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• BILL LUCIA Washington State Standard
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• https://www.dailyrecordnews.com/news/cdc-confirms-two-people-in-washington-infected-with-bird-flu/article_5d4ffbe0-92d4-11ef-bf3b-63644781ee36.html
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Federal health authorities have confirmed at least two people in Washington have contracted bird flu after working around poultry with the virus at a commercial egg farm in Franklin County.

State and local health officials on Sunday revealed four people in Washington were “presumptively” positive for the illness, based on initial testing at a state lab. Since then, the number of presumptive positive cases climbed to seven.

On Thursday, the state health department said that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had confirmed two of the positive tests announced over the weekend. Confirmation of other positive test results is still pending.

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Staff from the CDC has been on site in Franklin County, in southeast Washington, since Wednesday. The federal agency, along with the state health department and the local health district for Benton and Franklin counties were working together on testing and other response efforts.

Roberto Bonaccorso, a spokesperson for the state Department of Health, said health agencies are working to test more than 100 people. Some people will be tested more than once.

Washington is one of six states where bird flu has spread to people. The CDC has so far counted 31 human cases of the disease during 2024 in those states, including the two confirmed in Washington.

There is no evidence of human-to-human spread of the disease at this time — all identified infections are among workers who had contact with infected birds or their environments, the Washington State Department of Health said Thursday morning.

The department also said that no patients have experienced severe illness or been hospitalized. Infected individuals had shown signs of mild upper respiratory illness, including runny nose, sore throat, and mild cough, as well as conjunctivitis — often referred to as “pink eye.”

For now, risks from the disease for people who are not around animals that can catch it are considered low. But health officials are keeping watch for signs the illness may be evolving in a way where it can spread between people or cause more severe symptoms.

People who have tested positive in Washington were exposed to the outbreak among poultry at the egg farm in Franklin County. There, a flock of about 800,000 birds became infected with what is formally known as highly pathogenic avian influenza.

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Testing in mid-October showed poultry on the farm were infected. Health officials arranged for testing on Oct. 18 of workers showing symptoms. Presumptive positive tests for people came back the next day.

Washington’s Department of Agriculture is also reporting bird flu detections this month in two small backyard flocks — one in Kitsap County on Oct. 17 and another in Lewis County on Wednesday. The Lewis County incident is listed as “presumptive” by the department.

“Every backyard flock is at risk right now,” state veterinarian Amber Itle said in a statement. “Avian influenza is a very serious disease with serious implications for animal welfare. It’s crucial to stay alert for any sudden illness and deaths in your flock”

When poultry is suspected of having the virus, tests are run at the state level at the Washington Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory. Positive results are then confirmed by National Veterinary Services Laboratories.

Bird flu, which is relatively common in wild birds, spreads rapidly through poultry flocks, sickening and killing the animals. To stop the spread, birds are euthanized. Fall is a risky time of year for the disease in Washington as migrating birds pass through.

Since 2022, 48 commercial and backyard flocks in the state have been stricken with the virus, according to state department of agriculture figures. The three this month are the first ones recorded in 2024.

The agriculture department said Thursday that “humane depopulation” of the birds was complete at the Franklin County facility and that cleaning, disinfection, and disposal activities were underway. The plan was to destroy eggs on the farm as well.

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Agriculture officials also said no infected birds or eggs have entered the food supply chain.

Monitoring of poultry in the area where the farm is located has been taking place. Dairy cows were being watched too since they’ve caught the virus in other states. On Thursday, the state agriculture department said there were no confirmed or suspected cases at Washington dairy farms.

by Lara FarrarOctober 2, 2024 4:27 pm

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• https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/10/02/theres-an-international-bird-flu-summit-in-arkansas-this-week-and-this-is-why-it-is-important

With the race on to investigate the first possible human-to-human infections of bird flu in the United States, avian flu experts from around the world are meeting in Fayetteville this week to contain the spread.

This is the second year for the International Avian Influenza and One Health Emerging Issues Summit, a four-day conference held virtually and in-person at the Don Tyson Center for Agricultural Sciences in Fayetteville, part of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture.

The summit is significant because there are not many other conferences in the United States, or even globally, that bring together international experts to discuss the disease, which is increasingly alarming scientists as it spreads through poultry and infects other species. 

“We decided to do this summit because the world is getting hit very badly by this virus that is now basically a pandemic,” said Guillermo Tellez-Isaias, the summit’s organizer and a research professor in the Center of Excellence in Poultry Science, a unit of both the Division of Agriculture and the University of Arkansas Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences. “It is present in all continents now, even Antarctica.” 

