Join us on Thursday, February 13th at 2pm ET (11am Pacific) for a Flash Briefing and Q&A about H5N1 Bird Flu.
We've heard your questions! We're here to give you the latest updates on bird flu - from egg supply to new strains in dairy cows to human case updates. We'll go over why we're not yet panicking about a human pandemic, and what it would take for us to raise the alarm.
The big game is this weekend, which means one thing for managers responsible for staffing: Super Bowl Monday is coming. It’s a day dreaded for its last-minute call-outs and scheduling nightmares. A yearly survey estimates that 22.6 million people plan to miss work the day after the Super Bowl, and another 12.9 million Americans say they’ll go to work late that Monday. But at the same time, flu is at a 22-year high with its second peak of the season, and norovirus is also having a record year. To make things worse, Super Bowl parties may actually be super spreader events, so it’s not easy to assume all illnesses are just hangovers. We highly recommend staffing up enough for a higher-than-usual number of callouts on Monday. The ZHH clinical team asks explicit questions like “Are your symptoms due to hangover?” on Super Bowl Monday and other common days for calling out, and we do find that it can help differentiate between actual illness and those who just partied a little too hard. Managers can also proactively ask employees if they plan to take time off after the game to help with proper staffing and reduce same-day call-outs.
Source: CDC, CIDRAP, Axios, UKG
Up until now, all of the dairy cows infected with H5N1 have had the same genotype, B3.13. It’s likely that there was a single spillover event back in winter 2023 or early 2024, where an infected bird got a cow sick, probably somewhere in Texas. From there, cows spread it to each other, over and over - and to some cats and humans along the way. Birds have been sick with H5N1 for a lot longer and with lots more genotypes, including D1.1, which has been the dominant strain among birds in the U.S. this year. That’s the same strain that both the Louisiana patient who died and the severely ill Canadian teenager had. Recently, some milk samples from Nevada tested positive, and this week, the USDA confirmed that there have been four D1.1 detections in dairy herds there.
This is the second known spillover event in the U.S. where cows became ill from contact with wild birds. This could, and at this rate probably will, continue to happen.
Cows could theoretically be re-infected with different strains, which we’ve seen happening on poultry farms already. And because D1.1 was the strain involved in the two most severe North American cases, there’s some concern that if this continues to spread between cows, the human farm workers who interact with them may have more severe symptoms, but there’s no evidence of that at this point.
We are still not panicking about the impact on humans here. We would need to see evidence that farm workers who interacted with these sick cows are having different, more severe symptoms before we worry too much about this. But this doesn’t bode well for the dairy industry, which may see darker days ahead.
For more info on bird flu, join us next Thursday at 2pm ET for a quick briefing and Q&A via Zoom. Register here!
Sources: CIDRAP, NY Times, CDC
Our most dreaded holiday is here - Super Bowl Monday! The big day after the big game is a headache for managers, but there’s continued progress with managers and their employees having more open conversations about taking time, planning to come in late, or swapping shifts to cover the business. The good news - only 2% plan to pretend that they’re sick on Monday: