The withdrawal represents the administration’s latest missed opportunity to protect public health, food safety experts said. It was applauded by the poultry industry, which said the measure would have imposed a financial burden on producers without doing much to reduce contamination risk.

The USDA last month eliminated two committees that advised it on food safety, while the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently suspended a quality control program for testing milk and other dairy products.

Salmonellae are bacteria that live in animal and human intestines and are shed through feces. People usually become infected by consuming contaminated water or food, and symptoms include diarrhea and fever.

The proposal, which the Biden administration announced last summer, would have set final standards to determine whether raw poultry products are contaminated with certain Salmonella. It also sought to require poultry facilities to use certain procedures to monitor and document their processes for preventing contamination.

The proposal took three years to develop and included input from one of the two suspended food safety committees, the USDA said last year.

It represented a critical shift from reacting to outbreaks toward preventing them, said Darin Detwiler, an associate teaching professor at Northeastern University and food safety adviser.

“The proposal would have, for the first time, set enforceable limits on contamination,” he said. “This proposal was a long-overdue step toward aligning poultry safety regulations with modern science and consumer expectations.”

The USDA said in an emailed statement that the proposal would have been burdensome for U.S. businesses and consumers and that it did not offer an effective approach to address Salmonella in poultry.

Consumer advocacy group Consumer Reports said the withdrawal will weaken the agency’s ability to respond to outbreaks of foodborne illness.

The CDC estimates Salmonella causes about 1.35 million infections in the United States annually, though only 1 in 30 infections is diagnosed. Resistance to antibiotics is increasing in Salmonella, which can limit treatment options for people with severe infections, according to the CDC.

—Additional reporting by Leah Douglas in Washington

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Since U.S. President Donald Trump took office on January 20, two federal agencies responsible for monitoring and responding to the epidemic have withheld bird flu reports and canceled congressional briefings and meetings with state health officials, the sources said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention withheld two weekly reports, one on bird flu transmission and another on surveillance, and canceled several meetings on bird flu with state officials.

The CDC and U.S. Department of Agriculture held no congressional briefings for three weeks, and the USDA did not respond to a state official’s request for information on a new program to protect the nation’s food supply, the sources said.

The result has been anxiety among federal health staff that critical information about bird flu will not be disseminated in a timely manner or at all, even as more people and livestock test positive for the virus.

“The confusion over messaging and who can say what or anything is complicating matters at a bad time,” said Keith Poulsen, director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, who has been working closely with federal and state officials on the bird flu response.

Trump’s decision to withdraw the U.S. from the World Health Organization has also hampered information sharing that enables officials to track outbreaks and strains of the virus in other countries, three sources said.

The CDC has said the risk to the general public from bird flu remains low. However, increasing outbreaks in livestock and humans in the U.S. have raised concerns among scientists that the virus could mutate in a way that enables person-to-person transmission.

Bird flu has infected nearly 70 people in the U.S. since April and killed one person. It has wiped out about 159 million chickens, turkeys and other birds nationwide since the outbreak began in poultry in 2022. U.S. egg prices have soared to record highs, imperiling Trump’s pledges to bring down costs for Americans.

The USDA on February 5 said dairy cattle were infected with a second strain of bird flu, increasing concerns over its spread.

Before Trump’s inauguration, federal officials were in regular contact with state officials and industry groups as part of the U.S. response to its biggest animal-health emergency in history.

The USDA said it continued regular communications with other federal agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services, and external parties, such as states, throughout the transition into Trump’s second term.

HHS, which oversees the CDC, said it has resumed some external communications since a temporary freeze on public health agency communications ended on February 1. It did not respond to detailed questions.

Reports withheld

The CDC has not released two bird flu reports scheduled to be published on January 23 because of a lengthy and unusual review process, according to two sources with knowledge of the agency’s activity.

One of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports describes the first bird flu infections among cats that had no access to the outdoors. The other is a report on surveillance of wastewater in Oregon near poultry and dairy farms, according to screenshots of internal summaries seen by Reuters.

For decades, these weekly reports have been a way for the CDC to communicate important information to local health officials and clinicians so they can properly treat and protect patients, said Arthur Reingold, epidemiology professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

“It’s just extraordinary, frankly, that we would slow down or delay or impede that kind of communication,” Reingold said.

