A Grim Week -H5N5 Death in WA, ProPublica Piece Documents Likely OH-IN H5 Aerosol Spread as Situation Now Repeats in N. Indiana

On Track for 200 Confirmed U.S. Fall 2025 H5 HPAI poultry cases by November 30th, with perhaps 80 in Indiana alone...

I want to give credit to Michael Coston of Avian Flu Diary once again for my initial knowledge of the following: Avian Flu Diary: Washington DOH Statement: Grays Harbor County Resident Dies From Complications of Avian Influenza

Here is the Washington DOH press release: Grays Harbor County resident dies from complications of avian influenza | Washington State Department of Health

Please read both the Washinton DOH statement and the Avian Flu Diary links for yourself. I repost Michael’s concluding comments to amplify them:

As has become increasingly common, we’ve seen very little in the way of actual details on this HPAI case. While public health officials often redact patient information over ‘privacy concerns’, statements like ‘DOH testing identified avian influenza virus in the environment of the flock’ seem unnecessarily vague.

They don’t specify what subtype was detected (was it H5N5, H5N1, etc.), and they aren’t even clear on whether these birds were infected, or if any were symptomatic or had recently died.

Unfortunately, the USDA’s Confirmations of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza in Commercial and Backyard Flocks dashboard doesn’t help, as it doesn’t identify the subtype of any of the 1,873 flocks infected in the U.S. since 2022.

(Note by John - the Grays Harbor detection listed here is undoubtedly from the deceased owner’s flock - we MAY or may not get phylogenetic data at some point from those isolates in GISAID if USDA chooses to release them in concert with the human isolate release by CDC - that was past practice. All bets are off with the new administration…)

While it is reassuring when the DOH states that `No other people involved have tested positive for avian influenza.’, that leaves a lot of unanswered questions.

How many `contacts’ have actually been tested? What criteria was used for determining a close contact? Have any ‘contacts’ declined testing? How long after exposure were these tests conducted? How many tests are pending? Are there plans for serological follow-ups?

While I have little doubt that the local health department is being diligent in their epidemiological investigation - given the stakes - it would be nice to have more specifics.

Hopefully, we’ll get a more detailed account in an MMWR field report down the road.

This assumes that CDC has personnel on the ground and/or that WA staff will be allowed to write up a field report in MMWR. Hopefully, the “blue state” WA public health and ag departments will document this case investigation in some publication, including rigorous follow-up serological sampling, regardless of CDC’s and USDA’s ultimate level of participation.

For those of interested in a research piece on H5N5, including its movement into the western hemisphere: Multiple transatlantic incursions of highly pathogenic avian influenza clade 2.3.4.4b A(H5N5) virus into North America and spillover to mammals

Time will tell whether this virus gains prominence in either people or domestic birds/animals. It’s clear that it’s now part of our hemispheric H5 mix to be monitored with all the other pieces floating about out there. Further, under the right circumstances, it’s lethal…

HPAI Case Numbers

I’ve spent the last few days buried in spreadsheets and Indiana BOAH Sitrep e-mails summarizing up the fall 2025 HPAI carnage. The early 2025 Ohio-Indiana H5 “viral fog” documented by Nat Lash in ProPublica (see below) is currently repeating itself in northern Indiana’s Amish poultry industry (ducks, layers, and broilers).

Indiana is the top state for commercial duck production in the U.S., a position it has held for decades and is largely due to two major producers: Maple Leaf Farms and Culver Duck, which are responsible for about 75% of the nation’s duck harvest. In 2022, Indiana sold over 13 million ducks, representing a significant portion of the national total.

While we think of the Amish farms as horse and buggy operations sans electricity, many of them use quite sophisticated production methods with relatively large-sized production facilities, as evidenced by the numbers of ducks and chickens populating many of the infected farms.

Here is a slide showing the 2 infected counties in Northern Indiana, with a case count by week graph below. Note the ominous comparison with the classic “epidemic curve” shown above right, although we don’t know how close we may be to the “peak” in the real world.

Cases are increasing somewhat exponentially by the week. At some point the virus will exhaust its source of susceptible flocks; those on the ground have a better grasp of that than us watching from afar. Hopefully the outbreak won’t travel into southern Michigan or other production areas in Indiana - time will tell.

One concern is that the Indiana Board of Animal Health currently has 13 flocks (listed below from my spreadsheet) as probable but non-NVSL confirmed cases in the SitReps. I include them in my analyses, since non-confirmation of BOAH-listed NAHLN-positive cases is rare. Look for big Indiana numbers on the NVSL confirmed list early next week, with slight variations in dates confirmed and flock numbers:

Moving on to the national picture we now have a total of 172 cases (including the 13 “non-confirmed” Indiana BOAH announced cases). 48 of those are classified “non-poultry” or backyard flocks. The balance are commercial production flocks of some sort. We’ve now lost over 9 million domestic birds in 172 flocks to H5 since August 28th!

