As things heat up for the 2024 Presidential elections, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now are asking state officials to prepare for the next big pandemic. Calling for them to get their states to prepare plans for the potential for farm workers to come down with H5N1. With a Texas dairy farmer recently testing positive as the second case in humans in the US, officials claim it could start booming.
With cattle in Texas coming down with bird flu, and then more in Kansas, New Mexico, Ohio, Michigan, and Idaho popped up as well. According to the CDC, this marked the first for the virus to spread to cattle, as well as cattle to person. Thankfully, thus far there hasn’t been a reported case of person-to-person transmission despite this being a highly pathogenic influenza. So far, they claim that this is just precautionary and only has a low risk.
A CDC press release obtained by the Daily Mail reads, “recommended that state public health officials… ensure that they have up-to-date operational plans to respond to avian influenza at the state level. For example, the CDC emphasized the importance of having plans in place to quickly test and provide treatment to potentially impacted farm workers following positive results among cattle herds.”
So far the infected in Texas have only developed inflammation in the eye, with the CDC reporting that they are “also being treated with the drug oseltamivir or Tamiflu, and [is] not thought to have passed the virus on to anyone else.”
With chicken farms facing their own outbreaks, things are likely to get worse before they get better, and prices are sure to be impacted as well. In Mississippi, Cal-Maine Foods, Inc. announced that one of its plants had to destroy 1.7 million laying hens as well as 337,000 pullets after some of their flock tested positive. This represents 3.6% of their entire flock, and given the close confines they are in, the disease spreads incredibly easily.
