Michigan cats catch bird flu from their people

The incident with the severely ill Michigan cats is from about eight months ago—though the news is only just being reported today. The rest, sadly, is up to date.

• Per the CDC’s latest Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), an investigation into two severe H5N1 illnesses in exclusively indoor cats found that they may have been exposed by symptomatic dairy workers. The CDC suggests that if “occupational exposure to HPAI A(H5N1)-infected livestock is identified among cat owners, and their companion cats are suspected to have HPAI A(H5N1) virus infection, it is important that veterinarians contact state and federal public health and animal health officials to collaborate on joint One Health investigations and testing to protect human and animal health.”

• Two counties in Ohio have declared a bird flu emergency in order to get state and federal funding to help with the ongoing outbreaks among their massive layer farms. Ohio supplies 10 billion eggs each year, and prodces more than 554 million pounds of chicken, plus a lot of turkey. Eggs are not going to get any cheaper…and the state ranks ninth in turkey production.

• In Nevada, the egg situation is getting so dire that they’ve suspended some of their usual rules—eggs no longer have to be produced by cage-free birds. Also, those eggs no longer have to be perfectly egg-shaped . If you/re in Nevada, don’t be alarmed if you see weird shapes in your cartons, or weird sizes–they’re safe to eat.

So things are quietly going to hell in our food supply while the world is distracted by the asset-stripping disguised as a clown show that is our administration. And of course the powers that be have egg on their faces and are still scrambling to rehire all the avian influenza response workers they fired. I’m guessing it’s not going well—not unlike all those staff who oversee our nuclear safety. basically saying, Screw that, we can get other jobs.

Oh well, if we all blow up at least we can stop worrying about not having enough affordable protein to eat.

#birdFlu #cats #CDC #eggs #H5N1 #HPAI #MMWR #nevada #news #ohio #poultry

After delay, #CDC releases data signaling #BirdFlu spread undetected in #cows and #people

February 13, 20251:00 PM ET

By Will Stone

"The first study on the #H5N1 bird flu outbreak from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to make it to publication under the #Trump administration came out Thursday.

"The journal released data suggesting some #spillovers from dairy cattle into humans have gone #undetected, including in states where dairy herds have not tested positive.

"This comes after a #freeze in external communications that interrupted the agency's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, or #MMWR, a mainstay of public health communication. Publication on other topics resumed last week.

"In the new study, researchers analyzed blood samples collected from 150 veterinarians who worked with cattle around the country and found that three of them had #antibodies to the H5N1 virus, indicating recent infections. None recalled having any influenza-like symptoms or conjunctivitis. They also did not care for any cattle with known or suspected infections, although one did work with infected poultry.

"The findings underscore the difficulty of detecting and controlling human infections based on whether a person seeks out medical care, says Gregory Gray, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.

"'If the circulating #H5 viruses become more transmissible between humans, we are not going to be able to control transmission as the viruses will spread rapidly and often #subclinically,' says Gray.

"Previous CDC research that surveyed dairy workers found 7% had evidence of past infections, although only half reported symptoms. Work from Gray and his colleagues in Texas also indicates some cases in the dairy industry workforce are going undetected.

"'It means our surveillance is inadequate,' says Lauren Sauer, a professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Public Health. 'Any detection of #asymptomatic or mild cases in this study just tells me we're missing cases.'"

Read more:
npr.org/sections/shots-health-…
#HPAINews #Pandemic #HPAI #AvianInfluenza #USHealth #CDCCensorship #USPol #AuthoritarianRule #Censorship #USFail

As the Trump admin deletes online data, scientists and digital librarians rush to save it

The race is on to save public information about health and science before Trump makes it disappear

"Deleting gobs of public data/resources as well is the digital equivalent of book burning."

By Carlyn Zwarenstein
Published February 4, 2025 11:46AM (EST)
Updated February 5, 2025 8:34PM (EST)

"Orders from the Trump administration affecting science and health in the United States — and from there, the world — are coming thick and fast, affecting a myriad of institutional and personal decisions that depend on accurate information provided by the U.S. government. This ranges from websites disappearing to the prohibition of dictionary words from federal scientist research papers. Now researchers and data nerds are rushing to preserve this vital information before it’s lost.

"Meanwhile, many public communications have been paused as well. For the first time in sixty years, the federal health agency, the Centers for Disease Control (#CDC), has stopped its own publications, including the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (#MMWR). This comes on top of a communications gag order preventing its scientists from sharing any new findings — from new insights in cancer treatment to potential new pandemics like #Ebola — with the public.

"Additionally, it orders that a list of specific terms be removed from any CDC research manuscript being submitted to, already being considered, or already in press by any scientific or medical journal, with publication paused or retracted until the terms are scrubbed from the work. The terms in question are: Gender, #transgender, #PregnantPerson, pregnant people, #LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, #nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female.

"A quick search by Salon of PubMed, the National Institutes of Health-run database of academic biomedical and health publications as well as related disciplines like life sciences and chemical sciences, shows that it currently contains 145,340 pages’ worth of results (1,453,391individual publications) featuring the term '#gender,' and 5,613 publications with the term '#transexual,' with papers dating back to 1903.

"Since most medical science papers report demographic details, excluding papers that report this information or use this language would mean un-publishing exciting new findings on cancer treatment, or, say, vital information about #H5N1 transmission among American #farmworkers or the ongoing #tuberculosis outbreak in the #KansasCity area. The exact implications of President Trump’s orders are not entirely clear, so it’s hard to say exactly what may not be published as a result, but pre-emptive self-censorship is also likely. On Monday, some of the pages had already been restored, according to the New York Times, underscoring the unpredictable status of some federal information.

"In the meantime, a general communications gag order bans any CDC scientist from submitting any new scientific findings to the public. As federally-funded health websites and webpages disappear in real time from the Internet, the race is on to preserve vital datasets and formerly public information.

"Charles Gaba, a health care policy data analyst and web developer, created links on his website to every mirrored copy of the CDC’s public facing web pages as they appear on the #InternetArchive, a nearly 30-year-old non-partisan, non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the internet from #censorship and #DataDecay.

"'These pages and related files are both funded by taxpayers and specifically intended to be for the general public, after all,' Gaba told Salon. In quickly indexing every public-facing page on the CDC site in the nick of time, he anticipated what has happened over the past few days, although perhaps not the specifics of Trump’s Jan. 29 memo to all federal departments and agencies, outlining an executive order called '#DefendingWomen', that seems to have triggered the hasty scrubbing of federally-funded sites.

"Still, Gaba notes that both the former president’s campaign statements, and language in the policy playbook #Project2025, had promised to purge the federal government of 'anyone or anything' that they see as related to diversity, equity and inclusion, and of purging federal agencies of references and resources to the same."

salon.com/2025/02/04/as-the-ad…
#USPol #Fascism #Erasure #TransRightsAreHumanRights #TransHistoryIsHumanHistory #BookBurning #TrumpIsTryingToKillUsAllOff #CharacteristicsOfFascism