As usual, from a bird count standpoint, egg layers predominate in bird mortality, but turkeys have been hit hard by flock count. No industry has suffered more than ducks when considering percentage of the industry involved, with a California outbreak and all the Indiana losses hitting where a large percentage of ducks are produced.

Here is an analysis by state:

While 26 states have been infected to date, 4 upper Midwest states have borne the brunt of the losses from a case numbers standpoint - Indiana, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Michigan.

The historical counts are showing an alarming trend for an accelerating number of cases each month. I made a simple extrapolation of the November data to arrive at a projected end of November case count (113), shown on the graph above in lighter shading.

Accelerating cases per day is the most alarming trend in my opinion:

We are currently approaching 3.5 to 4 confirmed cases per day at the current rate of case growth. Are we at the top of the curve early for the season on December 1st? Or will the virus crop up in new geographically concentrated production areas to repeat the “area spread” patterns we’ve now repeatedly seen in:

1. multiple flocks surrounding 2024 dairy herd outbreaks in MI, TX, NM, IA, MN, SD(?)

2. California-2024-25;

3. IN-OH - early 2025;

4. AZ in early 2025 from dairy outbreak(s)

5. SD-ND-MN-early fall 2025;

6. Indiana currently

Explosive area outbreaks are now a feature, not an aberration with HPAI in the U.S. This epidemiological pattern is not compatible with “mechanical” biosecurity lapses across all infected farms. Rather…

The Answer My Friend is Blowing in the Wind

All this leads to perhaps the most interesting avian flu-related article of the week or year released Tuesday by Nathaniel Lash: What the U.S. Government Is Dismissing That Could Seed a Bird Flu Pandemic — ProPublica

Reporting Highlights

• Gone With The Wind: After a bird flu outbreak tore through Midwestern barns, killing hens and spiking egg prices, the USDA didn’t investigate whether the virus was airborne. ProPublica did.

• “Seems So Likely”: Experts say ProPublica’s analysis offers a plausible explanation for how the wind could have helped spread the virus, exposing a flaw in the USDA’s playbook to fight it.

• Vaccine Resistant: To combat bird flu spread, other countries have authorized poultry vaccines, but the U.S. has held off amid political and economic opposition.

Please read and study this article in its entirety; this is animal health Pulitzer Prize material! I want to pull out a few of the gems from the text for further comment.

“It just seems so likely to me that this was an airborne thing,” said Brian McCluskey, former chief epidemiologist with USDA’s agency that oversees the response to bird flu. “I mean, how else would it have moved around so quickly?”

The experts stressed the analysis didn’t prove the wind directly carried bird flu from one farm to another, or that it was the only factor at play. The virus typically spreads via multiple routes, which could include contaminated birds, rodents or workers; if farms share the same feed supplier or trash collector, those factors can’t be ruled out.

But several experts said ProPublica’s analysis underscores the shortcomings of the government’s strategy, which fails to take the wind into account at all.

“USDA has been grossly negligent in not establishing risk factors in real time,” said Simon Shane, a poultry veterinarian and consultant.

Two important points here- 1) the speed of new infections is a critical factor in implying airborne spread; however, 2) airborne spread does NOT negate the importance of preventing and critically examining for failures in other possible routes of exposure.

In 2022, a new strain of bird flu began infecting American flocks. About a year into the outbreak, officials noted a striking difference in their statistics: While farm-to-farm spread was responsible for 70% of the 2015 outbreaks, only 15% of cases originated from other farms. Industry and USDA officials concluded biosecurity was a resounding success.

But the government’s 15% statistic was not the big win for biosecurity that it suggested, ProPublica found.

Unlike the 2015 wave, which almost exclusively hit commercial farms, the majority of new infection sites were backyard or hobby farms raising just a few chickens, wide open to the threat of a new strain infecting a more diverse array of wild birds.

But hundreds of commercial farms were still hit by the virus this time around. And had the USDA published comparisons on those farms, a much different picture would have emerged. ProPublica obtained infection data from 2022, when bird flu arrived, through November 2023 (the period covered by a request under the Freedom of Information Act) and found that about 40% of infections on commercial premises were associated with genetically linked clusters. Despite a heavier emphasis on biosecurity, the disease was still moving among farms.

Since then, the threat to farms has gotten a good deal more complicated and the spread among them more significant.

