Today, Explained - One Flu Over The Cowcow’s Nest

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

Avian flu, which recently leapt from chickens to cows, has now been detected in milk. Vox’s Keren Landman and Kenny Torrella explain how worried humans should be about the outbreak. This episode was produced by Haleema Shah, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Amina Al-Sadi, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! vox.com/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We don't have to worry about the bird flu, right? Maybe. That's a bird thing. It's right there in the name. But then a dang cow went and got the dang bird flu. It's like, oh boy, that's my industry and I know there's going to be some fallout. And then at least one human got the bird flu from a cow, we think? A person tested positive for the bird flu and was exposed to dairy cattle that authorities believe were also infected. And then because the cows have the bird flu,

there's bird flu in our milk, at least if you're drinking that cow milk. Veterinary epidemiologist Andrew Bowman is testing milk from six states and finding traces of bird flu where he shouldn't. But you won't get sick if your milk is pasteurized, which for most Americans it is, and the U.S. government is in control, and they're surely doing a great job, right? Maybe listen to this episode of Today Explained just to be on the safe side. See you soon! Bet MGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with Bet MGM.

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I mispronounced by O'Day. Whatever, that's how I say it. It's early. Today explains Sean Ramos from here with Karen Landman. Dr. Karen Landman to you. Karen, there's bird flu in the milk? I've heard scientists call it moo flu. Moo flu!

It's cute, right? Before we get into all the deets and the news and all that stuff, can you just remind people what the avian flu is? What are we cooking with here? So avian flu is actually a bunch of different types of viruses, but the one that we are talking about here is called an H5N1 virus. And importantly, this is part of a class of flu viruses called influenza A viruses. What you need to know about the difference between influenza A and influenza B and C and D viruses is that the ones that are responsible for pandemics are typically influenza A viruses. And taking a bird's eye view here, you're clearly referencing several other bird flus

that we've dealt with. What has this meant for the U.S. in the past? I think the first H5N1 flu virus was identified in the mid-90s. And the most likely way that these viruses are being transmitted is either from some avian species, it could be chicken, it could be another species, but is most likely from poultry to humans. There have been lots of different types of bird flu viruses that have emerged since then. There's low pathogenic kinds and there are high pathogenic kinds. And unsurprisingly, it's the high pathogenic kinds that really catch our attention. Cases of H5N8 bird flu have been detected in wild ducks in northern France amid a recent outbreak of the disease in Europe. France, Europe's largest poultry producer, still recovering from a severe epidemic

which led to a total halting of duck and goose production in the southwest. H5 types of bird flu viruses have spread in the U.S. in the past and, you know, have caused some alarm in the past, but they've never spread the way we're seeing this particular bird flu spread in the U.S. Big news is that the bird flu has jumped to the cows. Karen, has that happened before? Is this something that's just new to us or is this just new period?

This is new period. So there are a couple of things about this that are really surprising to people who follow bird flu. One is the fact that we're seeing an influenza A virus in cows. Now, we have known that cows can get flu. I don't actually know how severe the disease is, but evidently not severe enough that it has caused a lot of concern to humans and not pathogenic to humans in any way. It may also be, we don't know this, it may be that various types of flu have spread to cows in the past

and spread without causing any symptoms. We don't test cows for flu on a routine basis. So we just don't know this. But the fact that a dairy worker got an influenza A virus transmitted to them from a cow, that is the first time that we know of that ever happening. Okay, before we talk a bunch about how it's spreading amongst the cows and how it got to a human, all super important, I want to ask you how it got from the birds to the cows. Because

I read in an opinion piece in the Times written by Zeynep Tufekci this weekend that apparently we're feeding our dairy cows like actual chicken shit. And I just have lots of questions. So that is true. And it is horrifying when you think about it. Yes. So we do feed animal waste to other animals on our factory farms, for sure. So I will say that a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Louise Moncla, who I spoke with on Friday, has done some analysis of the genetic strains of this flu that have been released by the USDA. These are flu viruses that were infecting the cows involved in this outbreak. And her analysis shows that this was likely introduced into one cow

and then spread from that cow to a lot of other cows. I think one of the leading theories is that it is being spread among cows through milking machines. There's huge concentrations of virus in their milk when it comes straight out of the cow and on their udders. And so there's ostensibly lots and lots of virus on the milking machines. I don't know if you know how these works. I don't, I've never really seen these in action, but they hook on the milking machines onto the udders of these cows. And then the milking machines do their work. And then they switch out the cow, and they pop another cow on the milking machine. So if there has not been any sanitization happening of the machine, and there's a lot of virus on the milking machine, it's going to very easily infect cow after cow after cow.

