I can comment on this as I’m a member. HPAI is the disease in birds, not in cows. H5N1 is the virus. The goal is, in part, to establish that not only birds carry and spread this virus. These are influenza naming guidelines: www.cdc.gov/flu/about/vi...

I’ve also gotten the feedback that “bird flu” is a scam and I’m spreading lies. I honestly hope that at the end of this, we’ve done our jobs, and people can point at us and say we are scam artists.

That is how I’ll know I’ve been successful.

I'm assuming that is why many were afraid when they got infected, because they could have lost their contracts. The cooperatives should be active in this solution, and incentivize biosecurity like incentivizing milk quality. This will only help us in the long run for the next disease challenge.

6. Incentivize biosecurity. Many modern farms have been built for production efficiency, not biosecurity. That's fine until you get hit with a disease like this one. Dairy producers are often independent, relying on cooperatives to buy their milk.

5. Point of care testing. This is a bias of mine; I think we need point of care testing in both animals and humans to drive boots on the ground level decisions to avoid disease spread.

4. Re-negotiate trade agreements, TOMORROW, so we can tease away the layers/turkeys/cattle from broilers that rely heavily on the export market. WE NEED BOTH BIOSECURITY AND VACCINES TO CONTROL THIS. Considering either one separately as optimally effective is disingenuous.

3. Use that data to drive risk-based modeling to help guide control and animal/product movement strategies.

2. Epidemiology investigations during an outbreak to characterize viral movement patterns so we can CUT IT OFF strategically. But real ones, none of this smoke in mirrors hand waving shit.

Without consistent testing, e.g. within a 10km zone of a poultry outbreak, of ALL at risk species (cows, pigs, horses, etc ) leave us with potential blind spots and may cause re-infections on re-population. We need more lab resources for this, too.

1. Honesty and Data. The narrow focus on only "routinely" testing lactating dairy cows, milk, and commercial poultry ignores several other susceptible hosts that may be contributing to the spillovers and viral ecology.

This is, high-level, what I believe we need to get in front of it:

It has compromised FOOD SECURITY in our country, driven up egg and grocery prices and had terrible welfare impacts to the animals in our care. It has mental health and financial impacts to producers and animal caregivers and rural economies.

This does NOT have to be a human pandemic to be devastating. We've lost nearly 170 million commercial birds and countless domestic and wild mammals and birds since 2022 due to this virus.

The focus on the zoonotic (human) risk in this episode was relevant but most assuredly turned off those that have distrust of public health, science and vaccines in a "post-covid world".