{"id":6464,"date":"2024-04-30T14:54:16","date_gmt":"2024-04-30T19:54:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=6464"},"modified":"2024-04-30T14:54:20","modified_gmt":"2024-04-30T19:54:20","slug":"are-we-testing-enough-for-h5n1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2024\/04\/30\/are-we-testing-enough-for-h5n1\/","title":{"rendered":"Are We Testing Enough for H5N1?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"panel body-content\"><div class=\"panel__container\">\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.medpagetoday.com\/special-reports\/features\/109842?trw=no\">MedPage Today<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>With H5N1 avian influenza causing\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/04\/22\/health\/birdflu-marine-mammals.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">unprecedented outbreaks in mammals <\/a>\u00a0around the world &#8212; including U.S. dairy cattle &#8212; infectious disease experts are raising concerns that the U.S. isn&#8217;t doing enough to get ahead of any potential problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;We really need to be moving quickly to get our heads around what&#8217;s happening in the animal population and also what&#8217;s happening in the human population,&#8221; James Lawler, MD, MPH, of the University of Nebraska Medical Center&#8217;s Global Center for Health Security, told\u00a0<em>MedPage Today<\/em>. &#8220;I don&#8217;t think we&#8217;ve been testing adequately to be able to get a real picture of that.&#8221; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Lawler said we should be particularly cautious &#8220;when a virus starts doing things that we don&#8217;t expect it to do, like circulating widely in a species where we normally haven&#8217;t seen infections. We really need to respect the potential danger that exists.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Federal officials have confirmed that 33 dairy cattle herds in eight U.S. states have tested positive for H5N1.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>However, the outbreak is likely much larger than that, and has probably been spreading undetected for much longer than thought, Lawler said. That&#8217;s evidenced by the fact that FDA detected H5N1 in\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.medpagetoday.com\/infectiousdisease\/generalinfectiousdisease\/109804\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">samples from the commercial milk supply<\/a>, and by recently released viral sequences from animal infections supplied by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), from which virologists concluded the outbreak\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/04\/24\/health\/bird-flu-cows-genetic.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">likely began in December 2023<\/a>, with a single spillover incident from birds into cows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.medpagetoday.com\/special-reports\/features\/109842?trw=no\">Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n<a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"\/secure-location.php\" style=\"display: none;\" title=\"YPWpnfm qevraFBaVeIXp rP\"><\/a><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>MedPage Today With H5N1 avian influenza causing\u00a0unprecedented outbreaks in mammals \u00a0around the world &#8212; including U.S. dairy cattle &#8212; infectious disease experts are raising concerns that the U.S. isn&#8217;t doing enough to get ahead of any potential problems. &#8220;We really need to be moving quickly to get our heads around what&#8217;s happening in the animal [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6464"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6465,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6464\/revisions\/6465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}