‘Chaotic messaging’

The U.S. last week did not participate in a WHO meeting of specialists looking at influenza strains, including H5N1 bird flu, said Scott Prendergast, director in the agency’s health emergencies team.

“We no longer have the communication of things that are happening in the U.S.,” Prendergast said.

At least one state, Minnesota, has struggled to get information from the USDA about bird flu.

The state’s Board of Animal Health did not receive answers to questions it posed in January about a USDA program to increase testing of turkeys to protect the U.S. food supply, said Shauna Voss, the board’s interim assistant director.

Other actions from the Trump administration, such as the planned freeze on federal funding, have added confusion, she said.

“That certainly chaotic messaging can trickle down to the state level and ultimately can impact our farmers who produce our food,” Voss said.

The CDC and USDA also canceled weekly or biweekly bird flu meetings with state veterinarians and congressional staff meant to help officials keep abreast of the latest virus detections and federal actions to contain the spread after Trump’s inauguration, five sources said.

After a three-week pause, USDA said it resumed congressional briefings on February 7.

— Additional reporting by Jennifer Rigby in London

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The CDC said the patient’s sample showed mutations in the hemagglutinin (HA) gene, the part of the virus that plays a key role in it attaching to host cells.

The health body said the risk to the general public from the outbreak has not changed and remains low.

Last week, the United States reported its first severe case of the virus, in a Louisiana resident above the age of 65, who was suffering from severe respiratory illness.

The patient was infected with the D1.1 genotype of the virus that was recently detected in wild birds and poultry in the United States, and not the B3.13 genotype detected in dairy cows, human cases and some poultry in multiple states.

The mutations seen in the patient are rare but have been reported in some cases in other countries and most often during severe infections. One of the mutations was also seen in another severe case from British Columbia, Canada.

No transmission from the patient in Louisiana to other persons has been identified, said the CDC.

—Reporting by Puyaan Singh in Bengaluru

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The person, who also had underlying medical conditions, was sent to hospital on Aug. 22 and later tested positive with the H5 avian influenza strain. The infection was detected by Missouri’s state standard flu surveillance system. The U.S. Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said it will study the flu strain more.

The case, being the first in the U.S. without known animal transmission, as well as the first case requiring hospitalization, has alarmed infectious disease experts. However, it has not been confirmed that the cause of the person’s hospitalization was bird flu. All 15 previous human cases in the U.S. during the current outbreak worked in farms and only showed minor illness.

Researchers from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and the Baylor College of Medicine detected H5N1 in the wastewater of 10 cities in the state.

In an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers in Texas said they collected 399 wastewater samples from March 4 to July 15, of which 100 tested positive for H5N1. The 100 positive samples came from 22 out of 23 sites and all 10 cities examined. Before March, 1,337 samples tested negative for the virus. Despite the abundance of H5N1, there were no reported hospitalizations due to infection.

The wastewater testing program was established as part of the Texas Epidemic Public Health Institute.

Elsewhere, three wastewater sites in California’s Bay Area detected H5N1 in June.

More than 100 million poultry, as well as more than 10,000 wild birds and 200 dairy herds were affected by bird flu as of Sept. 11, according to the CDC. Outbreaks were detected in poultry in 48 states, as well as in dairy cows in 14 states.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has not yet detected infections in dairy cattle. However, poultry, wild birds and other animals have been infected.

According to the CFIA, there have been 183 confirmed or suspected cases of bird flu in 2024 so far, with poultry cases found in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia.

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USDA officials, in a call with reporters along with staff from other U.S. health agencies, said the tests will begin in mid-September and urged livestock workers to remain vigilant.

Nearly 200 herds in 13 U.S. states have contracted bird flu since March after the virus jumped from wild birds to cows, according to USDA data.

The USDA in May tested 109 beef samples from dairy cows sent to slaughter and found bird flu virus particles in one cow’s tissue sample. Older dairy cattle are often slaughtered for ground beef.

The expanded testing will continue for the rest of the year, and will focus on beef from dairy cows, said Emilio Esteban, USDA’s under secretary for food safety.

Eric Deeble, deputy under secretary for marketing and regulatory programs, said the USDA is confident with the current level of bird-flu testing conducted by the nation’s dairy farmers.

