As the bird flu continues to spread, scientists with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are saying they ran into trouble investigating a human case of the “pandemic potential” virus, a new report shared.
While the CDC still says that the bird flu poses a “low risk to the general public” for now, the situation could worsen.
In the report, published Friday in the New England Journal of Medicine, epidemiologists with the agency shared that they were unable to access a Texas dairy farm where a human was infected by the virus in March.
This stopped them from being able to investigate how the workers might have been exposed to the virus on the farm.
The workers who contracted the virus went to the Texas field office for testing, but Lara Anton, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of State Health Services, said they “did not disclose the name of their workplace.”
The investigators were also unable to collect any follow-up samples from the infected workers, which could have helped reveal who else may be infected and antibodies that fought against it.
The report said that the worker was not wearing protective eye goggles or a face mask, which would have offered protection from the virus.
Investigators say it was likely transmitted through their contaminated hands or droplets of the virus from sick cows.
According to a draft report from the United States Department of Agriculture, the virus had been circulating in cows for an estimated four months before labs were able to confirm its presence at the end of March.
High concentrations of the H5N1 virus had been found in the raw milk of infected cows, leading to investigations.
A mutation in the virus carried by wild birds has enabled the bird flu to jump to cows, and officials have warned that multiple herds were likely infected as they migrated north.