It Was Airborne The Whole Time
An update on H5N1 bird flu.
We haven’t heard much about H5N1 bird flu in a few months.
That’s not because it went away.
In fact, a recent piece in Scientific American confirmed something that many of us knew the whole time. While officials assured us over and over again that the virus wasn’t airborne, a new study by Emory scientists found “small aerosol particles in the air on farms affected by bird flu in California.”
As the scientists say, “It’s everywhere.”
They’re specifically talking about dairy farms, which scientists now describe as “ridiculously contaminated environments.”
This study challenged the prevailing assumption that dairy workers were catching bird flu from contaminated milking equipment. The Emory scientists actually sampled the air, which apparently nobody else had done. They figured out that cows do, in fact, exhale the virus. It basically winds up everywhere. So, the workers are catching bird flu from a combination of surface and airborne transmission. As work by aerosol scientists has ta…