CDC Finally Allowed To Say Some Things About Health Again, Just Not Bird Flu
Three studies on bird flu still being held back, for reasons.
Yesterday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published its weekly “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report” (MMWR), just like it has every week since the agency began the weekly roundup of epidemiology stuff (to use the scientific term) back in 1952. OK, almost every week. The publication, and virtually all health agency communications with the outside world, was on hold after January 21, when Mad King Donald ordered a shutdown of all federally funded medical science (and other sciencey science too) so it could be screened for wokeness, disloyalty, science that made Trump look bad, unconstitutional mentions of climate change, and brown people.
So hooray, everything is now back to normal in science, if by “everything” you only mean the MMWR. Everything else remains shut down for now. And as the Washington Post reports (gift link), even the MMWR was a little odd this week, since it was missing three studies on H5N1 avian influenza that had been scheduled to be published January 23, according to “multiple CDC officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.”
Now that the weekly reports have resumed, you might think the paused bird flu articles would be in the first post-shutdown number, but thinking that could put you on a list of potential targets for a tax audit, so watch it, you.
Instead, this week’s MMWR carried two reports about wildfires, although thank Crom neither suggested that forests need to be raked or that wasting billions of gallons of water from dams hundreds of miles away can prevent them. One of the reports looked at the levels of PFAS, those nasty “forever chemicals” that don’t break down, in firefighters who worked the devastating Maui fires in 2023. The other was about the rise in emergency room use due to last month’s wildfires in Los Angeles County.
A CDC spokesperson told Medpage Today that the bird flu papers are “still in the pipeline,” but didn’t confirm a publication date. Maybe when Trump releases his plan to replace Obamacare.
The resumed MMWR didn’t include any articles on bird flu, although in a weird slip-up, or hostage note maybe, the Post points out that the report on the LA fires “accidentally” included a chart from an expected study on bird flu in domestic cats. The chart didn’t include any scrawled notes begging for help escaping a dungeon at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta, and was quickly removed from the online report.
So what gives? Nobody inside the government is talking, of course, but plenty of medical experts and people safely retired from the CDC shared their thoughts on the matter with the Post, because isn’t it quite the coincidence that the first issue on returning includes a report on the LA fires? (The report wasn’t critical of the state or LA governments; just a look at trends in emergency room admissions during the fires.) And more worrying, nothing on what could become a pandemic?
“Although I’m encouraged that the MMWR is being published again, I’m surprised and concerned that it doesn’t contain any reports on bird flu spreading in animals and people, the new strain of mpox spreading or other emerging health threats,” said Tom Frieden, a CDC director for the Obama administration.
“If political decisions determine which health threats to highlight, we’ll all be less safe,” Frieden said. “I hope the new administration will see the value in CDC publishing information on health threats every week, without political interference.”
Let’s not forget that Trump’s crew in the first term tried to push the CDC to make sure that the MMWR’s reports on the COVID pandemic would support whatever crazy shit Trump was spouting in his press conferences. The agency wouldn’t do that in 2020, but considering the havoc Trump and Elon Musk have wrought at other federal agencies, scientists with integrity may be quashed by political overseers this time around.
The studies that so far remain blocked sound like they might be a little important during the H5N1 outbreak, which has led to widespread disruption to poultry farms, driving up egg prices. There was the cat study, which I know I want to see, because in addition to the known cases of at least six cats in California being infected by being given raw milk, KFF Health News reports that the new study investigates a different potential vector. It looks at the “possibility that people working in Michigan's dairy industry infected their pet cats.”
These cases were partly revealed last year in emails obtained by KFF Health News. In one email from July 22, an epidemiologist pushed to publish the group's investigation to “inform others about the potential for indirect transmission to companion animals.”
In addition, because the virus has also spread to cattle, we probably need to know the information in another delayed study that
is aimed at whether cattle veterinarians have been unknowingly infected with the H5N1 avian influenza that has sickened hundreds of dairy cow herds in 16 states. Since the virus was first confirmed in dairy cows last spring, agriculture and health officials have been trying to better understand how the pathogen infects humans.
We’ve looked at several other news reports but darned if we saw any mention of what the third report was about. Hope it didn’t have anything to do with any of the now-verboten topics that must not be spoken of in government, like whether any of the fairly rare cases of humans getting infected by animals were found in anyone other than a straight white Christian male who only has sex for the purpose of procreation.
Before being silenced, the CDC emphasized that there are so far no signs that the bird flu virus can be transmitted between humans, and that the risk to the public remains low. The only known cases in humans resulted from contact with infected animals.
That said, the potential for a new pandemic if a variant of the virus evolves that can be spread between humans is why everyone in the infectious disease field is watching the data closely, and why it’s making a lot of researchers a bit antsy that the CDC hasn’t been releasing new studies on bird flu. Crazy scientists, they think they need information all the time!
In any case, the important thing about potentially deadly diseases is that if you don’t test, there’s no infection rate to go up, as the Great Leader wisely observed about COVID in 2020.
As of right now, the Post reports, an HHS memo sent Tuesday said that the “pause” will continue on external communication from health agencies, with the only exceptions so far being the resumed MMWR and a few other public health messages “such as data releases with interpretation or instruction; travel health notices or regulatory or statutorily required communications.” That includes advisories about disease outbreaks, such as one this week about an outbreak of Ebola in Uganda. No cases outside that country have been reported, so whew for now.
Were you anticipating another shoe? Well sure!
But the instructions are confusing, one CDC official said, because staff are still being asked to “flag all mass public communications, including those no longer subject to the pause,” to HHS.
So they’re no longer paused, but they need to be reviewed by a Trump commissar before they can be released anyway.
Good luck, folks!
[WaPo (gift link) / AP / Medpage Today (free with email signup) / KFF Health News at Medpage Today]
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If anyone has ever driven by a farm and smelled a cow then you understand the problem pasteurization is solving.