Federal health officials will pay for flu shots this year for farmworkers who want them in a move to curb the spread of bird flu after at least 13 dairy and poultry farm workers were infected.
All human cases of the disease in the United States have had mild symptoms and are believed to have been transmitted directly from infected animals rather than between people.
But health authorities are concerned about what might happen if people are infected with bird flu and seasonal flu at the same time. The viruses may swap gene segments, in a process scientists call reassortment. Bird flu could then acquire the ability to spread between people as easily as seasonal flu.
To prevent such co-infections, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Tuesday that it will spend $5 million to purchase seasonal flu vaccines and vaccinate farmworkers in the fall, in collaboration with state and local authorities. Another $5 million will go toward promoting these vaccines.
“We want to do everything we can to reduce the risk of the virus mutating,” said Nirav Shah, deputy director of the CDC.
Seasonal flu vaccines do not protect against bird flu but may reduce co-infections, Shah added. The CDC is looking into the possibility of offering some workers the antiviral drug Tamiflu to prevent them from getting the flu.
U.S. officials say there are at least 200,000 livestock workers in the country. According to the National Center for Farmworker Health, about a quarter of them are routinely vaccinated against seasonal flu.
A limited amount of bird flu vaccine is being produced for people, but the government is not recommending it for farm workers because there is not the kind of person-to-person spread that would trigger such a campaign.
The bird flu virus has been spreading since 2020 among mammals — dogs, cats, skunks, bears and even seals and porpoises — in dozens of countries. Earlier this year, the virus known as H5N1 was detected in livestock in the United States.