“I do feel that the response is adequate,” he said.

The Food and Drug Administration is talking with states about the plausibility of additional nationwide raw milk testing, said Steve Grube, chief medical officer of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.

Colorado implemented mandatory weekly milk testing for dairy farmers on July 22 and has since detected 10 additional positive herds in the state.

Farm workers remain at risk of bird-flu infections so long as the virus circulates among livestock, said Nirav Shah, principal deputy director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Thirteen poultry and dairy workers have contracted bird flu since April, according to the CDC.

The CDC is working on expanding its surveillance wastewater testing to H5 viruses in advance of the fall and winter flu season, Shah said.

—Reporting for Reuters by Leah Douglas, Tom Polansek and Bhanvi Satija

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The ongoing outbreak of bird flu has infected poultry flocks in nearly every U.S. state since 2022 and more than 170 dairy herds in 13 states since March, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Thirteen poultry and dairy farm workers have contracted the virus in Colorado, Michigan and Texas, according to the CDC. Nine of those cases were detected in July among workers killing chickens at two poultry farms with bird flu in Colorado.

The risk to the general public from bird flu is still low, CDC’s principal director Nirav Shah said on a call with reporters.

The CDC does not currently have any further human tests awaiting confirmation, though additional human cases in Colorado or elsewhere are possible, Shah added.

The Atlanta-based agency will allocate $5 million to organizations including the National Center for Farmworker Health to educate and train workers on protecting themselves from bird flu, and another $5 million to providing seasonal flu shots to farm workers, Shah said.

Though the seasonal flu vaccine does not provide protection from bird flu, the vaccine push could reduce the risk that workers become infected with the seasonal flu and bird flu at the same time, which could lead to flu virus mutations, Shah added.

“Preventing seasonal influenza for these workers, many of whom are also exposed to bird flu, may reduce risks of new strains of influenza emerging,” Shah said.

The CDC is hoping to vaccinate all of the nation’s approximately 200,000 livestock workers during this year’s flu shot season and is working with states to develop plans to reach the workers, Shah added.

The USDA believes it can stop the spread of bird flu among dairy cows and eventually eradicate the disease, Eric Deeble, an agency undersecretary, said on the call.

—Additional reporting for Reuters by Ahmed Aboulenein in Washington

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Scientists and government officials hope the research will guide efforts to contain the virus and reduce exposure to humans. Respiratory spread could give the virus more opportunity to evolve, they said.

Scientists have so far suspected the virus spreads among animals and humans through contact with infected milk or aerosolized milk droplets, or from exposure to infected birds or poultry.

The Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development is working with Michigan State University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to plan research on farms to evaluate respiratory spread, Tim Boring, the department’s director, said in an interview.

“This is an area of concern that we’re building out and looking more into,” Boring said. The research is a high priority and will be important to guiding the state’s public policy, he said.

The USDA did not respond to a request for comment.

Bird flu has been reported in more than 80 dairy herds across 11 states since late March.

The exact mechanics of the spread of the virus are still unclear, though there is evidence of spread to cows from wild birds and other cows.

The virus has been identified mainly in milk, but also in nasal swabs at lesser levels, said Zelmar Rodriguez, a dairy veterinarian and assistant professor in Michigan State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine who has researched affected farms.

“If it’s present in the nose when the cow is shedding (virus), it’s potentially transmitted through air,” he said.

Any change in how the virus is transmitting gives it the opportunity to evolve, said Richard Webby, a St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital virologist who studies flu in animals and birds for the World Health Organization.

“We certainly don’t want that,” Webby said.

But for the virus to be a more significant threat to human health, it would need to undergo further genetic mutations, Webby said.

The third dairy worker to contract avian flu, who lives in Michigan, reported respiratory symptoms, including coughing. Flu experts said the worker was most likely infected through close contact with milk through splashes or aerosolized droplets.

Respiratory symptoms have often been seen in prior human bird flu infections. The first two U.S. workers known to be infected during this outbreak only reported symptoms of conjunctivitis, or pink eye.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the latest case does not change its assessment that bird flu is a low risk to the general public, and that it has not seen evidence of human-to-human transmission.

