Scientists at the Iowa Research Facility are racing to stop the spread of bird flu

AMES, Iowa (AP) — At first glance, it looks like an unassuming farm. Cows are scattered across the fenced fields. A milking barn sits in the distance with a tractor parked alongside. But the people who work there aren’t farmers, and other buildings look more like what you’d find at a modern university than a cow pasture.

Welcome to the National Animal Disease Center, a government research facility in Iowa, where 43 scientists are working with pigs, cows and other animals in an effort to solve the bird flu outbreak currently spreading through livestock in USA – and to develop ways to stop it.

Of particular importance is the testing of a cow vaccine designed to stop the continued spread of the virus – hopefully reducing the risk that it will one day become a widespread disease in humans.

The USDA facility opened in 1961 in Ames, a college town about 45 minutes north of Des Moines. The center is located on 523 acres (212 hectares) of pastoral land a few miles east of downtown Ames.

It is a quiet place with a rich history. Over the years, researchers there have developed vaccines against various diseases that endanger pigs and cattle, including hog cholera and brucellosis. And work there during the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic — known at the time as “swine flu” — proved that the virus was confined to the respiratory tract of pigs and that pork was safe to eat.

The center has the unusual resources and expertise to do this kind of work, said Richard Webby, a prominent influenza researcher at St. John’s Children’s Research Hospital. Jude from Memphis.

“That’s not a capability that many places in the U.S. have,” said Webby, who collaborated with the Ames facility on the cow vaccination work.

The campus has 93 buildings, including a high-isolation laboratory building whose exterior resembles a modern megachurch, but inside is a series of corridors and compartmentalized rooms, some containing infected animals. There, scientists work with more dangerous germs, including H5N1 bird flu. There’s also a three-story office building that houses animal disease researchers, as well as a testing center that’s an “animal” version of the CDC’s Atlanta labs that identify rare (and sometimes scary) new human infections .

About 660 people work on campus — about a third of them are assigned to the animal disease center, which has an annual budget of $38 million. They were already busy with a wide range of projects, but they got even busier this year after the H5N1 bird flu unexpectedly jumped into US dairy cows.

“It’s just amazing how people dig in and make it work,” said Mark Ackermann, the center’s director.

The virus was first identified in 1959 and has become a widespread and highly lethal threat to migratory and domestic birds. Meanwhile, the virus has evolved, and in the past few years it has been detected in a growing number of animals, from dogs and cats to sea lions and polar bears.

Despite the spread to different animals, scientists were still surprised this year when infections were suddenly detected in cows – specifically, in the udder and milk of dairy cows. It’s not unusual for bacteria to cause udder infections, but a flu virus?

“We usually think of the flu as a respiratory disease,” said Kaitlyn Sarlo Davila, a researcher at the Ames facility.

Much of the research on the disease has been done at a USDA poultry research center in Athens, Ga., but the emergence of the virus in cows drew the Ames center into the mix.

Amy Baker, an award-winning researcher for her swine flu research, is now testing a vaccine for cows. Preliminary results are expected soon, she said.

USDA spokeswoman Shilo Weir called the work promising but early in development. There is not yet an approved avian flu vaccine for use on U.S. poultry farms, and Weir said that while bird vaccines are being pursued, any such strategy would be challenging and not guaranteed to eliminate the virus.

Baker and other researchers have also been working on studies trying to see how the virus spreads between cows. The work takes place in the high-isolation building, where scientists and animal keepers don specialized respirators and other protective equipment.

The research exposed four one-year-old heifers to a virus-carrying mist and then injected the virus into the teats and udders of two lactating cows. The first four cows became infected but had few symptoms. Both of them became ill — suffering from decreased appetite, decreased milk production, and producing thick, yellowish milk.

The conclusion that the virus spread primarily through exposure to milk containing high levels of the virus — which could then spread through shared milking equipment or other means — was consistent with what health investigators understood to be happen. But it was important to do the work because sometimes it was difficult to get complete information from dairy farms, Webby said.

“At best, we had some good guesses about how the virus was circulating, but we didn’t really know,” he added.

USDA scientists are doing additional work, checking the blood of calves that drank raw milk for signs of infection.

A study by the Iowa center and several universities concluded that the virus likely circulated for months before it was officially reported in Texas in March.

The study also noted a new and rare combination of genes in the bird flu virus that spread to cows, and researchers are determining whether that allowed it to spread to cows or among cows, said Tavis Anderson, who contributed to management of the work. .

Either way, the Ames researchers expect to be busy for years.

“Do (cows) have their own unique gripes? Can it go from a cow back to wild birds? Can it go from a cow to a man? Cow in a pig?” Anderson added. “Understanding these dynamics, I think, is the outstanding research question — or one of them.”

___

Stobbe reported from New York.

___

The Associated Press Department of Health and Science receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Educational and Science Media Group. AP is solely responsible for all content.

Copyright 2024 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

TOPICS
Iowa