NMPF’s Jonker, Hain See Bird Flu Lessons One Year Later

Transcript

Alan Bjerga: Hello and welcome to the Dairy Defined Podcast. Bird flu: it's still with us in the dairy community more than a year after the first case in a dairy cow was announced. How has dairy responded? How is that response evolving? And what can we expect next? Giving us some insight into that today is Dr. Jamie Jonker, NMPF's Chief Science Officer and NMPF's New Chief Veterinary Officer with the National Dairy FARM Program, Dr. Meggan Hain. Thank you both for joining us.

Dr. Meggan Hain: Thanks so much for having us.

Dr. Jamie Jonker: Glad to be here, Alan.

Alan Bjerga: Let's start with you, Jamie. You have been point person on NMPF's bird flu activities for more than a year. Tell us about the state of H5N1 in dairy cattle one year in as well as the state of industry efforts to contain and eradicate the virus.

Dr. Jamie Jonker: There's now over 1,000 affected dairy farms in 17 states since the outbreak began back on March 25th of last year. USDA in December instituted its national milk testing strategy, which is required for all of the 48 continental states. We have, of course, used our National Dairy FARM Biosecurity program as a source of educational information for dairy farmers on biosecurity efforts that they can put in on their farms to work to prevent this from occurring on their farm and if it occurs on their farm, to do their best to keep it from spreading to other farms. And we've refined those over time as we've learned more about how the virus is being spread. There are vaccines in development. USDA has indicated that there's 12 vaccine candidates in development from 7 different companies. Importantly, this remains an animal health issue and not a food safety issue. Pasteurization kills the virus. There is some increased risk for infection from dairy workers, particularly those working in the parlor, those that have exposure to milk from infected cows. But that's kind of where we have been in the past year and where things are as of today.

Alan Bjerga: So there's a lot going on, but there's been a lot going on for a long time and this has clearly become a marathon rather than a sprint, and I think a lot of people are just fatigued. They'd like it to go away. Is that still a possibility?

Dr. Jamie Jonker: I think it is still a possibility that we can eliminate the virus from the U.S. dairy cattle population. I mentioned about the National Milk Testing Strategy that USDA is requiring in the 48 continental states. There are currently six states that are demonstrated to be free of the virus in their dairy cattle population, and this includes three states, Oklahoma, Wyoming, and Colorado, which have previously had infected herds. Just a little bit more about Colorado. They had a large outbreak last year, June through August, where more than 75% of their dairy farms became infected with the H5N1 virus. And so their demonstration that they can eliminate the virus from their state when they had such a large percentage of farms being impacted, I think shows that we have a good opportunity to eliminate the virus.

But it's a little more complex here, just in the last few months, when we first started talking about this as a spillover event that happened in the Texas Panhandle early last year, thinking this was a once-in-a-lifetime event, there now have been two additional spillover events this year in Nevada and Arizona with a different genotype, still H5N1, but a different genotype than what we saw previously. That may complicate things. We're still trying to understand are these just two additional kind of unique events or do we now have some sort of increased risk of spillover events in the wintertime and particularly in the Western High Desert areas, which is where all three of the spillover events have occurred. We don't have enough information yet there. So I think yes, we can get rid of the virus, but we have complexities because we may have additional risk of spillover events that we might not have considered just a year ago.

Alan Bjerga: So we could get rid of this virus but it seems like there may be a heightened risk that it'll come back?

Dr. Jamie Jonker: I think that there may be an additional risk of it coming back as different genotypes, but just because it has occurred two winters in a row doesn't mean it will occur three. We still could be at a point where we just had three bad luck incidents and we may never see this again in our lifetime, or it could be something that is a risk every winter. We just don't have enough information yet.

Alan Bjerga: Turning to Meggan, you're new to NMPF, but certainly not new to the world of dairy, more than two decades of experience. You recently came here from Organic Valley with the FARM Program for which you're now leading the veterinary response, you got a special acronym here. It stands for Farmers Assuring Responsible Management. How are you seeing them do that?

Dr. Meggan Hain: So the FARM Program, even though I'm pretty new to it, has been running since about … Well running as an animal care side of it since 2009. So the FARM Program has had several iterations, sort of each three years kind of going through and looking at what things needed to be improved. The advantage with that is that we've slowly worked with the dairy industry, so working with partners and farmers in the dairy industry to build a program that works for dairy. The FARM Program now covers about 99% of the U.S. farm supply, which is really great, and the fact that we're working with farmers to help farmers. And when we're talking about bird flu, the advantage there is that we've established a well-grounded relationship with a lot of the industry.

So although the FARM Program is often known as a sort of animal care program, we also have a strong biosecurity arm. So the FARM Program has built what we call everyday biosecurity tools, and Jamie had mentioned these a little bit earlier, that they're basically tools for any sort of general farm biosecurity in that. So it does two big things. Number one, it gets farms used to the concepts of what things do we need to do to provide really good biosecurity on the farm? What things do we need to do to protect our farm from things we don't see, which essentially a lot of our viruses and illnesses are unseen, so it's easy to keep them out of mind and that until something like this comes up and then it can be quite scary.