The worker with respiratory symptoms was still recovering as of a few days ago, said Natasha Bagdasarian, Michigan’s chief medical executive, in an interview.

Michigan aims to begin its study of blood samples looking for evidence of prior bird flu infection among farm workers this month, Bagdasarian said.

Reuters reported on May 30 that the state and CDC would be conducting the study to understand the prevalence of human illness and whether any dairy workers had previously contracted the virus.

“We have folks from the CDC who are in the state right now,” Bagdasarian said. “We’ve been working really closely and collaboratively with them, our protocols are in place

—Additional reporting for Reuters by Tom Polansek in East Lansing, Michigan

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According to a Reuters story yesterday, Nirav Shah of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggested the results—in combination with disease particles being found in U.S. milk—may point to the existence of flu-carrying herds that have not yet tested positive for the flu.

Analysts are unable to use wastewater testing results to identify the virus’ origins, which could be from humans, infected milk or farm runoff.

“At the dairy farm level, thus far we’ve not seen corresponding reports, but those investigations are still underway,” said Shah.

The CDC has not detected increased incidents of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) H5N1 in people, said Shah. However, scientists are closely watching for changes in the virus that could cause it to spread more easily among humans.

The centers are working with local officials to understand why these wastewater sites show higher-than-expected levels of influenza A.

There have been no identified instances of HPAI in Canadian dairy herds or milk to date, and a Canadian Food Inspection Agency report this week said retail milk samples have thus far tested negative for the virus.

—With files from Reuters

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“We believe it is important for the public to understand the difference to maintain confidence in the safety and accessibility of beef and dairy products for consumers,” the American Association of Bovine Practitioners said in a letter yesterday.

While the virus causes high morbidity and mortality in birds, the association said, it does not cause effect cattle in the same way despite being caused by the same H5N1 virus.

“We encourage other organizations, state animal health officials, diagnostic labs and state and federal agencies to use this name,” the letter added.

To date, the disease has been found in cattle in Idaho, Michigan, Ohio, Kansas, New Mexico and Texas, according to the USDA’s website. No cases have been confirmed in Canada.

One person, a Texas farm worker who had contact with presumed infected dairy cattle, was confirmed with the disease, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Monday that the risk to the public of infection remains low.

However, it asked state public health officials to have plans in place to quickly test and provide treatment to potentially impacted farm workers following positive results among cattle herds.

Since 2003, there have been 14 cases of the H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b virus in humans, wrote biosecurity researchers in an April 8 article published on The Conversation.

The Texas farm worker’s case appears to be mild, they wrote, presenting as conjunctivitis, or pink eye. Previous cases have involved severe respiratory illness and neurological complications.

Scientists’ concerns stem from fears that—while avian flu viruses don’t spread easily among humans—they could jump to species like pigs where avian and human flu viruses could mix and mutate into something that more readily infects humans, the researchers wrote.

Although the number of outbreaks has been lower this season the virus has spread to new regions, including South America and Antarctica, and hit a larger number of animals, including cats, tigers, bears and seals.

—with files from Reuters

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The move comes amid rising concern over the rapid spread of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu in birds and mammals and just a day after Texas reported the second case of the strain in a human in the United States.

The company said it had culled about 3.6 per cent of its total flock as of last month, including 337,000 pullets — or young hens, after its facility in Parmer Country, Texas, tested positive.

Cal-Maine said it was working with government officials and industry groups to mitigate the risk of future outbreaks.

Since 2022, 82 million U.S. chickens, turkeys and other birds have been culled due to a deadly strain of the virus, which has spread to many corners of the world and has even been found in the frozen continent of Antarctica.

Cal-Maine said that no eggs have been recalled as there is no risk related to bird flu associated with eggs. According to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), the influenza cannot be transmitted through properly cooked eggs.

On Monday, Texas and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a case of bird flu in a person who had contact with dairy cows presumed to be infected with the virus, as the highly pathogenic influenza spreads to new mammals, including dairy cattle.

The USDA said in February the country was about 18 months away from identifying a vaccine for the current strain of bird flu.

The deadly strain has killed wildlife, including a few dolphins, about 50,000 seals and sea lions and about half a million birds in South America since it arrived in the region in 2022.

—Reporting for Reuters by Juveria Tabassum in Bengaluru

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