Tufekci: This may be our last chance to halt bird flu in humans and we are blowing it

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Public health officials don’t appear to know much, and little of what they do know is shared in a timely manner.

Cows at a dairy in California. The U.S. Department of Agriculture made testing for bird flu mandatory for dairy cattle moved between states, but not other herds.

That’s when I told him what I’d heard from Sid Miller, the Texas commissioner for agriculture. He said he strongly suspected that the outbreak dated back to at least February. The commissioner speculated that back then, as much as 40% of the herds in the Texas panhandle may have been infected.The H5N1 outbreak, already a devastating crisis for cattle farmers and their herds, has the potential to turn into an enormous tragedy for the rest of us.

The USDA also told me it doesn’t know how many farmers have tested their cattle and doesn’t know how many of those tests came up positive; whatever testing is being done takes place at the state level or in private labs. Recently the agency made it mandatory to report all positive results, a long overdue step that is still — without the negative results alongside them — insufficient to give us a full picture.

So far, the agency told me, it is aware of only 23 people who have been tested. That tiny number is deeply troubling.

Source: Healthcare Press (healthcarepress.net)

 

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