(OPINION) What they are telling us about the bird flu keeps changing. At first, they told us that humans were at no risk. But now the WHO says there is “enormous concern” that H5N1 could start spreading among humans.
And when dairy cows in the U.S. started catching bird flu, we were assured that milk from infected cows was being kept out of the supply chain. So, most Americans continued to buy milk, cheese, and butter as usual.
But now, two different rounds of testing have confirmed that massive amounts of milk from infected dairy cows are getting into the supply chain.
In fact, on Thursday,, an update posted on the official FDA website openly admitted that approximately one out of every five samples of grocery store milk they tested had “viral fragments” in them….
Today, the FDA received some initial results from its nationally representative commercial milk sampling study. The agency continues to analyze this information; however, the initial results show about 1 in 5 of the retail samples tested are quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR)-positive for HPAI viral fragments, with a greater proportion of positive results coming from milk in areas with infected herds.
That is a bombshell. But they are not the only ones that have been doing such testing.
A veterinary epidemiologist at Ohio State University tested “150 commercial milk products from around the Midwest”, and he found viral material in more than a third of them…
Andrew Bowman, a veterinary epidemiologist at Ohio State University, had a hunch. He had been struck by the huge amounts of H5N1 virus he’d seen in milk from cows infected with the bird flu and thought that at least some virus was getting off of farms and going downstream — onto store shelves.
He knew the Food and Drug Administration was working on its own national survey of the milk supply. But he was impatient. So he and a graduate student went on a road trip:
They collected 150 commercial milk products from around the Midwest, representing dairy processing plants in 10 states, including where herds tested positive for H5N1. Genetic testing found viral RNA in 58 samples, he told STAT.
These tests indicate that H5N1 is far, far more widespread in dairy cows than we had been told.
Originally, I wasn’t too concerned when I heard there were a few dozen confirmed cases in herds across the country because that was just a small fraction of the total.
But now experts acknowledge that these latest tests clearly show that a large proportion of U.S. dairy cows have been exposed to the virus…
“The fact that you can go into a supermarket and 30% to 40% of those samples test positive, that suggests there’s more of the virus around than is currently being recognized,” said Richard Webby, an influenza virologist who has been analyzing the samples at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., where he heads the WHO Collaborating Center for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals. (READ MORE)
