May 30, 2024 – A 3rd dairy employee has been diagnosed with bird flu, the Michigan Department of Health and social services was announced on Thursday. The risk to the final population stays low, federal officials said today at a press conference.
“This individual is a dairy worker in Michigan,” said Nirav Shah, MD, JD, CDC deputy director, on the briefing. Like the employee last week, this employee was exposed to dairy cows, but works on a distinct farm in Michigan than the second employee. The employee was not wearing personal protective equipment (PPE). In the present outbreak, a Texas dairy employee was the primary to contract the virus in April.
This case has different symptoms than the previous two.
“Unlike the previous two people with H5N1 (bird flu), who only had red or sore eyes, this person had respiratory symptoms, including cough, stuffy nose, sore throat and watery eyes,” Shah said. The employee was given Tamiflu, he said, and is currently recovering.
Despite the opposite symptoms the third employee exhibited, “this does not change the CDC's H5 risk assessment level for the general population, which remains low,” Shah said. That's because all three employees had direct contact with infected cows. Shah stressed that no human-to-human transmission has been detected.
This shows why dairy farms should protect themselves with personal protective equipment, he said. The CDC has provided states with personal protective equipment from the national stockpile, he said.
“The respiratory symptoms we are seeing in this individual are consistent with what we would expect,” Shah said. This shows that the virus can present itself in some ways. None of the employee's close contacts have reported symptoms, he said. Like the case reported in Michigan last week, this case was not unexpected, he said.
The CDC is sequencing the third employee's virus to match it with other previous human cases and search for changes that would increase the likelihood of transmission. More information is anticipated in the subsequent few days, he said.
In the identical briefing, Eric Deeble, DVM, deputy senior advisor for HPAI (highly pathogenic avian influenza) on the U.S. Department of Agriculture, announced an extra $824 million in funding to guard the health of livestock.
The USDA also announced a voluntary pilot program to check herds not known to be infected. This is meant to extend knowledge about bird flu and the way it spreads and to permit farmers to ship cows with negative test results. “We want to encourage more testing by any means we can,” he said.
Deeble also announced the ultimate results of the study of beef samples from the US Department of Agriculture. On May 28, all 109 muscle samples from cows were examined: 108 of them didn't contain any virus particles. Virus particles were detected in tissue samples from one cow during autopsy; these couldn't have gotten into the food.