Sick Chicks

How can you protect yourself and your family from Avian Flu?

You’ve no doubt heard that Avian flu (H5N1) infections are ramping up.  This disease is also known as Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza A or A(HPAI) due to its nearly 100% fatality rate in domestic poultry. Since the beginning of this year, about 12.7 million domestic birds have been infected or exposed to a level that dictates “culling.”  Culling is a euphemism for killing the birds before the avian flu kills them.  Culling presumably involves less suffering than the slower death from this avian flu.  The USDA justifies this aggressive response as a means of preventing infected eggs or meat getting into a grocery store as well as stopping the spread of the disease.  Over 80% of these 12.7M infections and exposures have occurred since early April of this year.  The first big loss was in Texas.  Cal-Maine Foods, the nation's largest table egg producer, detected H5N1 in a large flock and culled 1.9 million birds at the beginning of April.  The CDC now reports detections in 48 states and 541 counties since the beginning of the current H5N1 crisis in early 2022.  Poultry growers have lost over 92 million domestic birds in this surge.

Avian flu is not new – the first cases were noted in 1878, although it took a hundred years to understand the virus behind the disease.  One strain or another surges up every so often.  The current H5N1 virus family has been making periodic rounds since 1996.  In 1997, every domestic bird in Hong Kong was killed to try to stop it, as six people died of the disease.

The CDC has an H5N1 website (H5N1 Bird Flu: Current Situation Summary | Avian Influenza (Flu) (cdc.gov)) tracking the disease’s spread from the beginning of 2022.  It includes a map where you can click on your home state and county to see what’s going on close to home.  The map looks terrible, but egg-lovers should not panic.  You can’t catch avian flu from eating eggs if you take a few precautions.

If you want to be totally safe from egg-borne disease, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says to cook your eggs until both white and yolk are firm.  The FDA was recommending that before the discovery of H5N1, because of the risk of other nasty bugs like Salmonella and Listeria.  Despite farmers’ best efforts, about one egg in twenty thousand contains Salmonella.  The FDA would prefer you NEVER eat anything that contains raw, unpasteurized eggs.  This includes raw cookie or cake dough.  So much for reliving my childhood by “licking the bowl” after the cake goes into the oven.  Sigh.

What about mayonnaise, Caesar salad dressing, hollandaise sauce, carbonara pasta sauce, tiramisu, meringue, eggnog, and some ice creams – all made with “raw” eggs?  Before you discard half of what’s on your refrigerator and freezer door out of an abundance of caution, remember that store-bought versions of these are safe because they are made with pasteurized eggs.

Pasteurized eggs?  Until recently, I thought that pasteurization was just something we did to milk.  Turns out you can buy pasteurized eggs in the shell in some stores.  More likely, you will find pasteurized egg out of the shell, in a carton, because the USDA requires that all eggs sold out of the shell must be pasteurized.  You can pasteurize eggs at home, too.  You have to get them to just below 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius) for some period of time.  The viruses and bacteria die around 130F and eggs start “cooking” around 140F, so the trick is keeping them between those temperatures long enough to kill the bugs.  The time differs depending on whether you are pasteurizing them inside the shells or after cracking them out of their shells.  In their shells, use 3 minutes in 135F water for average-sized eggs, 5 minutes for extra-large eggs.  If you want to pasteurize eggs often enough to get tired of watching the water temperature with a thermometer, you can get a device called a sous vide (an immersion circulator) to relieve you of watching the pot.  Out of the shells, you add some liquid to the eggs from your recipe -- lemon juice or vinegar or milk-- and whisk them while keeping them warm.  You can use a double-boiler or even the microwave to heat the eggs to a safe point without actually cooking them enough to change their character.  I am still learning techniques myself, so I can’t yet recommend any particular one of the zillions that come up in an internet search. I’ve included a few links below for those that I am experimenting with, because I really, really want to “lick the bowl” again after the cake and cookies go into the oven.

I’m assuming that all of you are cooking your poultry thoroughly – 165F.  I feel like that’s been beat into us so long I don’t need to belabor that here, except to say that’s more than enough to kill the avian flu virus.

If people are not catching avian flu by eating poultry or eggs, how else might they catch it?  You have to catch it from an infected bird or animal.  No human-to-human transmission has been recorded.  Most humans who have gotten bird flu directly from birds have had sick chickens as roommates.  People keep chickens in their homes in many parts of the world.  Cuddling a sick bird is one way to catch this bug directly from a bird.  Or handling a very large number of sick birds. The only known US case of chicken-to-human transmission occurred in someone participating in culling a very large flock where avian flu was spreading.  That person had contact with thousands of sick or exposed birds. Fortunately for him, H5N1 seems to have gotten less dangerous for humans over the past 20 years.

Even so, don’t go visiting chicken flocks.  Honor farm quarantine signs.  If you have pet chickens or a backyard flock, make sure your birds have no contact with strange chickens or wild birds or their leavings.  This H5N1 strain of avian flu has a mutation that enables it to more easily infect wild birds, especially waterfowl, than earlier avian flu viruses.  The earlier viruses were spread by wild birds with mild cases, but primarily killed domestic poultry flocks.  The latest mutation is more likely to kill wild birds than earlier versions, leaving lots of dead birds for lazy predators to snack on—including the family dog or cat.  If you find a dead bird, contact the local or state health department to get it and test for avian flu.  Those of you with a backyard chicken or turkey flock should dedicate a pair of shoes to chicken care and leave your outdoor shoes outside the chicken coop.  Don’t let your birds drink from any ponds or puddles – and clean their (indoor) water source daily.  Keep your feathered friends under a roof during the avian flu peaks.  Remember that migrating birds don’t stop flying to use designated toilets at rest stops.

