Do ferrets have a vaccine? Experiments to investigate the transmission of H5N1 among birds and mammals, and in the wild in cattle and mammals

They also found evidence the virus had spread through the air between ferrets in different cages, but they didn’t see severe illness in the animals who were infected in this way. He thinks it’s possible that there was not enough virus being transmitted to overcome the immune barriers.

The results are “very preliminary” and what happens under controlled lab conditions isn’t necessarily indicative of what can happen in the wild, he says. There’s no way that we can support efficient airborne transmission due to the lack of changes.

Those experiments found a particular version of the virus, taken from a hawk, could transmit very rapidly from ferret to ferret through direct contact and cause lethal infection in the originally uninfected animals, says Kobasa, senior author of the study which has not yet been published.

They discovered that the variant has a high capacity to cause fatal disease among the animals and showed improved ability to replicate in human cells cultured in the lab but did not exhibit productive transmission in respiratory droplets or contaminated surfaces.

According to Raina MacIntyre, who heads the Biosecurity Program at the Kirby Institute in Sydney, the biggest concern is that as the virus adapts more and more to mammalian species, it will gain mutations that make it better equipped to spread between humans. The public health threat from H5N1 hasn’t been a big deal because it cannot get into the human nose and mouth and can be fatal.

This kind of reasoning could not explain the die-off of seals and sea lions in South America and the outbreak of a mink farm in Spain.

It is only now that bird flu is being followed closely that big questions are still being asked. Hill says that there are many different types of mutations that occurred with the jump from wild birds to cattle.

The spread of bird flu in mammals: How much does it take to get accustomed to? Anice Lowen and Dan Kobasa discuss the story of the Texas dairy worker’s H5N1 bird flu

She says that the two changes are needed to support efficient spread in mammals. Of course, she adds, “there’s potentially other factors that we don’t yet understand.”

Specifically, the protein that the virus uses to bind to cells could evolve to lock onto the receptors in the upper respiratory tract of humans. This would allow it to easily gain access to the cells so that it can churn out copies of itself.

Over the last few years there has not been a lot of change in this function, according to Anice Lowen.

Darwyn Kobasa says it’s a main obstacle that prevents this from becoming a virus that could spread efficiently.

“It takes a very, very high dose,” he says, “and it means exposure to processes that aerosolized the virus.”

Last Friday, a health alert from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pinged its way across the inboxes of clinicians and state health departments all over the US. The message talked about how the dairy farm worker in Texas had contracted the H5N1 strain of bird flu. The dairy worker had caught the virus, apparently, from cattle.

“It needs a handful of markers coordinated across multiple differentgene segments for it to be this breakthrough and the next epidemic,” she says.

Genetic sequencing of the virus in the​​ Texas dairy worker showed it had undergone a mutation in a gene, PB2, that commonly gets affected when the virus infects mammals.

“We have to keep on top of this because I believe we are at a situation where something could happen that is very interesting and unfortunate,” says Wille.

Is H5N1 a respiratory illness in cattle cattle? Comment on a U.S. Department of Agriculture avian virologist

“I wanted to point out how unusual this is,” says Thijs Kuiken, a professor of comparative pathology. “In other mammalian species with influenza viruses, it’s primarily a respiratory disease, which doesn’t seem to be the case in these cattle.”

The scientists from the U.S. Department of Agriculture have reassured people that the cattle virus isn’t presenting as a respiratory illness like it does in humans.

The CDC urged doctors to be careful with patients with acute respiratory symptoms who had recently been in contact with animals because H5N1 might be a possibility.