Bird flu is a nothing burger

Nelson Zandbergen
Farmers Forum

OTTAWA — Bird flu continues to slowly — very slowly — infect a tiny number of American dairy herds and has yet to infect any dairy cattle or people in Canada.

The total number of U.S. herds that have had bird flu infections since March inched upward from 188 at the end of July to 196 by Sept. 3, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, or about 0.7 % of dairy herds south of the border. But only five states have had cases in the last 30 days, with 7 herds involved.

Meanwhile, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency says it has embarked on another round of testing retail milk for fragments of the bird flu virus, H5N1. Earlier rounds of testing on samples collected across Canada — including 230 in Ontario — have all come back negative.

Pasteurization kills the virus anyway, according to the CFIA. The process leaves only inactive viral fragments behind, but the testing to date has failed to find even this inert material in Canadian milk.

The virus remains unable to transmit between humans. Since 2022, farm animals — poultry and dairy cattle — have passed the bug to only 14 people, or less than 0.00001 % of the U.S. population. No person in Canada has caught the virus from farm animals to date. In the U.S., only 10 poultry farm workers have been infected since 2022, with half of those cases occurring in Colorado in July of this year. Four other farm workers were infected at dairy farms in Michigan, Texas and Colorado in April and May 2024. All 14 of these infected workers recovered after experiencing symptoms that ranged from flu-like to bloodshot eyes.

That humdrum reality has seen the virus fade from the headlines. The mainstream media has shown much more interest in promoting monkeypox virus — since renamed mpox — as the next great pathogen to be feared as pandemic material.