The Bird Flu Outbreak Is Alarming. And the Government Is Stumbling.
The H5N1 crisis at dairy farms shows that public health agencies have failed to absorb the lessons of Covid.
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Photographer: Scott Olson/Getty ImagesThe bird flu outbreak at US dairy farms keeps finding alarming new ways to surprise scientists. Last week, the US Department of Agriculture confirmed that H5N1 is spreading not just from birds to herds, but among cows. Meanwhile, media reports suggest an unknown number of cows are asymptomatic. Although the risk to humans is still low, it’s clear that far more work needs to be done to get a handle on the reach of the virus and how it is being transmitted.
That will require the USDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to get out of their own way. There’s a palpable frustration among infectious disease experts that the agencies are being too protective of critical information and too timid in surveilling the virus. For example, so far, testing has been limited and until yesterday, only a handful of viral sequences had been publicly shared.