The CDC announced Wednesday that in the first such case of its kind, a patient has been hospitalized in Louisiana from the H5N1 bird flu. Since April, over 60 human cases of the disease have been reported across the US.
“We've been very proactive since the first cases of bird flu were found in the U.S. back in March in a herd in Texas, and recognizing that birds don't follow state borders and that we realized there was a risk, we wanted to be proactive," said Ashley Randle, commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources. “The movement of dairy cattle was what was transferring the virus from one herd to another, and those cattle were moving out of state, and what the common linkage was the milk. So, when we read in the news about dairy farms or farm workers that were impacted with bird flu, the virus was transmitted through the milk, typically in cattle. It was moving through the milking equipment, and when farm workers were impacted, it was potentially a farm worker who was milking the cows who then touched their eye and had what was basically conjunctivitis, or pink eye like symptoms. And so, milk is the common denominator.”
Randle says Massachusetts moved quickly to monitor dairy cattle to bolster the commonwealth’s defense against bird flu.
“The Healey-Driscoll Administration immediately, almost, after meeting with dairy farmers, our colleagues at Department of Public Health, and our MDAR team started a mandatory testing program in August, and from August, we have been testing on a monthly basis," she told WAMC. "We are currently wrapping up testing for the month of December, but we have been testing all 95 licensed dairy farms across the commonwealth in order to be proactive and to continue to emphasize following high biosecurity standards on farms, and that the risk does exist, as I said, because birds are migratory, and knowing that there is the potential for bird flu to impact the state. But currently, we see the risk as low in Massachusetts based on the proactive steps our farms have been taking.”
Earlier this month, the United States Department of Agriculture issued an order to implement a nationwide bird flu testing program for dairy herds similar to the Massachusetts model.
The commissioner says Massachusetts dairy drinkers should do their due diligence before consuming raw milk, and that pasteurization is a defense against bird flu.
“That is key to killing the virus and ensuring that we have a safe milk supply for consumers to enjoy dairy products,” said Randle.
Berkshire farmer Michael Gallagher of Lanesborough’s Square Roots Farm said that a positive bird flu test would be catastrophic for his business.
“We had a situation, I think it was last summer, the summer before, where there was a possibility that somebody else in town had bird flu in their flock, and that was pretty scary for us," he said. "If we had a positive test for bird flu, that would mean we would need to euthanize all our birds and not have any birds on the farm again for- I think it was 180 days. And that's the kind of thing that could mean I went and got a job in town instead of farming for a while.”
Gallagher says small, local farms like Square Roots are less susceptible to disease outbreak with an approach to farming that’s in stark contrast to large, corporate factory farms.
“We're focused a lot on a really different model of chicken farming than what we're seeing in the vast majority of the country, with birds at lower densities and outside and in much more natural conditions," he explained to WAMC. "And we're really focused on all the things we do to keep the birds healthy in those kinds of conditions. A lot of what we see through the big avian flu cases is, you have a barn full of 40,000 chickens, and those kind of crowded conditions can really be problematic in places where disease really spreads quickly.”
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there have been 315 confirmed cases of avian flu in cattle in the last 30 days in California, Texas, and Nevada.
