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An update on the probe into Missouri's suspected cluster of human cases of bird flu

A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:

Federal health officials are sharing their investigation into a particularly troubling bird flu case in Missouri - a case that led to suspicions the virus had jumped from human to human. Here's NPR's Will Stone.

WILL STONE, BYLINE: In almost every instance, when a person has ended up with bird flu, there's been an explanation, some link to infected poultry or dairy cattle. Not so for the patient in Missouri. That person who was hospitalized in August did not have any known exposure. Plus, it seemed like they may have spread the virus to half a dozen health care workers who said they later developed symptoms. It was an alarming possibility. Luckily, it seems that did not happen. Three kinds of tests found no evidence of bird flu infections in health care workers. Here's Dr. Demetre Daskalakis with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

DEMETRE DASKALAKIS: This finding rules out person-to-person spread between the index case and any of the health care workers with which they interacted at the hospital.

STONE: A household contact of that hospitalized patient, or index case, does seem to have been sick at the same time. Testing wasn't 100% conclusive. That said, it did show the person had antibodies against bird flu. Daskalakis says their suspicion is that both people caught the virus in the same way.

DASKALAKIS: I can't predict or can't retrospectively guess what that exposure was, but the force of evidence really supports some sort of animal or animal product exposure that happened at the same time.

STONE: What's puzzling is that Missouri has not reported a single dairy herd infection during the outbreak. Dr. Amesh Adalja is a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

AMESH ADALJA: The working assumption has to be that there are dairy cattle in Missouri that have this infection, and they need to find it.

STONE: Adalja says there are still so many unanswered questions. He believes the state needs to be more proactive and transparent.

ADALJA: They haven't still released, you know, what hospital he was treated at, what county he lives in, how many dairy farms are within a 20-mile radius. These are very obvious things to do.

STONE: Which is not to say Missouri is the only concern. Nationwide, the situation is far from contained. Washington state is finding its first human cases. In California, infections have hit dozens of herds this month, and 15 people there have caught the virus. Adalja says the U.S. has been lucky. This is a pretty forgiving bird flu virus. No one is dying. In the future, that may not be the case.

Will Stone, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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Will Stone
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