by AMES, Iowa (AP) – At first glance, it looks like an unassuming farm. Cows are scattered across fields to be fenced in. A milking barn sits in the distance with a tractor parked beside it. But the people who work there are not farmers, and other buildings that you would find in a modern university look more like a cow pasture.
Welcome to the National Center for Animal Diseases, a government research facility in Iowa where 43 scientists work with pigs, cows and other animals, pushing to solve the bird flu outbreak currently sweeping through US animals – and develop ways to stop it.
Of particular importance is testing a cow vaccine designed to stop the continued spread of the virus — and thus, it is hoped, reduce the risk of it someday becoming a widespread disease in humans.
The US Department of Agriculture facility opened in 1961 in Ames, a college town about 45 minutes north of Des Moines. The center is located on a pastoral, 523-acre (212-hectare) site a few miles east of low-slung downtown Ames.
It is a quiet place with a rich history. Over the years, researchers have developed vaccines there against various diseases that endanger pigs and cattle, including hog cholera and brucellosis. And work there during the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic – known at the time as “swine flu” – proved that the virus was confined to the respiratory tract of pigs and that pork was safe to eat.
The center has the extraordinary resources and experience to do that kind of work, said Richard Webby, a leading influenza researcher at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis.
“That’s not a resource that many places in the U.S. have,” said Webby, who has been collaborating with the Ames facility on the cow vaccine work.
There are 93 buildings on campus, including a highly restricted laboratory building whose exterior is reminiscent of a modern megachurch but inside is a series of corridors and shared rooms, some of which contain infected animals. That’s where scientists work with more dangerous germs, including the H5N1 bird flu. There is also a building with three floors of offices that house animal disease researchers as well as a testing center that is an “animal” version of the CDC labs in Atlanta that identifies rare (and sometimes scary) new human infections.
About 660 people work on campus – about a third of them assigned to the animal disease center, which has an annual budget of $38 million. They were already busy with a wide range of projects but grew even busier this year after the H5N1 bird flu unexpectedly jumped into US dairy cows.
“It’s amazing how people are digging down and making it work,” said Mark Ackermann, the center’s director.
The virus was first identified in 1959 and has grown into a widespread and highly lethal threat to migratory birds and poultry. Meanwhile, the virus evolved, and in recent years the number of animals from dogs and cats to sea lions and polar bears has grown.
Despite the spread in different animals, scientists were still surprised this year when infections were suddenly detected in cows – specifically, in eggs and milk of dairy cows. It’s not unusual for bacteria to cause yeast infections, but a flu virus?
“Typically we think of the flu as a respiratory disease,” said Kaitlyn Sarlo Davila, a researcher at the Ames facility.
Much of the research on the disease has been done at the USDA poultry research center in Athens, Georgia, but the virus drew the Ames center into the mix because of the appearance of the virus in cows.
Amy Baker, an award-winning researcher for her research into swine flu, is now testing a vaccine in cows. Preliminary results are expected soon, she said.
USDA spokesperson Shilo Weir said the work is promising but early in development. There is still no approved bird flu vaccine in use on U.S. poultry farms, and Weir said that while poultry vaccines are being pursued, any such strategy would be challenging and would not guarantee elimination of the virus. .
Baker and other researchers are working on studies where they try to see how the virus spreads between cows. That work is taking place in the high containment building, where scientists and animal keepers don specialized respirators and other protective equipment.
The research exposed four-year-old heifers to a virus-carrying mist and then injected the virus into the teats and udders of two lactating cows. The first four cows got infected but did not show many symptoms. The second became ill – suffering from reduced appetite, drop in milk production and production of thick, yellow milk.
The conclusion that the virus was spread primarily through exposure to milk containing high levels of the virus – which could then be spread through shared milking equipment or other methods – was consistent with what the health investigators understood was going on. But it was important to do the work because it was sometimes difficult to get complete information from dairy farms, Webby said.
“At best we had some good ideas about how the virus was spreading, but we didn’t really know,” he said.
USDA scientists are doing additional work, checking the blood of calves that drank raw milk for signs of infection.
A study by the Iowa center and several universities concluded that the virus was likely circulating for months before it was officially reported in Texas in March.
The study also noted a new and very rare combination of genes in the bird flu virus that spilled over into cows, and researchers are trying to sort out whether it enabled it to spread from cows to cows, or among cows, he said. Tavis Anderson, who helped direct. work.
Either way, the researchers in Ames expect to be busy for years.
“Do they have their own unique (cow) flu? Can he go from cow back to wild fowl? Can it go from cow to man? A cow into a pig?” Anderson added. “The research question is an unsolved question — or one of the research questions, I think.”
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Stobbe reported from New York.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Section is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Science and Media Education Group. The AP is solely responsible for all matters.
