“Public health credibility is really on the line here.”
—Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, telling the publication STAT that he is concerned about how long the state of Missouri was taking to figure out who might have been infected human-to-human with bird flu.
You may have noticed it at an American grocery store: the price of eggs is up. (It became a discussion point in the 2024 US presidential race, in fact.) There are many reasons for that, but one of them is that chickens have been sick.
Avian influenza of the H5N1 strain has been spreading through flocks of chickens this year, part of an outbreak that started back in 2022. The cullings that have been necessary have been a factor in driving up the prices, by reducing supply.
But bird flu isn’t just a worry in regard to birds, it turns out. The disease has spread through cattle in the US, as well, and it has had some serious impact.
And then, of course, there are humans. People of a certain age will remember that before Covid-19 hit the planet, epidemiologists were very vocal about the danger of a bird flu spreading into the human population and causing a pandemic. We aren’t anywhere near that point yet, but there has been at least one worrying infection of a human who had no contact with birds. We aren’t in the middle of the next pandemic, but are public health officials doing their best to figure out what is going on?
Birds
Bird flu, like human flu, circulates around the world, and this strain of bird flu is no different. But the US has been having a specifically wide outbreak of this disease.
The disease travels around the world in wild birds, but when it gets into the domestic poultry system, it spreads quickly through the groups of birds that are kept in close quarters with one another. The CDC says that since this current epidemic started in 2022, over 10,000 wild birds have been detected with the disease. But among poultry, the number of detected birds is 100,778,951.
There have been outbreaks among poultry birds in 48 American states, and millions of birds have been culled. A wide outbreak in a couple of Colorado farms in July, in particular, may be a cause of egg prices rising recently.
Cows
What’s more surprising about this outbreak is the fact that it has made its way into cattle. Bird flu has always had an ability to cross over into mammals, but this current outbreak has been particularly virulent in its ability to infect cows. And that has raised a number of concerns.
One is simply the dairy and meat supply. There are outbreaks of avian flu among cows in 14 US states, and in many of those cases, cows will need to be culled and destroyed. Furthermore, the disease itself can keep cows from reproducing, potentially affecting the number of cows available in the next generation.
It also appears that even once cows recover from the illness, they will have difficulty producing milk. According to an article in American Agriculturist, a 500-cow farm in Michigan that was hit with avian flu in April ended up only culling 5% of its cows. But the milk supply has still not gotten back to where it was.
“Honestly, we haven’t recovered since, though my forages have been stable,” Nathan Brearley, the owner of the farm, said. “I cannot get back to our baseline again.”
Whereas before the infection the herd produced 95-100 pounds of milk per cow, that fell to 75 pounds during the first three weeks of the infection, and it hasn’t returned to the original numbers yet.
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