Bird Flu Is Spreading Rapidly Across U.S. Undetected After Trump Administration Paused Releasing Results, New Report Shows

Extensive blood tests of large-animal veterinarians suggest that cases of bird flu have spread across the U.S. largely undetected.

A new study of veterinarians, released on Thursday, finds that three of the 150 who signed up to be tested had antibodies against bird flu in their blood (2%), indicating that the vets were infected with H5N1 despite not displaying symptoms. The report was published in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The 150 veterinarians were from 46 states and Canada, with one in four saying they had worked with infected cattle.

One of the veterinarians who tested positive said that they had worked with cattle in South Carolina and Georgia, two states that have presently not reported any infections. Authors of the report acknowledge that these findings evidence that there are unreported infections among cattle and other animals in many states, and emphasize the need for quick and thorough testing of animals.

Samples for this study were collected in September before the national bulk milk testing program was launched by the federal government, and the rate of human infections drastically increased.

This study is one of three that was delayed following the Trump administration’s pause on outside communications from federal health agencies last month. The other studies will reportedly detail transmission rates of H5N1 from domestic cats to their owners, as well as detections of the virus in wastewater.

Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo of Brown University told CNN, “I think the bottom line here is that there are vets who may have been infected in states that hadn’t reported outbreaks, which is bad…It speaks to the need to improve our surveillance so that we can better detect when outbreaks are occurring on farm so we can protect people.”

Dr. Erin Sorrell of Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security explained, “This report tells us that this virus can infect and present without symptoms in animals and that enough virus is shed either directly from animal to veterinarian or via touching surfaces to infect the vet.”