It can be It’s been nearly three months since the U.S. government announced an outbreak of the bird flu virus on dairy farms.
The World Health Organization considers the virus a public health concern because of its potential to cause a pandemic, yet the U.S. has tested only about 45 people across the country.
“We’re flying blind,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health. With so few tests run, she said, it’s impossible to know how many farmworkers have been infected, or how serious the disease is. A lack of testing means the country might not notice if the virus begins to spread between people — the gateway to another pandemic.
“We’d like to be doing more testing. There’s no doubt about that,” said Nirav Shah, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC’s bird flu test is the only one the Food and Drug Administration right now.
Shah said the agency has distributed these tests to about 100 public health labs in states. “We’ve got roughly a million available now,” he said, “and expect 1.2 million more in the next two months.
” But Nuzzo and other researchers are concerned because the CDC and public health labs aren’t generally where doctors order tests from. That job tends to be done by major clinical laboratories run by companies and universities, which lack authorization for bird flu testing. As the outbreak grows — with at least infected in.