When it comes to federal agencies communicating to the public about H5N1 bird flu, it feels like a classic case of Yogi Berra’s déjà vu all over again.
In the wake of pointed criticism about its failure to release new information about the growing H5N1 outbreak in livestock, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) on April 21 — four weeks after the outbreak first hit the media — “data dumped” genetic information from cattle on its public database. The posted material further confused the public. Two weeks later on May 1, USDA scientists published a preprint of a scientific paper based on this data, which has just muddled things further. While this report maintains that the spread of H5N1 to cattle is limited to a few herds, it also suggests that USDA sat on its data for more than a month and that the virus was mutating fairly rapidly in animals.