The best way to stop bird flu? Give farmworkers annual flu shots, CDC says

Federal officials are ramping up seasonal flu shots for livestock workers as part of an effort to prevent them from also getting sick with bird flu ‒ worried that if someone caught both together, the virus could mutate to become both severe and highly contagious .

The seasonal flu vaccine , which is set to be available this fall, does not protect against bird flu. But health officials believe vaccinating hundreds of thousands of livestock workers with regular flu shots will also save rural health systems from being overwhelmed this winter, while preventing severe illness among workers and their families.

More than a dozen people , all of whom work on either poultry or cattle farms, have been sickened with bird flu so far this year. Their symptoms have been relatively mild, with eye redness and/or respiratory symptoms. They have all been offered antiviral medication and none has required hospitalization, according to federal officials.

While health officials say the risk to the general public from the bird flu virus remains low, they are launching the vaccination effort to help it stay that way through the fall and winter cold and flu season.

"This is really just planning and preparedness 101,” Dr. Nirav Shah, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters in a briefing Tuesday.

About 47% of the U.S. population gets an annual flu shot, Shah said. The vaccine doesn’t prevent all seasonal flu infections but reduces the most serious effects of an illness that killed about 45,000 people last season and sends hundreds of thousands to the hospital each year. During the 2022 flu season, Shah said, the flu shot prevented 6 million illnesses, 65,000 hospitalizations and 3,700 deaths.

About 200,000 people work with livestock in the U.S., including veterinarians, Shah said, and they will typically opt for a seasonal vaccine if they have access to the shots.

As part of the response, the CDC is investing $5 million for livestock workers to get shots to protect against seasonal flu. The vaccines will be available this fall as millions of other Americans get their seasonal flu shots.

Additionally, officials are distributing $4 million to the nonprofit National Center for Farmworker Health to partner with community-based organizations in states with animals and people infected with bird flu. This includes training and information about H5N1, as well as personal protective equipment to reduce risk of infection, access to testing and treatment, and the seasonal flu shot.

“Our approach is really focused on supporting local organizations who already know their communities and are already trusted by farmworkers,” Bethany Alcauter, director of research and public health programs for the National Center, based in Texas, told USA TODAY.

The National Center has already worked on immunizations on COVID-19, seasonal flu and vector-borne diseases, Alcauter said. The organization wants to provide ecosystems where farmworkers, typically immigrants with many lacking U.S. documentation, can access health care in rural settings already short on medical services.

Access to seasonal vaccines is tied to the larger issue of healthcare access for farmworkers and other immigrants, said Dr. Raj Panjabi, who served as a special assistant to President Joe Biden during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Half of migrant farmworkers are undocumented and half of undocumented immigrants are uninsured, he said, meaning they're not getting basic medical care like vaccines or getting tested for problems like H5N1 infections.

Providing seasonal flu shots for these workers benefits them in the short-term but also helps establish a trusting relationship in case there's a more serious outbreak in the future, he said.

"If we use our seasonal flu muscle today, it will make that muscle stronger if we need it tomorrow," said Panjabi, an associate physician at Harvard Medical School and Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston. "Protecting farmworkers protects us all. By lowering their risk of getting sick, we lower our risk of an H5N1 outbreak turning into the next pandemic."

Since the spring of this year, 13 people − all livestock workers − have been infected with bird flu, also known as H5N1.

On Thursday, officials announced three of those workers had fallen ill at a poultry farm with infected chickens in Weld County, Colorado. Six workers had been sickened with the virus at a separate poultry farm of 1.8 million chickens in the same county. In Michigan, two dairy workers were sickened this spring and the first confirmed case of the year was in a Texas Panhandle dairy worker , who became infected from a cow that likely contracted the virus from wild birds.

Health officials believe the seasonal flu vaccine is better suited to prevent a bird flu pandemic right now than a dedicated H5N1 vaccine would be, though the first doses of a bird flu-specific vaccine rolled off an assembly line in North Carolina last week.

The bird flu virus hasn’t caused severe disease in any of the workers, hasn't been transmitted without symptoms and hasn't developed the ability to jump from person to person, said Shah, of CDC.

“Right now, the seasonal flu shot is the right tool for the job,” he said. “The H5 vaccine, at this moment in time, is not performing the job that we really need."

Karen Weintraub of USA TODAY contributed to this report.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The best way to stop bird flu? Give farmworkers annual flu shots, CDC says