Hello,

A severely sick person hospitalized in Washington state has the bird flu. According to the state health department, the person owned backyard poultry, suggesting they were infected while handling the birds.

Unlike the 70 other reported bird flu cases in the U.S. since March 2024, the Washington patient is infected with the H5N5 strain of the virus, rather than H5N1. The H5N5 bird flu virus has occasionally infected seals, cats, and other mammals since it was first detected in North America in 2023. Studies find that ferrets infected with H5N5 rapidly become very sick. 

Whereas last year the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention held regular briefings on the spread of bird flu, it has mostly been silent since President Donald Trump took office. 

This is the first known human case of bird flu since February, but researchers say authorities have likely missed more mild infections because of scant testing. Before Trump took office, health officials asked workers exposed to the bird flu on poultry and dairy farms to be tested. However, my reporting found that the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation tactics have scared farmworkers — the majority of whom are immigrants — from interacting with authorities or even going to the doctor.

This is a major reason the testing has slowed. From March 2024 to March 2025, about 870 people exposed to the bird flu — mainly workers on dairy and poultry farms — were tested, according to the CDC’s bird flu tracker. An additional 10 were tested in April, but testing then appeared to have stopped for more than six months. After Washington state announced that a patient had the bird flu last week, the tracker registered 80 more tests.   

Were 80 people truly tested within days? Perhaps Washington rapidly tested dozens of people who had been exposed to the patient? Or did the CDC suddenly update its tracker after a lag? After all, many of the agency’s activities stalled during the government shutdown. 

Had this happened last year, the CDC would have held a press briefing to answer questions. But it hasn’t held a single press briefing all year, and the bird flu has hardly been mentioned in the agency’s weekly reports. 

The bird flu has been ticking up on farms over the past several weeks, as wild birds migrate south for the winter. Currently, 86 flocks are infected on U.S. farms and in back yards, representing around 1.84 million birds. Dairy cattle appear to be doing better than last year, but as the virologist Angela Rasmussen points out on her blog, the national milk testing dashboard hasn’t been updated since July, and the federal workforce overseeing the bird flu is depleted.

In other bird flu news, a months-long standoff about an ostrich farm struck by the bird flu in Canada ended this month as the ostriches were put down, execution-style. On MS Now, the news channel formerly known as MSNBC, reporter Brandy Zadrozny recently published a dramatic feature on a conspiratorial contingent fighting to save the birds in Canada, with support from U.S. health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Administrator Mehmet Oz. Her article foreshadows the type of conflict that may arise if bird flu becomes more common in the U.S.

“What could have been a routine disease response at a small farm had become a cause célèbre for anti-vaccine, anti-government activists and the conspiratorial right,” Zadrozny writes. “The episode underscores a legacy of the pandemic in the West: eroded trust in government agencies and rising vaccine hesitancy, and how partisan politics have complicated public health.”

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