In early March, Dr. Barb Petersen, a large-animal vet in Texas, began getting calls from the dairy farms she works with in the Panhandle. Workers there were seeing a lot of cows with mastitis, an infection of the udder.Their milk was thickened and discolored, and it couldn’t be explained by any of the usual suspects such as bacteria or tissue damage.Several more dairies called. One owner told her he thought his farm had “whatever is going around, and half of my pets have died,” indicating that the contagion had moved beyond cattle.After running a battery of tests and ruling out every cause she could think of, Petersen sent samples from sick and dead animals to the Texas A&M state veterinary lab and to friends and colleagues at Iowa State University.What they found – loads of the H5N1 influenza virus – has rocked the dairy industry and put public health officials around the world on alert. It also created an urgent scientific to-do list. One of the first questions that needed to be answered was how the virus was infecting cows in the first place.Researchers in the US and Denmark took on that task. Their findings, published as a preprint study, show that cows have the same receptors for flu viruses as humans and birds. Scientists fear that cows …
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[mwai_chat context=”Let’s have a discussion about this article:nnIn early March, Dr. Barb Petersen, a large-animal vet in Texas, began getting calls from the dairy farms she works with in the Panhandle. Workers there were seeing a lot of cows with mastitis, an infection of the udder.Their milk was thickened and discolored, and it couldn’t be explained by any of the usual suspects such as bacteria or tissue damage.Several more dairies called. One owner told her he thought his farm had “whatever is going around, and half of my pets have died,” indicating that the contagion had moved beyond cattle.After running a battery of tests and ruling out every cause she could think of, Petersen sent samples from sick and dead animals to the Texas A&M state veterinary lab and to friends and colleagues at Iowa State University.What they found – loads of the H5N1 influenza virus – has rocked the dairy industry and put public health officials around the world on alert. It also created an urgent scientific to-do list. One of the first questions that needed to be answered was how the virus was infecting cows in the first place.Researchers in the US and Denmark took on that task. Their findings, published as a preprint study, show that cows have the same receptors for flu viruses as humans and birds. Scientists fear that cows …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]
