“Cow-to-cow transmission is definitely playing a role in how this disease progresses. To what extent, we don’t know yet,” Leibsle said. It’s clear that infected wild birds spread the disease to herds in Texas and Kansas, he said. “But the herd of cattle that came up from Texas to Idaho, the birds didn’t follow,” the state veterinarian said…
…Idaho’s Leibsle said “not all dairy producers will want to wait one, two, three weeks” for dairy cows to recover. Some producers may decide to send the animals to slaughter as beef animals, he said.
This bird flu shit scares me really badly.
At least there’s this… for now.
It’s good for the cows, but doesn’t that make it more likely to continue to jump species?
Jumping species isn’t always a bad thing, its just a thing that happens. Pretty much everybody who works around animals consistently probably already has had birdflu or cowflu or swineflu but the infections didn’t “do” anything and died out in the host.
There’s the idea of “dead end hosts” where an infection can spread outside of a species where it spreads, into a species where it just kinda dead ends and can’t jump out again.
Welp… https://www.cbs19.tv/article/news/local/officials-confirm-1st-human-case-of-bird-flu-in-texas/501-3c886ca8-338b-4036-9f80-c5ecb37fd4c7
Kinda my point right?
Though, I guess “didn’t ‘do’ anything” wasn’t exactly the most correctest phrase to use. My point was that cross species infections are pretty common but it doesn’t mean that the bug is leathal and requires COVID levels of concern.
A person who worked around dairy cattle caught the bug from the cows, had some noticeable but not life threatening symptoms, but is okay.