I was still working for APHIS when they announced the <15% farm to farm spread statistic, which sounded extremely hopeful. Unfortunately, I was as naive as others in failing to differentiate between spread between unlinked backyard farms (improbable) versus spread between linked commercial farms, where using the appropriate denominator showed a 40% farm to farm transmission rate. Since then, ProPublica states: “From then until late this summer, 73% of infections on poultry farms appeared to have originated on another farm.”

Wild birds likely introduced the virus to Howe’s Hens outbreak in December, but that’s where their role ended. Every one of the farms that fell from that moment on was infected by another farm, the USDA confirmed. What’s in dispute is how…

The USDA prefers to look at the entire span of this wave — going all the way back to 2022 and including those backyard farms — to reiterate its position that the “overwhelming majority” of infections have been traced to contact with infected wild birds — not spread among farms. It said this winter’s outbreak was “not representative” and was “unique.”

Here is where I really begin to lose patience with USDA, where they freely admitted that the Ohio outbreak was spread farm to farm (closely related genotype on every farm, I assume) but denying that “aerosol spread” was or is a plausible differential means for spread worthy of investigation! Further the agency continues to cling to wild bird contamination as the primary risk for farm infection on any given commercial farm.

I need to take a minute here for a mea culpa. Please do not deduce that just because the evidence shows that the average infected commercial poultry farm is not necessarily infected by wild birds, then wild bird risk assessment and exclusion are not important! Biosecurity remains critical, but not nearly sufficient in preventing a new flock infection in high density production areas!

From here the article provides more evidence supporting area aerosol spread in the OH-IN outbreak, which quickly led to egg industry calls for use of vaccine as the only practical way to defend against HPAI under current conditions:

As hens died in record numbers in February, Tony Wesner, CEO of Rose Acre Farms, spoke to Congress about the difference vaccines had made against other scourges.

“If you look at diseases that we have had in the poultry industry in the past, the only way to get past it was through vaccine,” he said. “We have to control this disease. We have to do it with offense, not defense, which in my opinion is what we have done to this point.”

The government has had a proven poultry vaccine against this strain of the bird flu since July 2023, when USDA scientists concluded several available vaccines provided full protection against death and illness and reduced the shedding of virus in infected chickens. Trade has been among the biggest barriers to using it.

As the egg industry asked newly minted Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to “bring a new sense of urgency” to address the question of vaccination, a bipartisan group of lawmakers wrote to her on behalf of the chicken meat industry, warning of a $10 billion economic loss if USDA authorized a vaccine. “If an egg-laying hen in Michigan is vaccinated,” they wrote, “the U.S. right now would likely be unable to export an unvaccinated broiler chicken from Mississippi.”

The scenario isn’t farfetched. After France vaccinated its ducks, the U.S. paused all poultry imports from the European Union, deeming much of the continent a risk because the vaccine could mask the presence of bird flu. The main way the virus is detected is by noticing dead birds; if vaccinated birds get infected but don’t die, the logic goes, how would anyone know whether the virus is spreading?

That’s not a risk the chicken meat industry is willing to take; it has lost only a tiny share of its chickens to bird flu and wouldn’t have a practical way to vaccinate them anyway. While egg-laying chickens are often in production for at least two years, broiler chickens are slaughtered within two months.

Wesner, the egg company CEO, argued that a large share of exported chicken meat went to countries that already vaccinate against bird flu. “I cannot understand why we cannot get together with those countries and figure this out so we do not ruin trade,” he said.

Vaccine proponents were heartened early in the Trump administration when the USDA licensed a chicken vaccine developed by Zoetis. But soon after, in an interview with Breitbart News, Rollins dashed their hopes that it would be used any time soon.

“It seems like a very simple and easy and quick answer but ultimately the repercussions that we don’t fully understand could be so significant that we just have to go in a different direction,” she said. “We have a tremendous amount of work to do before we would even consider that as a potential solution and that is at least a year or more away.”

She said she’d spoken with Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, who is a veterinarian: “He said to me, ‘Brooke, don’t ever forget, the virus always wins.’”

Pillen said in a March interview that vaccines would still allow the virus to spread and mutate, posing a threat for the disease to spread to people. “Using a vaccine would be absolutely catastrophic because there’s no vaccine that’s effective,” he said.

Kennedy echoed the sentiment in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, saying that vaccination would turn flocks into “mutation factories.”

Experts in avian influenza say the opposite is true. Not vaccinating poultry means that the virus has more opportunities to infect humans and adapt, said Richard Webby, an influenza researcher at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. “These are the interfaces where we know transmission occurs,” he said of poultry farms.

