May 3, 2024 – Bird flu was circulating in dairy cows within the United States for not less than 4 months before it was discovered and confirmed as a pathogenic H5N1 virus, in response to a knowledge evaluation by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal Disease Center.
According to the study published online, the virus appears to have passed from an infected bird to a dairy cow late last yr or early this yr. bioRxiv server on Wednesday.
The latest evaluation is further evidence that the bird flu strain has spread more widely than previously thought. The strain was present in cattle with no known link to other infected herds, suggesting that “there are affected herds that have not yet been identified,” the study said.
The researchers got here to their conclusions after analyzing a dump of genomic data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture right into a public archive on April 21. The researchers were concerned that the information was not published until nearly 4 weeks after the outbreak was announced on March 25, in response to Nature.
“It's good news that there has only been one spike that we can detect so far. But the bad news is that it's probably been spreading for several months,” said Dr. Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist on the University of Arizona in Tucson, in response to Nature.
Since the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced the outbreak at a Texas dairy, infections have been identified in about three dozen herds in Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, South Dakota and Texas.
Last week, the FDA said A nationwide survey found traces of the bird flu virus in a single in five retail samples of pasteurized milk. But health experts say these tests don't necessarily detect real viruses.
The FDA says the nation The milk supply is secure due to the pasteurization process and due to the “diversion and destruction of milk from sick cows.”