Additional, preliminary test results released Wednesday on samples of retail milk, cottage cheese and sour cream show pasteurization is effective in inactivating highly pathogenic avian influenza, which has been found in 36 herds in nine states, FDA said.
With Wednesday's announcement of results from 201 samples, the study of grocery-store milk now contains 297 samples from around the country, FDA said. The samples were tested using what Acting Director of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition Donald Prater called the “gold standard egg inoculation test.”
No “viable virus” was found, he said on a call with reporters.
USDA Chief Veterinary Officer Rosemary Sifford, who also was on the call, provided further details on how USDA thinks the virus spread from the Texas panhandle to eight other states.
She said there likely was an “initial spillover event in that geographic region” involving cows in several herds that were infected by wild birds. Animals from those herds were then transported to other states, and “subsequent movement” from those herds – "not necessarily" the animals, but “the movement of equipment or other items” – led to further infections, she said.
Idaho, Michigan, Ohio and North Carolina have all said that asymptomatic cattle from Texas infected herds in their states. Sifford’s comments indicate the transportation network supporting the dairy industry has helped spread the virus.
An Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service order went into effect Monday requiring that lactating dairy cows receive a negative H5N1 test before moving to another state.
Sifford clarified that not every lactating cow would be tested. “We are requiring any herds that are moving animals interstate to test … up to 30 animals in the lot of animals that they expect to move,” she said.
Thirty is a “statistically significant number to be able to determine the status of a lot,” she said
Sifford said USDA is looking at ways to compensate producers for expenses they incur as a result of biosecurity efforts. However, she said officials are “primarily at this point focused on their cooperation and taking up of additional biosecurity practices, and things of that nature that we're asking them to do that might incur additional costs for them.”
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official said CDC is working with the Health Resources and Services Administration in the Department of Health and Human Services to reach farmworkers who may be vulnerable to infection.
HRSA has “great reach into the population of farmworkers that we are concerned about,” said Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
“They have clinics and other community-based organizations that they fund that actually support the health of people on farms,” he said.
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Daskalakis also said that “CDC flu surveillance systems at this time show no indicators of unusual flu activity in people, and that includes avian influenza.”
Texas reported on April 1 that a person exposed to dairy cattle in the state had contracted the virus and was treated with antiviral drugs. The person had conjunctivitis.
As for the retail milk that has been tested, FDA had said initially, on April 25, that one in five samples tested using quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) from the first lot of 96 samples contained viral fragments of H5N1. The egg-inoculation tests confirmed that those fragments were inactive.
FDA also tested samples of retail powdered infant formula and powdered milk products marketed as toddler formula. “All qPCR results of formula testing were negative, indicating no detection of HPAI viral fragments or virus in powdered formula products, so no further testing was required for these samples,” FDA said, adding it continues to identify additional products for testing.
FDA continues to urge people not to consume raw milk and also is conducting more tests on a wider variety of dairy products.
The agency said samples are from 38 states but declined on the call with reporters to identify the number of states or how many samples were tested from each state.
Prater said it’s “important to point out that milk purchased in a particular state doesn't mean that it was produced or processed in that state. In fact, milk could be from cows on a farm a few states away, processed, pasteurized in a different state, and available for purchase in yet another state.”
He said FDA is sharing its data with “our federal partners. And we will have something more to say on that in the days to come.”
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