Editorial: Starving disease research

Genetic fragments of the avian flu virus have been found in milk, federal authorities reported last week, suggesting that the disease is more widespread among dairy cattle than previously thought. Pasteurized milk is safe to drink because the process neutralizes those viral fragments.

Avian flu has been found in dairy herds in eight states so far, and one dairy worker in Texas was infected. The flu has crossed into other mammals in the wild. Veterinarians are anxious that it could spread to swine, which would be a huge economic disaster.

Buena Vista County is well familiar with repeated massive poultry culling, the first in 2015 that affected turkeys and laying hens. Dare to imagine if that happens to swine. Or humans working with confined livestock. The economic considerations are staggering. The human health implications are troubling, to say the least.

Despite these massive losses partially covered by government indemnity funds, we are woefully unprepared to deal with disease pandemics. Authorities do not fully understand how avian influenza is spreading or its extent. Most of our effort goes to biosecurity, which has not been wholly effective despite rigor. Vaccination is controversial and comes with a cost to producers. Our solutions are limited in a consolidated system that concentrates huge numbers of animals indoors and facilitates transmission.

That’s why research is vital to our enterprise. Congress has been derelict. Federal funding for animal disease research has been static for over a decade because of budget sequestration imposed following the 2008 financial meltdown. It has just started to recover, with a 10% increase in funding over the past two years (which does not keep pace with inflation).

We budget about $1 billion a year for USDA livestock and plant research. Consider that the poultry industry alone accounted for $76 billion in sales in 2022. We devote a pittance to understanding how disease works. Congress just passed a $95 billion security package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan on a bipartisan basis. It is hard to understand why an imminent threat to our economic and national security — disease — pales in comparison. Our security surely depends on safe livestock and food, and healthy food production workers but we treat it as a fiscal afterthought.

A new farm bill is stalled in Congress, held up by radicals in the House who want to snuff out food stamps. Meantime, we snuff out millions of chickens at a draw. It will happen again and could strike any day. The question is how bad the next wave is. And, how long before the flu morphs into other species, and how severe will it be?

Iowa is a world center for livestock research. Ames is home to the National Animal Disease Lab. This should be an urgent priority for our congressional delegation, which is otherwise occupied with scaring off immigrants or trying to make certain no welfare queen gets free cheese.

Buena Vista County is built around livestock. We are especially vulnerable to pandemics — we were the hottest spot in the nation at one point during the early days of the Covid crisis because of the nature of our work. When chickens are exterminated, workers are laid off. When hens can’t lay, egg prices rise.

We have been studying this virus since 1963 and still don’t have our arms around it. If you could build a bomb to blow it up the Pentagon would have done it by now. Instead, we virtually ignore trying to figure out how to raise five million hens or 20,000 turkeys under one roof safely. Perhaps we can’t. It could be the nature of the consolidated system itself. We can better understand, then, why corporate interests who control USDA funding are not interested in answers that increase their expenses. That’s why we don’t vaccinate hens — it’s the margins, stupid! Do we really want a comprehensive research effort that concludes the production system itself promotes endemic disease? Given the level of funding, the answer is obvious.

The scientists warned us for years before the Covid pandemic that it was coming. What did we do? Reduced research. Then it hit. The scientists are warning us again, now that avian flu has shown up in mammals, that the next pandemic could be brewing. Yet our public funding treats it as a sniffle.