Texas dairy farm worker’s case may be first where bird flu virus spread from mammal to human, scientists say.
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In this talk some interesting details are mentioned.
North Carolina are planning to start vaccinating the dairy cows, and I believe this is something we will see more and more of in the near future.
There’s an update from US Food & Drug Administration saying it’s all good; the pasteurization process is working just fine.
But they also say 1/5 milk products shows genetic traces of the virus.
15 years ago this spring, CDC was notified about two kids from California who had tested positive for swine flu who hadn’t had exposure to pigs or each other. Before April 17, 2009, the risk of a swine flu pandemic would have seemed pretty low. And then CDC got those two samples, and everything changed really fast. Do you think about that?
Vivien Dugan, director of the influenza division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention answers:
“Well, yeah. It’s probably why I’m not sleeping very much right now.”
“I think that the threat of a pandemic is always looming in the flu space. The way that Dan Jernigan [Dugan’s predecessor] always described public health to me is that it is an art form. There’s a balance that you have to strike. There’s a difference in the pandemic risk versus the immediate risk right now. And so I think that’s what we’re trying to message to the average person who is walking about and living their lives. The risk to them is low.”
Some facts
