Scientists have managed to generate a full genetic sequence of #H5N1 #birdflu from store-bought milk, suggesting commercial milk products could be a way to monitor the outbreak in cows, given the lack of cooperation from dairy farmers. https://www.statnews.com/2024/05/21/bird-flu-virus-spread-scientists-monitor-h5n1-in-store-bought-milk/
@HelenBranswell@scicomm.xyz Mandating cooperation from dairy farmers instead of asking could be another way if there was anything resembling a government or public health left.
I also wish there were a way to make this possible, but, the sheer scale alone makes it near impossible. There's over 30,000 dairy farms in the US, and cattle take up ~27% of the land mass at ~614 million acres. Monitoring them all would take massive public investment and buy-in from a lot of ranchers who don't want federal government employees on their property, and may be willing to violently oppose it.
Monitoring it after dairy farms, and before human consumption would be a far more achievable goal in the short term.
Farmers are reluctant to cooperate bc they are concerned about the possibility of a cull and the financial impact that could have on their operations.
‘Mandating cooperation’ means: making the consequences of failing to cooperate obviously worse than downstream effects of a detected outbreak, and supporting affected farmers to mitigate those downstream effects, with support contingent on a history of cooperation.
@DavidM_yeg @HelenBranswell @driusan
I think you're on the right path here, but, what does "cooperation" itself mean to you, on the ground? I ask because lots of different people seem to have different preferred outcomes here.
Cattle owners testing their herds regularly for H5N1 in an attempt to identify and quarantine/cull infected herds?
Ranches testing employees to find out if/when H5N1 infects people?
Dairy operations testing milk to attempt to assure that infected milk doesn't get into circulation? Before, or after pasteurization?
I think the answer depends on your desired outcome for the current situation. There's plenty of people who don't care as long as their milk is deemed safe. There's plenty of people worried about zoonotic disease, whether that's about spillover to humans or just limiting bird flu spread in general.
@BE @DavidM_yeg @HelenBranswell @driusan for a start, we know what infection control measures are necessary to prevent/reduce farm-to-farm spread, and farm-to-worker spread, and nobody is even trying to implement them. The longer that situation is allowed to continue, the more a massive global pandemic among humans moves from a mere possibility to an inevitable certainty.
"You will kill many millions by this behavior" is a pretty devastating consequence, and the message "dairy farmers are trying to kill us all" should be shouted loud and clear by everyone in public health (if any of them had a fucking spine) until the dairy industry implements massive changes to the way they operate. Local scientists monitoring and then naming and shaming farms is a stopgap, but better than nothing. Even if such news collapses the entire industry, that would be a better outcome for humanity than a bird flu pandemic.
Secondly, governments have known this was coming for decades and have been telling us they're prepared for it, but we have almost nothing in place. Given where we are, the PPE and training that is needed for infection control on farms should be provided by the govt free of charge.
We all know that none of this is going to happen tho, so we're all just marching towards inevitability
@sleepfreeparent @DavidM_yeg @HelenBranswell @driusan
I'd like to push back that we know how to prevent or reduce farm to farm spread, at least a little. The viral sequencing indicates that it's spreading back and forth between birds and cows. There's nothing you can do to stop birds from flying all over. Doing testing for cattle that are going to cross state lines is at least *something* even if I think it's insufficient.
Agreed with the rest, and totally agree that bird flu is nothing new and we're seemingly unprepared.
@BE @sleepfreeparent @DavidM_yeg @driusan
It spilled over from birds and has spilled back into birds from cows. But I believe the thinking is that the spread among cows is cow-2-cow. Birds aren't igniting new outbreaks at this point.
@HelenBranswell @sleepfreeparent @DavidM_yeg @driusan
I think that what we have at the moment is one paper that shows a spillover in late 2023 from birds to cows:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.01.591751v1
But data that the virus can go back and forth between cows and birds:
I agree that what we know to date is a spillover event, with mammal to mammal transmission from there. It would be folly to assume that's the end of bird to mammal transmission, though.
@BE @HelenBranswell @DavidM_yeg @driusan yeah. If it evolves the ability to spread human-to-human, but that strain can still infect other mammals and birds, there's nothing we can do to stop it spreading worldwide.
Not only are we not going all out, doing everything we can to prevent that evolution, we're putting vulnerable farmworkers in close proximity to infected cattle, with no protective measures in sight, and just shrugging as though that's the absolute best that we as a society can do
@BE @DavidM_yeg @HelenBranswell @driusan all true. Nonetheless, the priority now surely has to be limiting chances for animal-to-human or human-to-animal transmission, because the mixing of our regular flu with H5N1 in hosts that can get both is a recipe for the next big leap in human infectivity.
This is where MSM reporting utterly falls us. They keep saying "not yet!" when they should say "not yet, but we're barreling towards a pandemic at high speed without even trying to slow down, here's what we could do differently to change that"