Researchers at Michigan State University are leading a new effort to understand avian flu in dairy cattle.
The school has been awarded a $168,000 grant from the US Department of Agriculture to collect samples from infected herds across Michigan.
According to MSU, the research team will seek to answer several key questions, such as:
- Impact: What are the short- and long-term effects of the disease on reproduction and milk production?
- At the herd level: What factors influence the likelihood of herds becoming infected?
- At the cow level: What increases or decreases the likelihood of cows becoming infected?
- Transmission: How is the virus spreading within and between herds?
James Averill is a researcher and the Assistant Director for AgBio at MSU, which is the research arm for the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
He said the goal is to provide dairy farmers actionable information, and that will take time.
"It's a little too early to be able to jump to that and say, this is what you need to do, or x puts you at higher risk than y, you know. We just don't have enough data to collected to be able to say that with certainty yet," he said.
Averill said researchers will test milk production and nose swabs in an effort to understand how long cattle are shedding the avian flu virus and how long the virus stays active
"What we're trying to do here is try to understand how this virus moves from cow to cow," he said. "The research is being done to either affirm or disprove the hypothesis that are out there of what bodily fluids and routes of transmission might be occurring for this virus and cattle."
Averill said historically researchers have seen the influenza virus in other mammals such as pigs and horses, but not in cattle.
“We've never seen this before. Whether that's a fact of us just not looking for it in the past, or if we're seeing it truly for the first time. So what we're trying to do here is try to understand how this virus moves from cow to cow", he said.
Averill said it may be early fall before the research team has information that will help dairy farmers understand how to mitigate the risk of avian flu on their farms.