A new study lends weight to fears that more livestock workers have gotten the bird flu than has been reported. “I am very confident there are more people being infected than we know about,” said Gregory Gray, the infectious disease researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch who led the study, posted online and under review to be published in a leading infectious disease journal. “Largely, that’s because our surveillance has been so poor.
” As bird flu cases go underreported, health officials risk being slow to notice if the virus were to become more contagious. A large surge of infections outside of farmworker communities would trigger the government’s flu surveillance system, but by then it might be too late to contain. “We need to figure out what we can do to stop this thing,” Gray said.
“It is not just going away.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention bases decisions on its surveillance. For example, the agency has bird flu vaccines on hand but has decided against offering them to farmworkers, citing a low number of cases.
But testing for bird flu among farmworkers remains rare, which is why Gray’s research stands out as the first to look for signs of prior, undiagnosed infections in people who had been exposed to sick dairy cattle — and who had become ill and recovered. Gray’s team detected signs of prior bird flu infections in workers from two dairy farms that had outbreaks in Texas earlier this year. They analyzed blood sampl.