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Bird flu infects three more Colorado poultry farm workers

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment on Thursday announced three additional human cases of bird flu among poultry farm workers, bringing the total number of confirmed human cases in the U.S. this year to 13.

The three new cases involved poultry farm workers who were killing infected chickens at a Weld County egg farm, the health department said. The workers are experiencing mild illness and have been offered antiviral drugs, said the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a statement.

Neither the state health department nor CDC provided the name of the egg farm.
The bird flu outbreak has infected poultry in nearly every U.S. state since early 2022. Since March, the virus has been circulating among dairy cattle and has infected more than 170 herds in 13 states, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Since April, four dairy farm workers and nine poultry farm workers have been infected with the virus in Colorado, Michigan and Texas.

The CDC said the risk to the general public from bird flu remains low, but that farm workers exposed to infected animals should use personal protective equipment (PPE).

Six workers culling infected chickens at a different Colorado chicken farm earlier this month were working without effective PPE, according to the CDC.

A CDC field team is deployed in Colorado to support its ongoing outbreak response, the agency said.

 

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Leman Swine Conference: Vaccination strategies to reduce PRRS virus recombination

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Dr. Jay Calvert, Research Director with Zoetis, recently spoke to The Pig Site’s Sarah Mikesell at the 2023 Leman Swine Conference in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA, about his conference presentation on porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) virus recombination.

“The number one problem in PRRS these days from a vaccine point of view is the emergence of new strains of PRRS. Since the beginning, we have had new strains and a lot of diversity,” said Dr. Jay Calvert. “We thought we knew it was all about mutation changes in amino acids and the individual strains over time, but they take on new characteristics.”

With the onset of more common whole genome sequencing and recombination analysis, Dr. Calvert says there is another mechanism, and recombination seems to be a key factor.