(NEW YORK) — The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has confirmed the first case of severe bird flu in the United States.
The federal health agency said Wednesday that the patient has been hospitalized in Louisiana. No identifying details about the patient were made available.
Genomic data showed the Louisiana patient was infected with a version of the virus recently found to be spreading in wild birds and poultry in the U.S., as well as found in some human cases in Canada and Washington state, according to the CDC.
This is different than the version of the virus found to be spreading in dairy cows and some poultry populations in the U.S.
The Louisiana patient was exposed to sick and dead birds in backyard flocks, although an investigation into the source of the illness is ongoing, the CDC said. This is the first case of human bird flu in the U.S. linked to exposure to backyard flock.
Almost all confirmed cases have had direct contact with infected cattle or infected livestock. Prior to the case confirmed in the Louisiana patient, cases had been mild and patients had all recovered after receiving antiviral medication, according to the CDC and state health officials. One previous case in Missouri was hospitalized, but health officials pointed to other health conditions aside from bird flu infection involved in the patient’s admission to the hospital.
Signs and symptoms of infection in humans often include sore throat, cough, fever, runny or stuffy nose, headache, muscle or body aches, fatigue and shortness of breath, the CDC says. Less common symptoms include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and seizures.
Infections can range from no symptoms or mild illness, such as flu-like symptoms, to more severe illness, such as pneumonia that could require hospitalizations, the CDC says.
“The best way to prevent bird flu is to avoid exposure whenever possible. Infected birds shed avian influenza A viruses in their saliva, mucous and feces,” the CDC wrote Wednesday in a press release. “Other infected animals may shed avian influenza A viruses in respiratory secretions and other bodily fluids (e.g., in unpasteurized cow milk or ‘raw milk’).”
The CDC said no person-to-person transmission has been detected and the risk to the general public is low. However, those who work with birds, poultry or cows — or have recreational exposure to them — are at higher risk and should take precautions recommended by the health agency.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture issued a new federal order last week that raw milk samples nationwide will be collected and shared with the department in order to test for bird flu.
The decision came after the bird flu virus was found in samples of raw milk from a California farm, which issued a recall of all of its raw milk products earlier this week. The farm was also placed under quarantine by state health officials.
ABC News’ Youri Benadjaoud contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — A rise in rates of sudden unexpected infant deaths may have been linked to an off-season surge of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in 2021, according to a new study published Thursday in the journal JAMA Open Network.
Sudden unexpected infant deaths (SUID) includes deaths of infants under one year old without a known cause, deaths that are due to accidental suffocation or strangulation in bed and those from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“This is an important topic because SIDS and other unexpected deaths are still one of the leading causes of infant mortality, and there’s still a lot unknown,” said Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist and chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News contributor.
The most recent CDC data shows about 3,700 infants died from SUID in 2022 and 41% were from SIDS.
“There are very few things that are as horrific as a family experiencing a sudden infant death, and especially given the causes are so often unknown,” Brownstein said.
Using records from the CDC, researchers analyzed more than 14,000 cases of SUID and found that rates per 100,000 live births increased by 10% from 2019 to 2021.
Results showed the risk of SUID was highest from June to December 2021 — at the same time there was an off-season surge in hospitalizations due to RSV after the virus skipped its typical winter season in 2020.
Influenza hospitalizations were rare during this time and hospitalizations from COVID-19 did not have any clear association with monthly changes in SUID rates in the study.
These findings may indicate a connection between the risk of SUID and seasonal shifts in infections like RSV, but more research is needed to better understand this link.
“The findings underscore the importance of monitoring infant mortality during and after pandemics and obviously it puts big support for vaccinations and RSV prevention,” Brownstein said.
Currently, there are newer RSV shots available that doctors say are important to help prevent RSV and give babies the best protection against this virus that hospitalizes thousands of kids a year, mostly babies.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends pregnant women get an RSV vaccine between 32 and 36 weeks of pregnancy to pass on antibody protection to newborns.
The CDC recommends an RSV antibody shot called nirsevimab for all babies less than 8 months old unless their mother received an RSV vaccine in pregnancy at least 2 weeks before birth.