“We are facing a unique virus that has been able to adapt and infect other species that it traditionally did not used to infect,” Tellez-Isaias told Arkansas Times. (In Vietnam, 47 tigers, three lions and a panther died in zoos because of bird flu, Agence France-Presse reported Wednesday. In 2023, avian influenza killed tens of thousands of pelicans and more than 700 sea lions in Peru.)

In July, Reuters published a report based on interviews with more than a dozen disease experts who characterized the avian flu as a “pandemic unfolding in slow motion.” The experts said its rapid spread to more than 100 dairy herds in the U.S., as well as infections found in other mammals including alpacas and house cats, is an alarming indication that bird flu could soon be transmissible between humans.

In fact, this scenario may already be unfolding in Missouri. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced last week that seven people who came into contact with an avian flu patient in Missouri later showed symptoms of a respiratory illness. In humans, avian flu symptoms include fever, body aches, headache and shortness of breath. Officials are testing them for antibodies to the H5N1 avian flu strain, which would indicate they had been infected by avian flu.

Since April 2024, the CDC reports that there have been 14 human cases of avian influenza in the U.S. All but one were the result of direct contact with sick cows or poultry. The source of the most recent human case, the one in Missouri that may have resulted in human-to-human transmission, is still unknown. (Note, the CDC says the immediate risk to the general public from bird flu remains low.)

It would be prudent not to forget that a pandemic in 1918 that killed at least 50 million people globally, known as the Spanish flu, was caused by a virus “with genes of avian origin,” according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although the origin of that influenza strain is not known, the 1918 outbreak was called the Spanish flu because it killed millions of people in Spain as it spread worldwide. About 500 million people, or half the world’s population at the time, contracted the Spanish flu, making it the worst pandemic in modern history. (Strains of the disease have continued to infect humans globally, with some outbreaks resulting in notably high fatality rates nearing 50% of those infected.) 

Though the data remains imprecise, estimates of global deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic range from about 7 million to close to 20 million, less than half of the death toll of the Spanish flu.  

While a great deal of the content presented at the International Avian Flu Summit this week is esoterically scientific in nature, and largely focusing on the risks the bird flu continues to pose to the poultry industry, the event is again notable in relation to COVID-19. 

The national and international response to the coronavirus pandemic was catastrophically disorganized and shockingly dysfunctional, revealing not just cracks, but gaping fissures, in unquestionably broken public and global health systems that led to countless unnecessary deaths.

The response to COVID was so bad, The Lancet labeled it a “massive global failure” in a 2022 report from the medical journal’s COVID-19 commission. The death toll from the coronavirus “is both a profound tragedy and a massive global failure at multiple levels,” the Lancet commission wrote. “Too many governments have failed to adhere to basic norms of institutional rationality and transparency, too many people – often influenced by misinformation – have disrespected and protested against basic public health precautions, and the world’s major powers have failed to collaborate and control the pandemic.” 

About 1,000 people representing 55 countries are taking part in the International Avian Flu Summit. Organizer Tellez-Isaias, the UA poultry professor, said the conference is intended to address some of the failures that occurred during COVID-19. 

“If this virus is able to adapt to humans, it will make COVID-19 look like a small cold compared to the mortality that the human race could see,” Tellez-Isaias said. “It happened before with the 1918 Spanish flu. It could happen again. We need to prepare ourselves and work together. This is serious.” 

Throughout the week, International Avian Influenza Summit participants will craft recommendations centered on the avian flu and global efforts, or lack thereof, to contain it and monitor its spread in commercial farming, wildlife and humans. The recommendations will be presented to the World Health Organization, the CDC, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Organization for Animal Health, among others, Tellez-Isaias said.

“This is something that is going to have to involve the collaboration of agencies that involve human and animal health at all levels in all countries,” Tellez-Isaias said. “What we are facing is a problem that needs to be controlled as soon as possible.” 

Undoubtedly the poultry industry in Arkansas and elsewhere has a vested interest in controlling bird flu. Infections in Arkansas have been sporadic and mostly isolated, but the industry has had to cull millions of birds.

The poultry sector engages in numerous unsavory business practices, but if it takes Big Chicken to get policymakers to pay attention to what could become another global pandemic in an instant, then kudos to Tellez-Isaias and his colleagues for making this very important summit happen.