The other good thing about it is by setting that initial groundwork and getting the industry used to it, when we come up with something like avian influenza or bird flu, the advantage is that we can easily add onto what we've built already. So for the bird flu, they're using what they call enhanced biosecurity, which is our everyday biosecurity, and then some added on top. So by starting from a good [inaudible 00:07:15] groundworks and that we're able to build on it relatively easily and build on the relationships we already have with farms.

Alan Bjerga: So when you look at the challenge of H5N1 and what you've learned in the past year regarding the virus and biosecurity and protecting your herds and protecting your workers, what are some of the challenges of maintaining that responsibility in year two?

Dr. Meggan Hain: Two things in that that we've run into when we're looking at this sort of long-term. First thing is that at least in the dairy side, bird flu hasn't affected all parts of the country. So there are some parts of the country that have been affected, and they certainly have found good use in good biosecurity and good biosecurity tools. Other parts of the country that haven't been affected haven't necessarily dived into that. So as Jamie mentioned, we're hoping that this virus will slowly decrease in that, and won't affect other parts of the country, in which case they won't necessarily need to dive into it. But we still need to keep strong and keep that education available for those farms in case they need it.

The second part, which is something we all face, is just that fatigue and that sort of drift with any program and that we're implementing on farm or anything that's basically a good habit. We all know that those kind of fade over time. So really sort of working with farms and working with industry to build strategies just to keep those good habits up and that, even though we're all kind of getting tired.

Alan Bjerga: Even though this has been around for a while and a person gets used to it and perhaps you get a bit fatigued, the reason people responded to this so strongly was because it is fundamentally scary, what happens when you get the call at 3:00 AM and Jamie, I think I have called you at 3:00 AM about this issue. And what keeps you up at night? So I would actually put this to both of you. Knowing what you know and knowing what you don't know and having some experience for this, what is the key concern that farmers in the industry should keep in mind as we continue to deal with this?

Dr. Jamie Jonker: For a farmer perspective, let's keep them focused on this as an animal health issue and protection of their workers. But I will tell you what keeps me up at night on this is the concern that the virus can adapt and viruses do adapt over time to their differing hosts. So what if there is a mutation of one of these current genotypes that are affecting dairy cattle that makes it more infectious to people and transmissible from person to person? That's the thing that keeps me up at night, but that isn't what I think should keep our farmers up at night. They should focus on this from their animal health perspective and their farm workers' perspective. We need to leave it to others that are on the human health side to help look at what's happening with the virus, whether or not it's mutating, to see if it becomes that general human health concern.

And I'm happy to report today that even though it's been in over 1,000 dairy farms in the U.S., it's not mutating in dairy cattle. Both of the two different genotypes of the H5N1 that have been in dairy cattle, really like the mammary gland. They go there, they hang out, they have a good time, they're not adapting because they don't need to change anything to infect dairy cows. So far, we're not seeing any changes in the virus that make it more adaptable to infect humans because it's in dairy cows. So let's take this opportunity and get it entirely out of our dairy cattle population.

Dr. Meggan Hain: This has been sort of a good opportunity to learn some lessons. So when I think of my career within dairy, we haven't had any really bad, severe contagious diseases in dairy for a long time. So we've been lucky enough to be quite comfortable and not really test our biosecurity on the dairy farm, and also to test a lot of our infrastructures on a national level for containing diseases. So with the bird flu of jumping over to cattle, it's given us an opportunity to really test a lot of those, both our on-farm systems for controlling disease and then also our national systems. And it's given us a chance to really learn some of the lessons of where do we have opportunities, where are there things that we'll want to sort of dig into so that we're better prepared in the future if we do get challenges and that from other diseases? I think there's a lot of things we can take away from this that we can really make improvements on.

Alan Bjerga: We've been speaking with Dr. Jamie Jonker, NMPF's Chief Science Officer, and Chief Veterinary Officer Dr. Meggan Hain. Anything else either of you would like to add?

Dr. Meggan Hain: We've got plenty of resources on that on the FARM website. You're welcome to come find them.

Dr. Jamie Jonker: Even though we're already a year into the process, we're still learning things about the virus and how it's being transmitted from farm to farm, and we still need some answers on that, but hang in there. We're going to get through this. I do believe we're going to eliminate the virus from the U.S. dairy cattle population. I think it's just a matter of when, not if.

Alan Bjerga: The website Meggan is referring to is at nationaldairyfarm.com. That is the FARM Program's website, and that'll get you off to a good start in many of the resources that we have available. For more of the Dairy Defined Podcast, all you have to do is go to our website or go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music and search under the podcast name Dairy Defined. We'll talk again soon.