So that is one possibility. You know, other possibilities are that cows are ending up eating a little of each other's poop while they're in the barn or in whatever holding pen they're in. And if they're shedding the virus in their poop, which we know happens in a lot of other species with influenza, then they could be transmitting it that way. I think the thing we do not want to see is this virus being transmitted through the air. Because then, you know, there are a couple of sort of criteria that a flu virus has to meet in order to have a human pandemic potential. And one of them is it has to spread easily through the air. And that would suggest, if it does that, it would suggest that this virus has a lot more potential to cause

problems among humans than we realize. Well, let's talk about the one human who got it from a cow. What are the theories there? Who is this person? Where were they? They're a dairy worker in Texas. And so far as I have heard, the only symptoms that they had from their infection were conjunctivitis. It means sort of redness, an infection, maybe some irritation of the eye. Pink eye. Pink eye. That's right. And that is suggestive of basically getting a squirt or a little droplet of infected milk in their eye and having mild symptoms as a

consequence of that. And that is not, you know, it's kind of neither here nor there in terms of how much does that worry us. I think it doesn't have that characteristic of being an obvious respiratory transmission that would really set off a lot of alarm bells. So, the fact that we now have only one person with this and that they only got infected in the eye doesn't really match that pattern, right? So, it lets us think, okay, maybe this can cause some mild illness in humans if it has contact with a mucous membrane. And that's actually pretty important for kind of grading its ability to cause problems in humans. Hmm. But speaking of causing problems in humans, it's in the milk.

How concerned should we be that this H5N1 virus is in our dairy? So in our pasteurized dairy, we shouldn't really be that concerned about it. We know from past studies that viruses that are enveloped, like the flu virus, which means they're kind of protected maybe a little bit more from their environment like the flu viruses, that they are killed, made untransmissible, non-pathogenic through the pasteurization process. So that, you know, there are new data released on Friday. They tried to grow the virus particles that were isolated from the milk in eggs, and nothing grew. So that's pretty reassuring. And it confirms what the USDA and the FDA thought was probably true before. So all that is great.

Now, raw milk isn't pasteurized. And there are several states that have rules that make it legal for people to sell and drink raw milk. Okay. So for the moment, if you're drinking pasteurized milk, oat milk, soy milk, almond milk, coconut milk, you got nothing to worry about. Absolutely. And then if you're drinking raw milk, you got to ask yourself some questions right now all bets are off i recommend not doing that and then is there any chance this could become a a much worse i don't know who knows p word you know of course why are you yelling at me i didn't't do it. No, you did not do it. This is not your fault. I think where scientists may be struggling a little bit right now is with quantifying the risk and communicating the risk.

Bird flu has always been scary to us, not because it has done a pandemic before, but because it just surprises us all the time. And when a virus surprises you on a regular basis, you learn not to be glib about it. So, like, the fact that an influenza A virus is infecting cows, I don't think any flu experts would have predicted that. So yes, this could do a lot of different things, but it hasn't showed us yet that it is doing those things. The things we want to watch out for are whether it gets good at spreading between humans. You know, it's one thing to spread from a cow to a human, but if it spreads from a human to a human, even causing mild symptoms, that would be worrisome because it can adapt to become more pathogenic, to cause worse disease. We also don't want to see it causing severe

disease in cows because conversely, if it causes severe disease and all it has to do is adapt to spread through the air among humans. You know, we're kind of looking at it a little bit like, okay, if you line up a bunch of slices of Swiss cheese together, there are going to be holes in each individual slice of Swiss cheese, but the odds that they're all going to line up in the same place is small. What we want to avoid is a situation where all of those holes line up. You know, where this virus undergoes enough mutations in a host that's enough like a human that when it skips to a human, it's adapted enough that it's only a few mutations away from causing a really severe disease and a lot of spread.

Dr. Karen Landman Vox.com, her colleague, our colleague, Kenny Torella, is going to join us to help us understand who's in charge of the Swiss cheese and whether they're currently falling down on the job when we're back on Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself.

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checkout. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com, promo code EXPLAINED. This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. Support for today Explained comes from Ramp. If you're a finance manager, you're probably used to having to toggle between multiple disjointed tools just to keep track of everything. And sometimes that means there's limited visibility on business spend. I don't know what any of that means, but Ramp might be able to help. Ramp is a corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your back pocket. Ramp's accounting software automatically collects receipts, categorizes your expenses in real time.

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The first is that it took the agency nearly a month to upload data containing genetic sequences of the virus. Yikes. And then once that data was uploaded, it was incomplete. It lacked specifics that researchers say that they needed to properly study it. And one former official from the Department of Health and Human Services even told Stat News that it was as if, quote, the USDA is intentionally trying to hide data from the Department of Health and Human Services, even told Stat News that it was as if, quote, the USDA is intentionally trying to hide data from the world.

Oh, no. Okay, so USDA so far has been kind of blowing it on sharing data, sharing genetic information. How are they doing on monitoring the spread of this bird flu in cows? Yeah, so they've also faced criticism for insufficient monitoring. Experts believe the virus had been circulating for months on U.S. dairy farms before it was detected, which suggests the need for better and more proactive disease surveillance on the part of the USDA. Because this didn't come out of nowhere. Bird flu has ravaged

hundreds of poultry farms over the last two years. But in addition to the disease surveillance concern, there's also been a reporting issue. Bird flu was first detected on a dairy farm in late March, and it took over four weeks for the USDA to begin to require producers to report positive tests. What's going on at the USDA, Kenny, that they're blowing it on sharing data, they're blowing it on monitoring? Isn't this literally their job? Yeah, and we've been here before because the U.S. poultry industry experienced a massive bird flu outbreak in 2015.

