If the bird flu outbreak affecting America's dairy herds starts spreading more easily to—or between—humans, large quantities of vaccines could be ready within weeks, federal health authorities said Wednesday. Officials said studies suggest two vaccines already in the national stockpile "offer good cross-protection against cattle outbreak viruses," NBC News reports. They said there is no sign that H5N1 has mutated to become more dangerous to people but if the situation changes, hundreds of thousands of vaccine doses could be shipped within a few weeks, and 100 million more could be ready within a few months.
"We've been investing in a library of antigens to move out as quickly as possible should we begin to see a highly transmissible flu strain circulate," Dawn O'Connell, assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services, tells NBC. She says the two vaccine candidates were produced with traditional vaccine technology and work is continuing on a third one using the mRNA technology used in Pfizer and Moderna's COVID vaccines. In other developments:
- Milk from infected cows kills cats. Cats are among the species considered most vulnerable to the virus. Earlier this week, researchers said more than half the cats at the first farm where an outbreak was confirmed died after drinking raw milk from infected cows, CBS News reports. Researchers said "high amounts of virus" were found in the cats' brains and lungs. Infected cows generally recover within a month.
- Ground beef tests negative. Reuters reports that the USDA says tests on ground beef have shown that the nation's meat supply is safe. The agency says its Food Safety and Inspection Service tested 30 samples of ground beef from states with infected herds and none of them tested positive. Officials say pasteurized milk is also safe.
- Calls for more testing in humans. Only one case has been confirmed in a dairy worker, but testing has been "woefully inadequate," public health researchers at Johns Hopkins University write in an op-ed at the New York Times. "Any serious surveillance efforts of H5N1 demand that the country do better to ensure proper testing and health care is provided to these workers now, lest we risk being caught flat-footed by a new pandemic so soon after COVID," they write. "This is especially important for a work force whose broader social and economic circumstances may discourage them from seeking out timely testing and treatment."
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