When H5N1 avian influenza made an unprecedented jump into dairy cattle in early 2024, the development prompted concern on multiple fronts. How would herds with infections fare? Would dairy workers be at risk? Could the virus potentially infect consumers through milk and other dairy products?
Led by a team of virologists at the Influenza Research Institute, University of Wisconsin–Madison researchers and their collaborators immediately got to work to answer some of these questions with important public health and food-safety implications. The work, which was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, helped to ease potential fears about most dairy products and has given policymakers crucial information as they confront the evolving threat the virus poses to the agricultural industry and public health.
First, in a set of experiments the team described in the New England Journal of Medicine in May 2024, the researchers demonstrated that raw milk containing H5N1 poses an infection risk to mammals.