Devastation Looms as US Fails to Contain Bird Flu Outbreak!

United States: Now, almost one year after the first discovery of bird flu that affects cattle, the virus has not stopped spreading.

When the virus was only operating in a limited number of states, the U.S. government could have stopped it on the dairy farms by pinpointing which cows were infected and isolating them to make sure they didn’t infect others.

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At least 875 herds spread across 16 states have now contracted the virus. It is true that several experts have voiced their lack of confidence in the government’s capacity to slow down the virus spread.

For this report, KFF Health News spoke with nearly 70 individuals – government officials, farmers, and farmworkers, as well as virologists and pandemic and veterinary medicine specialists.

When combined with the locally obtained emails through Public Records Act requests, this study highlighted the major issues, such as deference to the farm industry and inferior health budgets with weak protections for industry agriculture workers, as well as slow federal actions.

This month, the US Department of Agriculture issued a federal order that says it will test milk across the country, CNN Health reported.

What more has the expert stated?

Experts offered their approval but added that it should have been done earlier — say, before the virus began spreading.

Much bird flu damage is bound to happen, but the degree of damage is going to be completely up to the Trump Government and nature’s discretion.

The USDA has invested over USD USD 1.7 billion in trying to prevent the bird flu on poultry farms starting in 2022, which tends to cover payments to the farmers who have culled their birds to more than USD 430 million that has gone to combating bird flu on dairy farms.

As has been noted, these deadly diseases may be costing many, many billions of dollars more in the years to come, including bird flu.

Some animal health specialists in the dairy industry note that the virus is fatal to about 2-5 percent of the affected dairy cows while decreasing the total production from the cows that make up a given herd by about 20 percent.