Is bird flu in cattle here to stay?

Despite assurances from the federal government that bird flu will be eradicated from the nation’s dairy cows, some experts worry the disease is here to stay. Recently, Eric Deeble, USDA acting senior advisor for H5N1 response, said that the federal government hoped to “eliminate the disease from the dairy herd” without requiring vaccines. David Topham, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Rochester’s Center for Vaccine Biology and Immunology, said he considers H5N1 to be “endemic in animals in North America” — citing its prevalence in wild bird populations as well as its long staying power in domestic poultry. “But I suspect the closer we look, the more we’ll find, and I don’t know if we’re going to cull our entire cattle herds and start over again.” Topham said he understands the industry’s reluctance to permit government scientists onto farms “because we’re going to want to see everything, and we’re going to report everything that we see, and that might be bad for business.. She said testing for H5 in wastewater had only recently started and therefore “there is no way to compare this data from last year or the year before, and so we don’t know what a baseline detection of H5 looks like.” “Maybe we see H5 detections like this on a regular basis, and it is not of public health significance or importance.. How do we define normalcy when we have nothing to compare the data to?” She said the findings were “not a public health concern” and her agency and the state “do not need to really investigate into this, because this could be H5N1, or could be any other H5 strains, and it really does not affect the public in general.” Dennis Nash, distinguished professor of epidemiology and executive director of City University of New York’s Institute for Implementation Science in Population Health, said that given the current situation, the wastewater sample should be considered H5N1 “until proven otherwise.