Health officials say there's very little risk to humans from the bird flu outbreak among dairy cattle, but there's still much they don't know. Here are four questions scientists are trying to answer.
Bird flu is spreading through U.S. dairy cattle. Scientists say the risk to people is minimal, but open questions remain, including how widespread the outbreak is and how the virus is spreading.Bird flu is spreading through U.S. dairy cattle. Scientists say the risk to people is minimal, but open questions remain, including how widespread the outbreak is and how the virus is spreading.in dairy cattle, and each week seems to bring more surprises.
"There's a couple big unknowns at this point," says Louise Moncla, a virologist at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.How widespread is the virus in dairy cattle?While the official tally shows it's been detected in eight states and just over 30 herds, the actual number could be much larger.
If it turns out there are lots of animals shedding the virus and not symptomatic, the outbreak could be"substantially larger" than we realize, says Inglesby."To get to the bottom of that, we would need to do surveillance testing in places that don't already have clear outbreaks."So far, it doesn't appear that way, but scientists who are studying this possibility acknowledge it's too soon to say that with absolute certainty.
"We've seen nothing that would change our assessment that the commercial milk supply is safe," said Don Prater from the Food and Drug Administration. "It's pretty good evidence," he says,"We could never say there's none, but we could say if it's there, it's at a very, very, very low level." This general idea was affirmed again this week by Mike Watson with the United States Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, who said the evidence still points to some form of"mechanical transmission."
"A lot of these cattle sequences are quite similar to each other, suggesting that there's almost certainly some degree of cattle-to-cattle transmission going on," she says.
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