On the avian flu front, this is both the worst-case scenario coming to fruition… and reassuring news. In the United States, the virus is found to be more often present among agricultural workers than previously measured. On the other hand, several of these people did not have symptoms, which suggests that the virus is less virulent than feared.
Remember that H5N1 avian flu, after having been detected since the end of 2021 in at least 50 species of mammals – which means that it has acquired one or more mutations allowing it to cross the barrier of these species – is detected in the States -United since last March in cows.
However, as many humans on farms are in daily contact with cows, this raises fears that a mutation would be enough for this virus to become transmissible between humans.
Since last March, American farmers have often been hostile to the idea of letting veterinarians carry out systematic screening of their animals or their employees. Which only gave a partial idea of the dispersion of the virus. Officially, H5N1 has been identified in 446 cows in 15 states and in 44 farm workers.
7% of workers
However, according to a collection of blood samples carried out from 115 agricultural workers in Michigan and Colorado by the Center for Disease Control (CDC), and only on farms where at least one cow had tested positive for the virus, 7 % of these workers (or 8 of them) had antibodies against the virus. Which means they had been carrying the virus at some point.
Canada