And while it isn’t guaranteed to prevent all infections, vaccination makes them much less likely and lowers the chances that they will spread because the birds wouldn’t shed as much virus, said David Swayne, the former head of the USDA’s poultry research unit. “It makes the chickens or turkeys very, very resistant to infection.”

So…the vaccine argument remains at loggerheads, and no one is blinking…yet!

The Bottom Line - Willful Ignorance

ProPublica and Nat Lash published another article explaining “materials and methods” used in this investigation: How ProPublica Investigated a Bird Flu Outbreak in Ohio and Indiana — ProPublica:

On Tuesday, ProPublica published a story that demonstrates how the federal government is failing to control the spread of a deadly virus that could spark a pandemic.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture typically attributes bird flu outbreaks to failures of biosecurity — meaning farmers have not done enough to protect flocks from contamination by wild birds.

But my genomic analysis shows wild birds had little to do with this particular cluster of infections. Although the USDA said it tested nearly 1,000 virus samples in wild animals from December to April in Ohio and Indiana, no nearby wild birds were found infected with this outbreak’s strain.

I did find a strong predictor of infection during the first few weeks of this outbreak: whether a farm was downwind from that first contaminated facility. That pattern reinforced the suspicions of egg producers and some local officials that the virus may be spreading on the wind.

If bird flu is airborne, the government’s current biosecurity-based strategy cannot protect farms on its own. A poultry vaccine likely would have stemmed the damage from this outbreak, experts told me. Yet while other countries have curbed infections through vaccination, the U.S. has not authorized those efforts amid political and economic pushback.

The USDA told me it didn’t investigate whether the wind contributed to the outbreak’s spread.

Here’s how I used genetic markers, satellite imagery, property records, trade notices, wind simulations and Google Street View to do the work USDA did not.

That is a damning summary of the entire situation - if the Ohio-Indiana outbreak had been a “one-off” we could ask for better performance with upcoming investigations.

However, I referred earlier to the most alarming trend in the current Northern Indiana Situation:

I’ll repeat - We are currently approaching 3.5 to 4 confirmed cases per day at the current rate of case growth. Are we at the top of the curve on December 1st? Or will the virus pop up in new geographically concentrated production areas to repeat the “area spread” patterns we’ve now seen repeatedly in the following historical episodes:

1. multiple flocks surrounding 2024 dairy herd outbreaks in MI, TX, NM, IA, MN, SD(?)

2. California avian (and dairy) cases-2024-25;

3. IN-OH - early 2025;

4. AZ in early 2025 from dairy outbreak(s)

5. SD-ND-MN-early fall 2025;

6. Indiana currently

Explosive area outbreaks are now a feature, not an aberration with HPAI in the U.S. This epidemiological pattern is NOT compatible with mass “surface contamination” biosecurity deficiencies across all infected farms. And NOTHING will change this situation for the balance of the winter 2025-26 influenza season! Area spread is not a new, unique or unproven with HPAI in poultry, with influenza in animals, or in humans for that matter. It’s widely accepted with multiple agents in multiple species.

It’s time to disassociate the vaccine question from the epidemiology issues with this disease. Denying vaccine use will not end the threat from area spread of this virus! No level of biosecurity awareness and compliance will prevent viral incursions into air inlets or from infected nearby human or animal carriers if close by. Follow the science wherever it leads, then address the vaccine policies based on reality-based epidemiological data and scientifically generated recommendations. The ongoing bureaucratic double-speak is just—embarrassing…

Governor Pillen was exactly right - the virus always wins! However, I’d argue that he and Secretary Rollins may have misunderstood the rules for engagement with H5! H5 wins when it replicates! We will have lots of viral replication without vaccine in the face of area spread within our current industry structure - more than we can control or comfortably indemnify, while struggling to maintain egg and poultry meat production with current necessary mandatory depopulation policies. Current “no vaccine” policy is not really a viable choice! The key for managing H5 is to inhibit replication, which vaccination paired with collaborative surveillance can accomplish! Trade restrictions are a man-made barrier, which can be conquered.

Finally, are we really sure that the current system provides consistently H5 negative broiler meat, as assumed? A few cats fed raw FSIS-inspected chicken seem to disagree, and they should not be ignored. We have holes in our H5 certification processes that need to be reassessed, as APHIS recently proposed with revised preslaughter broiler surveillance testing. However, I assume this may be DOA after the initial announcement. Indiana has also suffered a few “WOAH Poultry broiler farm” infections, indicating broiler operations are not immune from area spread infection risks. Widespread HPAI outbreaks in broiler operations could change vaccine calculus in U.S. politics.

In the end, H5 program and vaccine policy is all politics, now more than ever! Kudos to brave reporters like Nat Lash who afflict the comfortable! Facts are facts - and facts are stubborn things…

John