As bird flu spreads beyond dairy herds in the Central Valley to farms in Southern California, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency Wednesday to strengthen and streamline the state’s response to the virus.

“This proclamation is a targeted measure to ensure government agencies have the resources and flexibility they need to respond quickly to this outbreak,” Newsom said in a statement.

The emergency declaration allows the governor to release state funds and other resources to help state and local governments hire staff and award contracts to combat the contagion. If necessary, it gives the governor broad authority to issue mandates intended to slow the spread of the virus and bypass certain state laws that could slow the response.

It could also help increase testing capacity, which officials hope will help find cases that likely have gone undetected. There are no reports of the virus arriving at dairies in rural areas of the Bay Area, although the state is not releasing the names of affected farms.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the current public health risk is low. So far this year, 61 human cases of bird flu have been confirmed in the United States. The virus is not known to spread among humans and is rarely transmitted through contact with infected animals. When infections have occurred in humans, they are usually mild and manageable.

But on Wednesday, the CDC confirmed the first known serious avian flu infection in a patient from southwest Louisiana. The hospitalized patient is over 65 years old and has other health complications, according to the Louisiana Department of Health.

The Louisiana patient’s virus is genetically different from the virus spreading among dairy cows. The strain that sickened the Louisiana resident is known as genotype D1.1 and is found among wild birds and poultry workers. The strain circulating in dairy cows and infecting California farm workers is known as the B3.13 genotype.

Recently, D1.1 infected a teenager in Vancouver, British Columbia, who had a severe case that required intensive care. The sequencing data suggests that the teen’s virus contained two possible mutations that could improve the virus’s ability to infect human cells and another mutation that could allow it to multiply more easily in human cells only in the cells of its usual avian host to the journal Nature. None of the infected teenager’s three dozen close contacts became ill.

Bird flu does not spread through food, except raw milk. A recent Stanford study found that the virus remains infectious in refrigerated raw milk for up to five days. It is killed by pasteurization.

After emerging in 2020, the virus caused large outbreaks in birds in Europe, Africa and Asia. It arrived in the U.S. in January 2022 and stormed through the nation’s largest clusters of poultry farms in the East and Midwest, driving up egg prices.

Despite a rapid response – biosecurity measures at farm entrances, immediate killing of potentially infected animals, quarantine of affected farms – the disease has continued to spread and infect dairy cattle.

The continued spread of the virus, now widespread among wild birds and affecting nearly half of California’s dairy farms, is a worrisome development. The more it spreads, the greater the chance it has of mutating.

California’s local health officials welcomed the statement, saying the state must rebuild core workforce and public health infrastructure capacity to quickly detect, respond to and contain public health threats.

“We appreciate Governor Newsom’s actions that provide flexibility and enable California to request more federal funding to support health officials’ ongoing efforts to prevent the spread of H5N1, also known as avian influenza, in livestock and people,” said Elsa Mendoza Jimenez, President Member of the County Health Executives Association of California and Director of Health Services for the County of Monterey Health Department.

In another step to ramp up the response, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Tuesday that a second round of states has been added to its new National Milk Testing Strategy, bringing the number to 13. These states represent eight of the 15 largest milk producing states and account for half of the country’s total production. Farmers and milk processors in these states may be required to provide raw milk samples upon government request.

The USDA confirmed five additional outbreaks in dairy herds on Tuesday, four from California and one from Texas. The outbreak affected 865 dairy herds in 16 states this year. The vast majority of these diagnoses are in California, while Nevada and Texas have each tested positive.

The USDA also reported additional poultry outbreaks in three states. Bird flu has also been confirmed in nearly 124 million poultry in 49 states.

Some counties, like Sonoma, had previously declared a state of emergency to mitigate the impact of the disaster, including providing support to businesses. In November 2023, bird flu raged through Sonoma County’s historic poultry region, resulting in the slaughter of more than a million birds and causing heartache and economic disaster to small family farmers in the once famous “Egg Capital of the World.”

“While the risk to the public remains low,” Newsom said, “we will continue to take all necessary steps to prevent the spread of this virus.”

Originally published: December 18, 2024 at 5:09 pm PST