While nirsevimab had supply constraints last year in its first season, Sanofi, the drug manufacturer, recently announced they have started shipping shots to doctors’ offices and anticipate having enough doses for all eligible babies in the US this RSV season.
Doctors say safe sleep is also important for SUID prevention. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that infants sleep alone, placed down on their back on a firm, flat surface, with nothing in the sleeping area other than a fitted sheet.
Scott Gummerson, MD, ScM, is an emergency medicine resident and member of the ABC Medical News Unit.
Jade A. Cobern, MD, MPH is a physician board-certified in pediatrics and preventive medicine and a medical fellow of the ABC News Medical Unit.
(NEW YORK) — People who were diagnosed with severe COVID-19 infections from the first wave of the pandemic could face double the risk of heart attack and stroke, a new study has found.
The study, published this week in the journal Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology and supported by the National Institutes of Health, found the elevated risk could last for up to three years
Researchers focused on the long-term cardiovascular risks for unvaccinated people who were sick with the virus during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019 and 2020.
Compared to someone who never had COVID-19, the likelihood of heart attack, stroke and death doubled for anyone who was ever ill with the virus, and was four times higher for people who required hospitalization, the study found.
The elevated danger persisted for more than three years after the initial infection, which, according to the study, posed a serious cardiovascular threat comparable to that of type 2 diabetes.
“Findings suggest severe COVID-19 infection as a catastrophic component,” Dr. Hooman Allayee, the study’s principal investigator, told ABC News. “Cardiovascular mortality trends from 2010 to 2019 were steadily going down. Then, all of a sudden, between 2020 and 2022, ten years of work [was] completely wiped out because of COVID-19.”
People with blood types A, B and AB were especially vulnerable to increased cardiovascular risk from COVID-19, while people with type O blood had a reduced chance of facing such issues, according to the study.
“Blood type is known to be associated with heart attack and stroke risk,” said Allayee, who is a professor of population and public health sciences at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. “If your blood type is A, B or AB, the virus is more likely to infect you and makes these blood cells open to viral entry.”
The study analyzed individuals from the UK Biobank, a large medical database consisting primarily of data taken from older, wealthier and predominantly white participants. However, similar studies looking at other populations came to nearly identical conclusions, according to Allayee.
The study emphasized the importance of COVID-19 vaccinations, Allayee said.
“No matter what vaccine you got, just six months after the vaccination or the booster, the chance of heart attack and stroke went down,” he said. “But immunity wanes over time, which is why you need the boosters. If not, you could be susceptible to getting severe COVID again.”
Anyone who has ever had a severe COVID-19 infection, especially if they required a hospital stay, should discuss the potentially increased health hazards caused by the virus with their health care provider, Allayee stressed.
“Talk to your doctor and start the discussion with your physician,” he said. “It’s not going away, so we have to start talking about it. Stay on top of your vaccinations and boosters and get regular check-ups.”
Mahir Qureshi, M.D. is an internal medicine physician resident at Cooper University Hospital and a member of the ABC Medical Unit.
(WASHINGTON) — Named to lead the nation’s sprawling Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has big ideas for busting public health policy norms.
His Senate confirmation hearings — should they happen — will come with lots of questions about what Kennedy’s ideas would look like in practice.
His new role would mean relinquishing his outsider critic status and working from within a massive government system, leading an agency of 80,000 employees and dealing with everything from drug approvals to food recalls to the pandemic response.
So, what happens when his motto “Make America Healthy Again” collides with one of Washington’s largest government bureaucracies?
“He seems very clear on what it is he wants to get done. I’m just not sure he has an understanding of what it will take to get that done,” said one former senior HHS official who worked in the Biden administration.
Vaccines
On vaccines, President-elect Donald Trump’s picks of Johns Hopkins University professor Marty Makary to lead the Food and Drug Administration, former GOP Rep. Dave Weldon to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Dr. Janette Nesheiwat as surgeon general certainly add to Kennedy’s ability to make changes — if they’re confirmed by the Senate.
Both Makary and Weldon have raised questions about vaccine side effects, although they’ve also at times been supportive overall of the role vaccines play in public health. Kennedy himself has falsely claimed that vaccines cause autism, which has been debunked by numerous studies.
