By Leah Douglas
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Bird flu infections were detected among cattle veterinarians tested last fall, including two people with no known exposure to animals with the virus, according to a report released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday.
Bird flu has infected nearly 70 people in the U.S., with one death, since last April. Most of those infections have been among farmworkers exposed to infected poultry or cows.
The CDC report said the virus was found in three out of 150 veterinarians who were tested in September 2024. Two of those veterinarians were not exposed to animals known to be sick with bird flu, and one was not practicing in a state where bird flu had been detected among cattle.
None of the veterinarians reported flu symptoms or conjunctivitis, which has been a common symptom of bird flu among infected farmworkers, the report said.
Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said the lack of information about the prevalence of human cases is frustrating.
“We need much closer surveillance,” he said. “We need to continue to look, especially in the poultry and dairy industry.”
The findings suggest there could be dairy cattle infected in more states than currently known, the study said.
Bird flu has infected nearly 1,000 dairy herds in 16 states, most recently California and Nevada, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The agency said on February 5 that it had detected a second strain of bird flu among dairy herds in Nevada.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture since December has been rolling out a nationwide mandatory milk testing program to detect bird flu.
For months, human and animal health experts have warned of undercounts of bird flu cases as farmers and workers have in some cases resisted testing. Farmers have worried about lost income due to quarantining their dairy herds if they test positive, and workers about lost pay from mandatory isolation and missed work.
(Reporting by Leah Douglas in Washington; additional reporting by Tom Polansek in Chicago; writing by Susan Heavey; editing by Chris Reese, Bill Berkrot and Aurora Ellis)
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