Unfortunately, H5N1 infections have been found in over 200 different mammal species – including marine mammals and pets.  The virus has also figured out how to infect ruminants including cows and goats, our most common diary sources.  This spring, the USDA has found infected dairy cattle in nine states—which include four of the top ten dairy-producing states.  So don’t drink any “raw” unpasteurized milk.  Cows eat grass that may be contaminated by infected migrating birds or wild predators that ate infected birds.  The evidence points toward cow-to-cow transmission, but no one knows the exact mechanism.  Because infected cows shed a lot of the virus in their milk, perhaps milking machines can spread it.  High-pressure dairy wash-down systems may “aerosolize” the virus (suspend the virus in tiny airborne particles), allowing other cows to breathe it in or consume it with their feed after it settles out of the air.  Ironic that a system to reduce spread of some diseases might increase spread of a new disease, isn’t it?  The dairy farmers will probably soon be quaking in their rubber boots at the thought of a new round of requirements to modify expensive wash-down systems, after they struggle through the immediate crisis in their barns.

When the cow is really sick, her milk changes character and it’s easy for the farmer to find her and discard her milk.  Unfortunately, a lot of infected cows do not show symptoms right away, and some never show any symptoms.  This makes it harder for farmers to separate out infected cows and discard their milk.  Twenty percent of US dairy products on store shelves recently tested contained fragments of H5N1 RNA.  That’s fragments of viruses, not live, viable viruses that can infect you.  And yes, someone has tried the experiment to make sure virus fragments can’t infect people drinking the milk.  Pasteurization works, even for disease agents that Dr. Louie Pasteur did not know about when he developed the treatment.  Influenza viruses are especially sensitive to heat; fairly low temperatures kill them.

The business impact of avian flu on dairy farmers will be significant.  It doesn’t kill cows like it does birds.  Cows usually recover from avian flu in a couple of weeks – but their milk production goes down for a while after they recover.  Dairy farmers with infected cows are reporting revenue losses in the tens of thousands of dollars beyond the milk discarded during the cows’ active infections.  That’s on top of treatment costs (mainly giving dehydrated and feverish cows comfort) of thousands of dollars.  The USDA reimburses poultry farmers for flocks that the agency “culls” but the dairy farmers are on their own dealing with this.

What can you do?  Well, now is definitely not the time to start your course of cow-hugging therapy.  That’s a real thing, no kidding!  Avoid cow barns unless you work there.  A second dairy worker has been diagnosed with avian flu this week, in Michigan.  The danger to dairy workers is getting live virus from raw milk in their eyes, because human eyes have receptors for this avian flu virus.  The US human infections have been eye irritations.  Unfortunately, the surveillance of dairy cows for avian flu is a very new thing (in contrast with surveillance of poultry flocks, put in place over two decades).  Dairy farms are getting larger while there are fewer of them (recall my newsletter Eighteen Thousand Dairy Cows, RIP - by Kristin Farry (someonegrewthat.farm)).  Large concentrations of like critters increase disease risk, so the USDA is in catch-up mode.

Maybe we shouldn’t be in such a rush to shut down the Office of Pandemic Preparedness.  Or cut our public health budgets, which has become a popular way to vent our frustration over the COVID-19 lockdowns.  Our generation has enjoyed the results of public health investments so long that we’ve become complacent.  Those public health investments include keeping farm animals from getting sick, too.  Farmers want to see culling and its related “depopulation” approaches to disease control replaced with preventative measures like vaccination and prophylactic treatments.  These culling and depopulation policies are traumatic for the farmers involved.  Not every farmer caught up in these policies are compensated, either.  We won’t save these animals from death or farmers from emotional and financial hardship by cutting investments in public health and pandemic research preparedness.  Bacteria and viruses don’t read political statements.

I’ll be back with more on eggs soon.  In the meantime, be careful what you eat and what’s going on with the creatures around you.  For the most current and quickest risk assessment on avian flu and any other bugs, I recommend Dr. Katelyn Jetelina’s Substack Newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist:

What “culling” a flock infected with H5N1, Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, really means

Avian Flu and Food Safety:

Avian Influenza: Past, Present, Future (asm.org)

The largest fresh egg producer in the U.S. has found bird flu in chickens at a Texas plant (nbcnews.com)

As bird flu spreads in the U.S., is it safe to eat eggs? (nbcnews.com)

H5N1 Bird Flu: Current Situation Summary | Avian Influenza (Flu) (cdc.gov)

As Bird Flu Spreads through Cows, Is Pasteurized Milk Safe to Drink? | Scientific American

Experts Confirm First Bird Flu Outbreak in Cows: Is It Safe to Drink Milk? : ScienceAlert

Four Important Questions About Bird Flu, Answered | Smithsonian (smithsonianmag.com)

Pasteurizing Eggs:

How to Pasteurize Eggs: 14 Steps (with Pictures) - wikiHow

How to Pasteurize Eggs in the Microwave (thespruceeats.com)

How To Pasteurize Eggs - Boston Girl Bakes

Office of Pandemic Preparedness:

American Pandemic Preparedness: Transforming Our Capabilities (whitehouse.gov)

Cow-Hugging Therapy:

Cow Hugging: Yes it's a Thing | Psych Central