When the current outbreak of the highly pathogenic avian influenza virus was detected in dairy cattle in March 2024, a group of researchers at Iowa State University started to ask questions.
“If this virus can show up in cow milk, can it show up in other types of milk?” Todd Bell, a professor of veterinary pathology at ISU, recalled asking.
Bell, Rahul Nelli, a research assistant professor of veterinary diagnostic and production animal medicine at ISU, and more than a dozen other researchers examined the mammary glands of commonly milked livestock to find out. Their conclusion: the milk-producing glands of production animals like sheep, goats, beef cattle and alpacas, as well as pigs and humans, have the same sialic acids that the virus was able to attach to in dairy cattle.
Nelli said in theory, this means there is a potential for the virus to bind to these sialic acids, which serve as receptors for the virus, and to start replicating in those cells.