Important Takeaways:

• A small study in Texas suggests that human bird flu cases are being missed on dairy farms where the H5N1 virus has taken off in cows, sparking an unprecedented nationwide outbreak.
• Authors of the study, led by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, went further, stating bluntly why the US is failing to fully surveil, let alone contain, a virus with pandemic potential.
• “Due to fears that research might damage dairy businesses, studies like this one have been few,” the authors write in the topline summary of their study, which was posted online as a pre-print and had not been peer-reviewed.
• The finding suggests human cases of H5N1 are going undetected. Moreover, managing to find evidence of two undetected infections in a sample of just 14 workers suggests it may not be hard to find more.
• To date, the virus has infected at least 175 dairy farms in 13 states. The official tally of human cases in the dairy outbreak is 14: four in dairy farm workers and 10 in workers on poultry farms with infections linked to the dairy outbreak.
• Experts are anxious that with each new infection, the wily H5N1 virus is getting new opportunities to adapt further to humans. If the virus evolves to cause more severe disease and spread from human to human, it could spark another pandemic.

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