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First, it’s important to note that Campylobacter infection is a nationally notifiable illness. That means that by the time you find out that an employee tested positive, you can be fairly certain that your local health department has found out, too. Because Campy is a diarrheal illness that can spread through food, it’s particularly important that any food handlers stay home until they’re at least 24 hours symptom-free. On top of that, we recommend that employees working in food service test negative in two consecutive stool samples taken at least 24 hours apart to ensure that they’re not spreading the bacteria to others. As always, ZHH can support end to end with Campy cases, including arranging convenient stool testing for your sick employees. Shoot us an email - or clients can chat in the ZHH app - if you need help with employee testing for return to work.
While we do have at least two types of vaccines that would likely work well against the current strain of H5N1, there are two major issues preventing us from going ahead and starting a large stockpile. First, it can take months to ramp up production, and right now, the U.S. isn’t willing to pause on seasonal flu vaccine production to switch to bird flu vaccines, especially since the need isn’t clear yet. But even more importantly, the H5N1 virus would need to mutate significantly to become an easily transmitted human-to-human virus. Any possible pandemic that would require human vaccination would be from a mutated version of the virus with some significant changes to its genetics. We have no evidence that these current vaccines would work for whatever that new mutated version of the virus would be. We’ve seen this back in 2009 during the swine flu pandemic, when the seasonal H1N1 vaccine didn’t work against the newly mutated H1N1 swine flu virus. That’s why you won’t see governments (or companies) do much stockpiling right now - there are just too many unknowns.
Sources: CIDRAP
Not yet. Right now, the risk of any individual person who doesn’t work on dairy or poultry farms is low. Pasteurization kills the virus in our dairy products and cooking kills it in eggs, so the risk of getting infected through food is very low (just don’t drink raw milk, please!). But there are a lot of risk factors that could tip us over the edge, and the outcome if a bird flu pandemic started could be very, very bad. Right now, the mortality rate for those infected with H5N1 is abysmal - about half die. We’re on the lookout for a few key warning signs that would concern us greatly: if the virus starts spreading to and between pigs, if we see more mutations that make this spread more easily between humans, and if more farm workers develop symptoms and we start to see community spread to their family and friends (or beyond). Right now, the added complication of the sociopolitical context - pitting states and farmers against federal public health officials - raises more concerns that we may miss some of those initial warning signs. We’re not ready to hit the panic button, but we are keeping a close eye on this.
Sources: KFF, Dr. Feigl-Ding, Politico
We think this deep dive by the New York Times into people who believe they’ve been injured by COVID vaccines is worth your time to read. In a time when vaccination in general has become a political issue, taking the time to investigate legitimate claims of side effects is important for building trust, and doesn’t have to undermine the fact that millions have taken the vaccines safely.