Yes, the headlines are anxiety-producing right now, but most of us don’t need to be freaking out about bird flu in Michigan at the moment.
That’s the message today from the state’s chief medical executive, Dr. Natasha Bagadasarian.
“Right now, this is most definitely not another COVID. ... This is not something folks need to worry about if they are just going about their day-to-day lives,” she said. “But I would say that there are certain groups of people who need to take precautions, and those are individuals who work with impacted animals.”
That includes birds in the wild, as well as backyard and commercial poultry animals, and dairy cows.
And now that California has declared a state of emergency and the CDC has confirmed the first severe human case of H5N1 bird flu in the United States, here’s what Michigan residents should know about bird flu in our state.
How many human cases have been reported in Michigan?
Michigan has had two human cases, out of 61 human cases in the U.S. so far, according to the CDC.
Both cases were in dairy farm workers from two separate farms in May 2024, and were linked to their work with sick herds. The first worker experienced conjunctivitis in one eye, and the second “had onset of cough, shortness of breath, headache, sore throat, fatigue, nasal congestion, and rhinitis,” according to Michigan health officials in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Just seven other states have confirmed human cases so far, with the majority (34) in California. Only one of those cases has been severe, and it’s in a Louisiana patient who had “exposure to sick and dead birds in backyard flocks,” according to the CDC.
“No person-to-person spread of H5 bird flu has been detected,” the CDC said in a statement Wednesday. “This case does not change CDC's overall assessment of the immediate risk to the public's health from H5N1 bird flu, which remains low.”
How widespread is bird flu in Michigan animals?
Cases have been detected in Michigan’s wildlife, domestic animals, and dairy cattle, according to the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development. Since 2022, there have been 39 instances of bird flu associated with this current outbreak detected in Michigan’s dairy cattle, and both backyard and commercial poultry.
The most recent detection of the disease was on December 15 at an Ottawa County poultry farm. So far, 13 counties in the state have had bird flu detections in animals.
While California officials have recalled raw milk over bird flu contamination, drinking pasteurized milk in Michigan is safe, said state agriculture department Director Tim Boring.
“Pasteurization remains an effective means of dealing with the virus,” he said Thursday. “Our milk supply and our food supply remain safe.”
But if you are drinking raw milk, Bagdasarian said, “you don't have those same assurances.”
How is Michigan monitoring for bird flu transmission?
The state health department is sequencing a percentage of positive influenza tests that turn up in emergency departments and conducting wastewater surveillance “to make sure that we're not missing cases of H5N1 out there,” Bagdasarian said.
“Certainly Michigan isn't a hotbed of activity for this [on dairy farms] in the way that we were earlier this spring,” Boring said. “We've seen three positive dairy farms since August, and all of those are low-level cases as detected as part of surveillance monitoring.”
Michigan is also participating in the USDA’s National Milk Testing Strategy, which launched earlier this month. It requires the sharing of raw milk samples, upon request, from any dairy farms, transporters or processing facilities that send or hold milk intended for pasteurization.
The state agriculture department is “working with dairy farm cooperatives and labs to test routine milk samples,” Boring said, “to determine where we might have positive dairy farms that that might not be clinical, [and] that it's going to teach us a lot about the true extent of what this disease looks like both here in Michigan and across the country.”
Bird flu isn’t going away any time soon, Bagdasarian said. And the more the virus spreads between species, the more chances there are for the virus to evolve and change.
“This is something that influenza viruses in particular love to do, where they will get into a new species, and they will shuffle their building blocks and they will combine pieces with other influenza viruses that are circulating in those animal species,” she said. “And that's how we typically end up with new flu viruses. And so the more we give this virus an opportunity to go from one species to another, the more it has that opportunity to shuffle its genetic components around.”
