Bird flu outbreak in cows: Lessons learned from COVID-19 failures

Scientists are taking lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic to mitigate the potential threat of the highly pathogenic avian influenza, a bird flu known as H5N1, currently circulating among livestock in the United States and in the domestic dairy supply.

The Food and Drug Administration responded to growing scientific concern about the outbreak this week by announcing on Thursday that H5N1 virus particles had been detected in 20% of tested samples in the commercial milk supply. 

Andrew Pekosz, Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the Washington Examiner the testing protocol from the FDA and Department of Agriculture that gave this result closely mirrors that used during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when individuals with symptoms were tested with PCR rapid tests.

“A PCR test doesn’t really tell you anything about how much live virus is in there,” said Pekosz. “It just tells you that pieces of the genes of a virus are in the sample.”

PCR tests, which can be produced and disseminated rapidly to areas in need during a crisis, are highly sensitive tests that can identify even trace remnants of virus particles that cannot make an individual or an animal sick — which is similar to the experience during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“To use the same analogy, back to the early days of the COVID pandemic, people were testing PCR positive for a week, sometimes two weeks, but those samples were actually negative for infectious virus because it takes longer to do the tests to show that there’s infectious virus in the sample,” said Pekosz.

Although more virulent strains of bird flu have been circulating in the U.S. for several years, the public concern over the virus mounted earlier this month when a dairy worker in Texas became the second human case of the disease in the U.S., the first ever contracted from close contact with sick cows. 

Since the incident, the FDA has insisted the pasteurization process likely has killed all of the live virus particles that could potentially infect humans, but more thorough testing will be able to confirm this prediction in the coming weeks.

Pekosz agrees, noting that pasteurization was always a fail-safe mechanism to protect the commercial dairy market.

“It’s really a scientific problem right now because this is telling us that somehow this virus got into the milk supply even though we thought we had in place ways to monitor for sick cows and take [contaminated milk] out of the system,” said Pekosz. 

The scientific community this week began putting sharper pressure on the USDA for more information about the genetic sequences of testing samples to cultivate a better understanding of the virus’s mutations as it has spread across the country. 

Pekosz voiced similar concerns. Although the USDA released 283 sequences of the virus from their samples, the agency did not release the collection dates, location, or species of genetic data. This means scientists are struggling to draw meaningful connections between the identified mutations.

The good news, however, is the mutations so far do not seem to be making the virus more dangerous to humans and are instead “more like a fingerprint” to note where it has been and how far it’s spreading.

“I think one of the critical things is when you detect a problem, you have to go to full-blown all the lights on all the floodlights on to try to get a sense of the extent of the problem,” said Pekosz. “Without all that information of where and when it’s hard to really get a good sense of what the extent of the outbreak is.”

He also added that the USDA needs to begin to test more cows than those that only present symptoms, highlighting yet another parallel to COVID.

“For months, we were just testing sick people, and then one day we realized that all these people that aren’t showing symptoms were actually virus positive,” he said, comparing the H5N1 situation to COVID. “You want to know that as soon as possible because all of that dictates how you respond to an outbreak. It doesn’t matter if it’s cows, dogs, or humans.”

Pekosz was quick to highlight there are probably a host of reasons for the USDA’s response and that the agency has different constraints than the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He says all three are doing a good job given the circumstances.

“Animals are under USDA. The milk is under FDA. The humans are under CDC,” said Pekosz, saying that effective coordination between them is critical.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

He also noted that although each agency has its own responsibilities, having one means of communicating to the general public is an essential point of improvement that can be gleaned from how both the Trump and Biden administrations struggled during the COVID pandemic.

“It’s one thing that different organizations are responsible for different aspects of reporting on this outbreak, but eventually, you have to have one centralized place where the information lives and is communicated from because that makes it more simple,” said Pekosz. “People find their answers, and when it’s simple to find the answers, people are reassured quickly.”