Non-Response To H5N1 Outbreak At Dairy Factory Shows Nothing Has Changed W. America's Industrial Meat And Milk

Cats have long been kept at American dairy farms to kill rats, mice and other rodents. In March 2024, a number of barn cats at dairies in the Texas panhandle started to behave strangely. It was like the opening scene of a horror movie. The cats began to walk in circles obsessively. They became listless and depressed, lost their balance, staggered, had seizures, suffered paralysis and died within a few days of becoming ill. At one dairy in north Texas, two dozen cats developed these odd symptoms; more than half were soon dead. Their bodies showed no unusual signs of injury or disease.

Dr Barb Petersen, a veterinarian in Amarillo, heard stories about the sick cats. “I went to one of my dairies last week, and all their cats were missing,” a colleague told her. “I couldn’t figure it out – the cats usually come to my vet truck.” For about a month, Petersen had been investigating a mysterious illness among dairy cattle in Texas. Cows were developing a fever, producing less milk, losing weight. The milk they did produce was thick and yellow. The illness was rarely fatal but could last for weeks, and the decline in milk production was hurting local dairy farmers. Petersen sent fluid samples from sick cows to a diagnostic lab at Iowa State University, yet all the tests came back negative for diseases known to infect cattle. She wondered if there might be a connection between the unexplained illnesses of the cats and the cows. She sent the bodies of two dead barn cats to the lab at Iowa State, where their brains were dissected.

Petersen’s hunch led to a series of important discoveries. The dairy cows in north Texas were suffering from highly pathogenic avian influenza A (H5N1) – and the barn cats had been infected with this virulent bird flu after being fed raw milk from the sick cows. H5N1 had emerged years earlier in Asia, travelled to the United States via migrating birds, and began to devastate US poultry farms in 2022. The fatality rate of H5N1 among poultry approaches 100% – and more than 150 millon chickens have been culled by American farmers since 2022 to halt the spread of this new virus. Researchers have known for years that cats were vulnerable to bird flu. In previous cases, they’d been sickened mainly by eating infected birds. But until Peterson’s discovery, nobody knew that cows could be infected with bird flu, that the virus propagated in their udders, and that it could be spread by their milk.

A commonsense response to the discovery of H5N1 among Texas dairy cattle in 2024 would have been mandatory testing of every cow for the virus, a strict quarantine of dairies where bird flu was found, mandatory testing of milk for contamination, monetary compensation to dairy farmers for any losses caused by the disease, and widespread testing of dairy workers to ensure that H5N1 was not spreading from cows to people. None of those things happened. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is primarily responsible for the health of livestock, not people. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has no authority to test livestock for diseases. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) lacks the authority to test farm animals or farm workers without the permission of farm owners. State officials can wield those powers. But the Texas agriculture commissioner, Sid Miller, a rightwing conspiracy theorist who’d spoken at a QAnon event in Dallas a few years earlier, thought H5N1 posed “no threat to the public”. The dairy industry opposed the routine testing of its cows or workers – and dairy was responsible for about $50bn of economic activity in Texas every year. Miller made clear how he felt about federal investigators visiting dairies in the panhandle to look for bird flu: “They need to back off.”

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/jan/06/we-still-live-in-fast-food-nation-eric-schlosser