Brian Mayer on WNYC, and now we'll talk about the current bird flu situation.

Recent outbreaks of the H5N1 strain have affected not only wild birds and poultry, but have also made jumps to dairy cattle and humans.

And with the United States grappling with containment issues and new testing strategies emerging, we'll get some insight now on what the experts are doing to prevent a pandemic scenario.

Joining me is Amy Maxman, a Ph.D and public health correspondent and editor at KFF Health News. Hi, Amy. Welcome

back to WNYC. Hi, Brian. So let's start with the basics. How many cases of bird flu have there

been in the U.S. to this point in any species?

Well, it's too hard to say in any species, but in humans, we know that there's been

58 cases. We also know there's probably been many more cases in farm workers who've gotten

them directly from livestock or poultry.

And we know that they're cows in 15 states at least that have it.

So the birds are giving it to those workers and the birds are giving it to cows and it's

mostly poultry chickens?

So basically it spilled over from, so wild birds have had the bird flu, which often

kills them for the past almost 30 years now, is spilled over into cows one time in Texas,

maybe late last year or early this year.

And since then, it's been traveling within from

cow to cow, and that's what's really remarkable and unprecedented. So the virus has

evolved the ability to spread between mammals and spreading between cows, and that's sort of the

worry. And this gets us to the milk testing program. That's one of the concerns for people if it's spreading to cows. Then I'll ask you about human-to-human transmission later. But the USDA, the Agriculture Department, has announced a new milk testing program. Can you walk us through this strategy and how it might help control the spread

of bird flu in the dairy sector, the dairy products that humans consume?

Yeah, so I should say starting off, every study we've done so far shows that pasteurized milk,

which is all the milk that you buy in grocery stores, the virus has been killed. It's broken

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