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Podcast: Science Quickly
Episode: Bird Flu’s Jump to Cattle Took Dairy Farmers by Surprise (Part 2)
Description: Dairy cattle have become an intermediary between avian influenza found in wild birds and the handful of recorded H5N1 bird flu cases in humans. Senior news reporter Meghan Bartels took a trip upstate to Cornell University’s Teaching Dairy Barn. Early last year Texas dairy farmers noticed lethargic cows producing off-color milk. One of them sent Cornell researchers a sample, which genetic sequencing determined to contain a strain of H5N1. That strain traces its roots to the H5N1 virus that emerged in China in the late 1990s—which spread around the world thanks to migrating wild bird...