Bird flu raising concerns for Petaluma dairy farmers
It's officially called Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, better known as bird flu, and poultry farms in the Bay Area and across the nation are in lockdown because of it.
But now the virus has mutated and is being passed on to cows and workers, particularly at dairy farms. That's raising concerns in places like Petaluma, where dairy is an important industry.
It feels like one battle after another at the dairy farms dotting the Petaluma countryside. They just beat back Measure J, which threatened the commercial dairies in the county, and now they're facing a threat from above–avian flu.
"Knock on wood, we haven't seen anything and, God forsakes, we hope we don't. I hope nobody brings it here, but I have to explain to my employees, just be careful with who you're around, where you're going," said Neil McIsaac III.
He and his family have been in the dairy business for generations, but they are also in the egg business. So, when avian flu began devastating poultry farms a year ago, they installed the same bio-security measures at the dairy as well.
"We don't let many people come onto the property," said Neil. "We have them spray at the end of the driveway, 'Hey spray your tires,' things of that nature. We've just kept it going from last year."
But Neil said there are limits to how much can practically be done.
"It's not like we're going to put on different coveralls in between each animal," he said. "It's just, you touch an animal, wash your hands, stuff like that. It's just simple."
But it may soon get a lot more complicated. There are a growing number of cases in the country of the virus being passed on to dairy workers.
So far, symptoms have been mild, including conjunctivitis, or "pink eye." But a recently published CDC study revealed that seven percent of workers at infected farms in Michigan and Colorado tested positive for the virus, with many of them unaware because they had no symptoms.
Dr. Maurice Pitesky, an animal epidemiologist at UC Davis, said we shouldn't sleep on the threat it may be posing.
"People are like, 'Oh, it's just a little conjunctivitis and it's just a handful of people here and there.' But I think that's the wrong mentality," said Dr. Pitesky. "Because there's so much virus floating around, the virus has already shown us the extraordinary ability to mutate and change. I think we're playing with fire if we have this general approach, which I think we have right now a little, where we're really not focused on what the worst-case scenarios are."
As a result, the CDC report recommends that "a low threshold for reporting mild symptoms and seeking testing should be encouraged to identify whether these mild symptoms are caused by HPAI A(H5) virus."
But Antonio De Loera, a spokesman for the United Farmworkers, said that's the reason the state should set up a fund, like they did with COVID, to pay the salaries of workers who contract avian flu.
"Some workers are unwilling to get tested because if they test positive they have to isolate for 10 days, but they're not necessarily able to make that up financially. So, here we see how, really, the poverty that these workers are living in is also a public health risk," said De Loera.
It's a health risk for the public, but it's also an economic threat to the McIsaac family.
"I don't what's coming next," said Neil. "And I don't know how much more I can take of it."
The biggest transmission problem is that the virus can be spread by the droppings of infected birds. That means cattle ranches can be threatened by birds simply flying overhead.
So far, there have been no reported hospitalizations but at the rate the virus is mutating, no one is very confident it will simply go away.
