A new outbreak of avian influenza, also called the bird flu, has infected commercial poultry facilities in the US since 2020.

On March 25th of this year, experts spotted the first case of it infecting dairy cattle in Texas.

We sat down with the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife and the commissioner of AG, Jonathan Schell, to see how it's impacting Kentucky.

We had our first detection in February, and so we've been tracking this since then, and it has previously showed up in the United States, in North America.

Back in 2014 through 2016, there was a big outbreak and that predominantly affected domestic birds at that time.

It didn't really have this big impact in wildlife that we're seeing with the current outbreak where, you know, we're seeing mortality in wild mammals.

We've seen in wild birds as this strain came in and then it started to reassert with North American variants and actually made it a little less severe.

But there's also been some other spill over into I wouldn't say non-target but accidental host.

So like the wild mammal situation.

So we've had detections in raccoons and Kentucky and then we also just had our recent detection in a mink, which is the first in the United States back in March.

It was first detected in Texas dairy cattle.

And since then it's been in the news and we've been aware of the situation through our state vet's office.

So far it is only in dairy cattle, lactating dairy cattle.

And what the infection is, is a high path.

Aviation influenza, which I think it's H5N1, is the classification of it, the new stuff with cattle, I mean, that's a totally different system and they're not as confined.

And there's definitely a potential exposure to wild birds.

But once what they're seeing in the cows is the count of cow transmission and the movement of the cows has propagated this influenza outbreak.

It's basically it's making them have a little bit less milk production and dehydration a little bit.

But as of now, it's those are mild symptoms and it's affecting the production of the dairy cattle.

The FDA recommend communications that we've got now is that pasteurized milk is completely safe through this process.

It's not in any of the other types of cattle as of right now.

And so the restriction movements that the Federal Government has put down on having them being pre tested before movement across state lines and then here in Kentucky we've implemented a quarantine section to where that they can permit and say that, you know, just make notification that they're receiving cattle into the state of Kentucky from other affected areas in the nation.

Right now, we don't have any cases in Kentucky, in dairy cattle.

And we're we're trying our best to be monitoring that situation.

And with the permitting and the notification process for the state vets office, we should be able to keep a pretty close handle on it.

Now, USDA does some surveillance in Hunter harvested birds, so those are also dead birds.

So that's kind of like passive surveillance where they're harvesting these birds.

And then we would USDA would swab them.

And so we've gotten a few detections through.

That is a zoonotic disease.

And that's one of the reasons why High Path is on everyone's radar from a domestic poultry side or domestic animals to wildlife.

It also affects public health and human health.

The biggest thing we have to keep in mind is the virus can be in the environment, so it can be on your shoes.

That's honestly probably how a lot of the transmission happens on the domestic side is humans moving the virus around, practice effective and understood biosecurity measures on your farm.

It's just clean workstations in your barns that you're milking with.

It's washing in and out, making sure that you don't have any unnecessary composting laying around that animal removals, those kind of things.

Cleaning up in between washes.

The people that have contracted it have either worked in a poultry house that had an outbreak.

So you imagine that a lot of virus in a confined space.

And then the other one was actually a dairy operator.

We know that there was high viral loads in the milk and that's clearly not pasteurized at that point.

So they had a very high risk exposure there and they were able to get it.

And so, yes, it can infect humans, but the average person is at very low risk for this disease.

Currently, nine states have reported outbreaks in dairy cattle.

They are Colorado, Ohio, Idaho, New Mexico, Michigan, Texas, Kansas, South Dakota and North Carolina.