The Vaccines for Avian Influenza in Dairy Cattle: What Can We Learn from the Encounters of a Bird Influenza?

The recent discovery of a bird flulike virus in dairy cattle has startled some scientists who have been watching a global outbreak.

There have been no instances of human- to-human transmission of avian flu in the U.S.

All Things Considered host Ari Shapiro spoke to Dr. Mandy Cohen, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about the potential risks and the government’s response.

Cohen: We’re working closely with our state and local partners, our partners through agriculture and the U.S. Department of Agriculture and farm workers. Again, we want to get ahead of this. We’re trying to build trust by talking to people and they’ve been willing to listen. We’ve worked with a lot of the veterinarians that are part of the farms that have been impacted. All working well together so far.

There is a chance that cases will go under the radar if people are afraid to report, so is the importance of widespread testing important? Whether it’s farm owners who don’t want their operation to be shut down or farm workers who might not have health coverage.

But she says this human case and the infections in dairy cattle are clear warnings: “The less human or cow transmission we have, the fewer of these mutations the virus can acquire.”

There is a person named “Schafer.” If it does take time to mass produce vaccines, is that something the U.S. should be doing on the chance that the virus becomes more dangerous?

Are cows sick? Emerging epidemics around the world: how avian influenza affects humans and animals in the United States and in other countries

cows are not proving to be deadly because of their falling sick And so far, federal officials emphasize the commercial milk supply is not at risk because products are pasteurized.

An ongoing outbreak in livestock threatens the industry and also makes it more likely that other animals will be exposed, or the workers themselves.

“We are in fairly unprecedented, uncharted territory, globally in relationship to avian influenza,” says Dr. Peter Rabinowitz, director of the UW Center for One Health Research.

Sequencing of the virus in the Texas patient did show “minor changes,” includung one mutation associated with viral adaptation to mammals that’s appeared in other human cases, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“It doesn’t look like there’s any indication that this has adapted itself to spread efficiently between humans, and to routinely cause severe disease,” says Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan.

Some recent human infections have led to severe illness in other countries, including Ecuador, Chile and China. “This is a virus that doesn’t infect humans very well, but can — not all the time — cause very significant disease when it does.”

“If you’re exposed to bird feces, if you’re exposed to dead birds, if you’re around a lot of live birds, you’re going to be exposed to more of that,” says Rasmussen.

Unlike the seasonal influenza viruses that infects humans, H5N1 doesn’t have the ability to easily attack our upper respiratory tract, so it doesn’t tend to spread among humans.

However, the virus can bind to receptors in the lower respiratory tract. “People who get respiratory infections with bird Flu can get very, very sick with serious pneumonia, because those receptors are located in the lungs”, says Rasmussen.

The recent case in Texas also raises the possibility of “mucosal exposure,” meaning the person may have come in contact with the virus and then touched their eyes, although the details and what that might mean for tranmission are unclear, she says.

The University of Minnesota’s animal doctor Joe Armstrong says he would be surprised if the disease was not being spread from cow to cow.

Scientists worry about mammal to mammal transmission of bird flu because the chances of the virus becoming better for mammals are much greater because of that.

The virus had evolved a couple of “mammal adaptive alterations” that hadn’t yet been seen in cows, according to Louise Moncla.

Unlike pigs — known to be intermediary hosts for human and bird viruses — there is no data that show that cows are an important intermediary host for these viruses, she says.

Source: What to know about the risks of the bird flu outbreak

Are There More Cases of Bird Influenza in the Farm Workers? A Commissioner for Human Vaccination and a Project to Identify the Causes of CoVID

Rabinowitz said that they have not paid a lot of attention to the workers even though they’ve been the canary in the coal mine.

The CDC has been preparing for an outbreak of bird flu for 20 years, according to the director. It’s different from what we experienced at the start of CoVID, when we didn’t have tests, treatment or vaccine, for example, because there was a new novel virus.

Immune-stimulating ingredients, known as adjuvants, can be added to these older vaccines in order to broaden the immune response so that it better covers mismatched strains. In addition, mRNA technology could be leveraged to produce new vaccines, says Dr. Wilbur Chen, at the University of Maryland’s School of Medicine.

Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s school of public health, says he would not be surprised if there are more cases in humans, most likely other farm workers.

He believes that it’s not time to mobilize a large response because the chances that will be needed are very low.

You want to consider getting a vaccine for it if it is widespread in farm workers. If you see evidence of human-to-human transmission in non farm workers, that’s when you want to think about making the vaccine more widely available.