In their new positions, Makary, Weldon and Kennedy would have the power to select the experts who sit on important FDA and CDC advisory panels. Those panels play a key role in vaccine recommendations and authorizations for the general public, ultimately creating public health guidance for years to come.
“I think massively, in large part, the health care community would continue to move forward on vaccines as they do now, as they are considered to be one of the massive successes of public health in the last 100 years. And I don’t think that would change,” said Tom Inglesby, a former senior adviser to HHS and the White House during COVID-19 during the Biden administration.
“But what could change is potentially the cost of vaccines, the access to vaccines, guidance around new vaccines that might come online, and also confusion around public messaging from the federal government about safety and effectiveness of vaccines,” Inglesby said.
Food and nutrition
When it comes to chemicals and the food Americans consume, it’s less clear how Kennedy could make changes at HHS, as opposed to the Environmental Protection Agency or the Department of Agriculture, which have more oversight of areas such as water fluoridation, which Kennedy opposes, or school lunches, which he says he wants to make healthier. He has said, however, that he would gut the entire nutrition department at the FDA.
Kennedy could also move around funding — he’s said he’d deprioritize infectious disease research in favor of chronic illness research, for example. As avian flu cases continue to rise — raising concerns about a new pandemic — public health experts and former government officials have pushed back strongly on that idea.
But he has also called for restrictions on food additives, dyes and ultra-processed foods, something he could have direct influence over through the FDA, which determines safe thresholds for the “Acceptable Daily Intake” on substances.
Kennedy has generally received a more cautious welcome from the public health community regarding his focus on healthy food.
“There are some things here that are worth working on. You know, if we’re looking at the school lunch program in America, 30 million children get more than half of their calories from that program. It would be a wonderful thing to make that the best school lunch program possible,” said Dr. Richard Besser, former CDC acting director.
But many public health experts are also wary of giving Kennedy credit, for fear it could lend credibility to other false information he promotes. He advocates drinking raw milk, for example, even though the pasteurization process kills off bacteria that can cause serious illness, including the fast-spreading avian flu.
“One of the dangerous things about RFK Jr. is that there are bits of things he says that are true, and they’re mixed in. And it makes it really hard to sort out what things you should follow because they’re based on fact, and which things are not,” Besser told ABC News, where he was former chief health and medical editor.
Experts also question Kennedy’s ability to counter powerful Washington lobbies — one of his stated main goals — in a Trump administration focused on working with big business on deregulating industries.
Abortion access
Another area where Kennedy could be out of line with the Trump administration is abortion access. Kennedy has said he supports legal abortion access until fetal viability (despite an earlier comment on the campaign trail that he later walked back about supporting a 15-week ban) and that such decisions should be up to women.
Many abortion rights advocates still expect the Trump administration to quickly move to rescind protections and halt legal fights the Biden administration initiated after the fall of Roe v. Wade — but are hopeful that Kennedy and the broader administration would not attempt sweeping bans.
“[Trump’s] obviously waffled on this and other issues a thousand times so I’m not going to trust every word he says, but I do think there’s the possibility that he and his administration has seen that actually, abortion access is very popular,” said Katie O’Connor, senior director of abortion policy at the National Women’s Law Center.
“We have seen that over the past three elections, and there could be pushback if this administration does something to further restrict abortion access.”
There are certainly members of Trump’s orbit who would support broader restrictions on abortion, but Trump himself has said he would not sign a federal ban if Congress passed one.
Some of the policies O’Connor expects to see rolled back would include the Pentagon paying for service members who need to cross state lines to get an abortion because of where they were stationed, as well as expanded access to abortion pills through telemedicine.
As HHS secretary, Kennedy could undo these rules and also build on the first Trump administration’s efforts. He could expand protections for health care providers who don’t want to perform abortion procedures, allowing more providers to deny care, and make it more difficult for private insurers to cover abortion, leaving it more expensive for patients, O’Connor said.
Large-scale bans, were they executed, would focus on removing access to the medication abortion pill called mifepristone, either by attempting to take medication abortion off the market by way of the FDA approval process, or employing a very old law called the Comstock Act to prohibit the pills from being mailed.
“I do hold out hope that this administration doesn’t want to expand political capital on abortion,” O’Connor said.