The experts still haven't figured out exactly what caused Minnesota's unprecedented avian flu outbreak. But Renville County farmer Barb Frank told lawmakers she's still living the nightmare. It took four days to kill the first barn, the first 135,000. And at the time, the USDA and the poultry industry vowed to really beef up disease surveillance and biosecurity on farms. And despite all that work, the outbreak we're now experiencing over these last two years is even worse. It's the worst bird flu outbreak in U.S. history. The main approach the USDA and the farming industry has taken to slow the spread of the disease has been to kill flocks at the first sign of infection. The destruction of our flocks was beyond what your imaginations can imagine. That's actually mandatory because it is highly contagious and fatal among birds.

But the USDA has been really reluctant to consider taking a stronger approach, such as vaccinating birds, because the poultry industry really doesn't want to. There's this fear that it will disrupt trade because a lot of countries don't want to take eggs and poultry meat from countries that vaccinate animals because it's harder to detect whether that animal was actually sick or just has antigens from the vaccine in

their body. And trade is a major source of revenue for the industry. Of course. And so this kind of deference to industry that we've seen playing out during this outbreak in dairy cows is part of this larger pattern. The USDA has really failed to hold the industry's feet to the fire on a range of other issues like pollution and labor concerns and false advertising, animal welfare. And we're seeing that play out with the bird flu outbreak in dairy cows. You know, more strict measures earlier on would have been a hassle for industry. There's no doubt about that, but it would have been in the public's best interest as it's critical to stop the spread of avian flu in mammals. Okay, so you're talking about the USDA being caught between its obligations to we the people and its, you know, industry deference.

But isn't it bad for the industry to have avian flu in our dairy? Yeah, it's not a good look. But the dairy industry, as with the poultry industry and other parts of the agricultural sector, deal with a number of diseases. And most of them they can control. They don't become pandemics within their herds. And so with bird flu, I think dairy producers and industry groups have had to weigh

the hassle and costs of taking strict measures to stop the virus against the potential for it to become a real problem within their industry. And in this case, it seems that they're not so worried about it and they've taken a more lax approach. A lot of this can be explained by tension within the USDA's mission, which is to both promote and regulate American agriculture. And you can't really do both properly. You know, it does a great job of promoting and subsidizing agriculture, but critics say it often looks the other way on these societal problems that stem from food production, public health in this case. And you could argue that maybe this focus on promotion made sense when the USDA was formed over 150 years ago and agriculture was a major part of the U.S. economy. You know, you wanted to ensure food security,

develop the agricultural sciences to feed more people. But now if you look at the most common products of American agriculture, just a few wealthy companies control the market, and they've been able to largely avoid meaningful regulations on a number of issues like public health, the environment, and animal welfare through accruing a lot of political power. Agriculture donates a lot to politicians and has immense sway on Capitol Hill. And there's also a revolving door between industry and government. In fact, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack was the president of a major dairy organization in between his time as Obama's USDA Secretary and now Biden's

USDA Secretary. How has the USDA responded to the critiques that they're kind of falling down on the job? The agency has pushed back against a lot of the criticisms. In response to criticism over its delay in uploading data on the virus, it said that it's dedicated to transparency and the timely release of information. And it's continued to reiterate that it's trying to increase cooperation with dairy farmers to monitor and test cows, to increase biosecurity on farms, and to coordinate with other agencies. And don't get me wrong, this is a rapidly evolving virus that poses a lot of challenges to even the most seasoned scientists and USDA staff. But at the same time,

you would be hard-pressed to find infectious disease experts who have nothing but good things to say about the agency's response over the last month. I mean, if this does get worse, is there lingering concern that the USDA isn't taking this seriously enough? Or do we think if more humans start catching this disease from cows, that we'll see them beef up their response? The USDA is starting to take some measures that could slow the spread of the disease. On Monday, a federal order by the USDA went into effect that will require any laboratory or state veterinarian that finds a positive bird flu test on a dairy farm will have to report it to the USDA. The USDA's order requires dairy cattle moving between states to be tested for all types of

influenza. Any cow that tests positive can't cross state lines without satisfying conditions set by the USDA's inspection arm. So that certainly represents some progress. Some, you know, critics say it should have been done sooner. Some critics say the order is too narrow and there should be much more testing being done, but it's a step in the right direction. Ultimately, even though the FDA has detected fragments of the virus in milk, they assure consumers it's safe to consume, and many independent experts have confirmed that too. So at this point in time, the commercial milk supply remains safe. That's the general consensus. But we'll see how this shakes out in the coming weeks and months.

It's a rapidly changing situation. And I think, if anything, it highlights to the public the emerging disease threat posed by keeping thousands, tens of thousands of animals together on farms where disease can spread quickly. Kenny Torella, he's a writer at Vox. Read and support his work at Vox.com. Halima Shah, Matthew Collette, Patrick Boyd, and Amna Alsadi work at Vox, too. Respectively, they produce, report, edit, mix, and sometimes even fact check. Today Explained. Thank you.