmus Medical Center, noted that Canada has made it mandatory to report suspected H5N1 cases in cows; in the U.S., only positive tests have to be reported to federal authorities. (Some states have also said suspected cases need to be reported.)”

“The scientific specifics of this outbreak are also complicating the response. Many of the world’s top flu scientists have acknowledged they didn’t think cows could get H5N1, a blind spot that delayed pinpointing the virus as the culprit behind a decline in milk production among cows”

I come from dairy farmers. I'm incredibly disappointed with how the industry seems to be in near-total denial about the gravity of the problem ... but I also can't say I'm terribly surprised. The whole of the system has been built to handle the response this poorly, putting public health secondary.

There needs to be immediate and drastic intervention from the federal government to standardize an industry-wide response that puts public health first, and the writer is 100% correct in assessing that if this were happening anywhere else in the world, we would be having a fit.

* writers

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