Hello and welcome to the Osterholm update, a podcast on COVID-19 and other infectious diseases with Dr Michael Osterholm.

Dr Ostrom is an internationally recognized medical detective and director of the Center for

Infectious Disease Research and Policy or or Sidrapp at the University of Minnesota.

In this podcast, Dr. Ostrom draws on nearly 50 years of experience investigating

infectious disease outbreaks to provide straight talk on the latest infectious disease

and public health threats.

I'm Chris Dahl, reporter for Sidrapp News,

and I'm your host for these conversations.

Welcome back. conversations.

Welcome back everyone to another episode of the Osterome Update Podcast. Earlier this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

unveiled the public dashboard tracking influenza

A levels in wastewater that the agency has been collecting from 600 sites around the country

since the fall.

Although the monitoring doesn't distinguish the influenza A subtype or determine the source of the virus,

H5N1 is part of the influenza A family of viruses,

and the hope is that tracking influenza A and sewage could help the CDC detect potential hot spots.

CDC officials have taken the step because U.S. dairy farmers have been reluctant to report outbreaks of H5N1 in dairy herds or allow testing of dairy workers.

On this May 16th episode of the podcast, we're going to talk about this effort as we bring

you up to speed on the latest on H5N1 avian influenza. We'll follow that up with an update on COVID-19 and how the rise of the

K-P2 variant could affect COVID activity, a look at the latest news on long COVID,

and a discussion about the World Health Organizations

proposed new terminology for pathogens

...