Scientists are calling on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to disclose data about the risks of bird flu to people and pets that was posted briefly online Wednesday and quickly deleted.

The data table was the only mention of bird flu in a report devoted to air quality and California wildfires.

The data was not included in an embargoed copy of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) shared with news organizations on Tuesday. Until President Donald Trump ordered a communications ban on the agency two weeks ago, MMWR had published every week for decades.

A copy of the deleted data table obtained by The New York Times revealed that a cat infected with the H5N1 virus may have spread it to another cat and to a human in the same home. In a second case, two days after an infected dairy worker showed symptoms, a cat got sick and died the next day.

“If there is new evidence about H5N1 that is been [sic] held up for political purposes, that is just completely at odds with what the government’s responsibility is, which is to protect the American people,” Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University, told The Times.

She called on the CDC to publish the full data immediately along with the context in which they were gathered so other scientists can review them.

To date, 67 human cases of H5N1 infection have been confirmed in the U.S. and a patient in Louisiana has died, according to the CDC. The virus has not yet spread easily from person to person.

But cats are known to be highly susceptible to the bird flu virus, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) reports at least 85 domestic cats have been infected since 2022.

Until Tuesday, no cases of cats passing the virus to people had been documented, The Times reported.

Cases in domestic cats have been rising since last year when the virus began spreading through dairy farms. Some recent cases have been tied to contaminated raw pet food or raw milk.

“Given the number of cats in the U.S. and the close contact with people, there is definitely a need to understand the potential risk,” Dr. Diego Diel, a veterinarian and virologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., told The Times.

While H5N1 primarily affected birds in the past, new versions of the virus are capable of infecting many mammals, including cows and seals. This risks changes in the virus that could make people more vulnerable to it.

A day after his inauguration, Trump ordered federal health agencies to put a hold on communications with the public for an indefinite time. 

The blackout not only affects the CDC, but also the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The CDC website has a prominent advisory that it is “being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.”

More information

There’s more about the gag order and public health at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

SOURCE: The New York Times, media report, Feb. 6, 2025

Source: HealthDay

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