OMAHA (DTN) -- The Biden administration on Friday announced it would award $306 million more to address avian influenza cases in humans, especially livestock workers.
The funding comes as the Biden administration has drawn criticism for its efforts to control the H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza in both poultry and dairy cows. The New York Times noted the timing of the funding reflects concerns among senior health officials that the incoming Trump administration might move to cut the budgets of major health agencies.
HHS FUNDING
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) awarded the $306 million to address issues. Most of the funds -- $183 million -- will help prepare hospitals for H5N1 cases, research and training, including $43 million to the Special Pathogen Treatment Centers for avian influenza preparedness.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will award $103 million to local jurisdictions to increase monitoring of high-risk populations, such as livestock workers and others who are exposed to infected animals. Another $8 million will go toward distributing additional influenza testing kits.
The National Institutes of Health will award another $11 million for influenza research.
CDC continues to state the risk of avian influenza to the general public remains low.
CDC reports there have been 66 human cases nationally, including 36 people in California who worked with dairy cattle and 23 cases involving poultry workers. Almost all cases have been mild.
Still, there is increased concern after a more severe case of H5N1 reported in Louisiana in mid-December involving a person who handled backyard flocks and showed signs of mutations that could more easily infect people. A similar severe case in November involving a teenage girl in British Columbia, Canada, also showed signs of mutations.
USDA CONTINUES TO SEE MORE CASES
USDA has spent as much as $1.7 billion addressing H5N1 since 2022. Since finding the first case of H5N1 in dairy cows last March, there have been 915 herds affected across 16 states.
California, which declared a state of emergency in mid-December, has become the epicenter, with 699 dairies hit by the virus since its first cases were discovered in late August.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced this week it is now testing cheese made from raw milk to determine if the virus is present after recalls of raw-milk products in California.
NEW POULTRY RULES
Earlier this week, USDA also announced it would tighten standards on poultry operators who have reported more than one outbreak. The USDA released an interim final rule requiring poultry facilities to undergo and pass a biosecurity audit before restocking their barns after an avian influenza outbreak, or risk not receiving any future indemnity payments.
Commercial flocks continue to be infected around the country. In the last month, 65 commercial operations have been hit, affecting 17.3 million birds. That includes 25 commercial flocks in California involving nearly 8 million birds and seven flocks in Iowa involving 6.6 million birds.
Since the beginning of 2022, USDA has provided indemnity payments to more than 1,200 poultry producers, including 67 commercial operations that have had at least two HPAI infections during the current outbreak. That includes 18 farms that have now been infected three or more times. Those reinfections have cost more than $365 million in indemnity payments out of nearly $1.1 billion total.
On Friday, USDA updated the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) page to provide more details about financial assistance to producers.
VILSACK RESPONDS TO CRITICS
The Biden administration has come under fire from scientists over the response to H5N1. When the USDA announced a federal order to test milk nationwide, researchers said such a move should have happened months earlier.
In an interview last month with DTN, outgoing Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack sought to distinguish how animal scientists view USDA's work versus human-health scientists.
"The public health sector has had a bit more difficult circumstance, in part because of the aftermath of COVID and so forth," Vilsack said.
But Vilsack said he believed USDA had been "pretty aggressive" as far as animal health issues.
"We've created a massive testing regime. We've created financial support for farmers who want to enhance their biosecurity, knowing that's a strategy to try to sort of get our arms around this," he said. "We've created a mechanism for those who don't want to necessarily go through the testing process to be able to establish that they are disease free and therefore should have perhaps a lesser hurdle."
Vilsack also noted USDA had accelerated vaccine production for bovines, with seven potential vaccine candidates in the works.
"We are accelerating the process of both the safety and efficacy testing that's necessary to get vaccines conditionally licensed. We've had some good reports so far, but we still have more tests to conduct, which you have to do to be safe about this."
Poultry, Vilsack said, is a much more complicated issue. There are vaccines licensed for poultry, but there are struggles, because workers would have to stick a needle in a chick multiple times. That may be impossible when farms have hundreds of thousands of chicks. Also, there is currently no way to distinguish between a vaccinated bird and a sick one because both would have the virus.
Vaccinating poultry could also lead to an immediate halt in poultry meat exports, which Vilsack said, "would be a pretty steep price."
Poultry products amounted to about $5.5 billion in exports throughout the first ten months of 2024.
"So in the meantime, we're going to do what we've done, which on the poultry side, depopulate, try to get the disease out of the system as quickly as possible, and repopulate, and provide indemnification for farmers and focus on biosecurity and on the bovine side, basically try to figure out exactly where this virus is down to the farm, use advanced biosecurity to sort of surround that farm."
Vilsack added, "The vaccine doesn't solve the problem. Make sure we're clear about this. It reduces the shedding of the virus, and therefore it reduces the risk of spreading it, the risk of more and more cross contamination."
USDA Financial Aid Assistance: https://www.aphis.usda.gov/…
APHIS poultry rule: https://www.aphis.usda.gov/…
Also see, "Top 10 Ag Stories of 2024: No. 5 H5N1 Detected in Dairy Cattle for the First Time" https://www.dtnpf.com/…
Chris Clayton can be reached at Chris.Clayton@dtn.com
Follow him on social platform X @ChrisClaytonDTN
(c) Copyright 2025 DTN, LLC. All rights reserved.
