Opinion: Getting farmworkers to use PPE is hard, but it’s the best way to stop an H5N1 bird flu epidemic
Although a third U.S. dairy worker has been confirmed to be infected with the H5N1 bird flu, many dairy farms are still unwilling to use even freely offered personal protective equipment (PPE). This is cause for alarm. Working with a pathogen assigned a biosafety level of 3 — meaning it “can cause serious or potentially lethal disease through respiratory transmission” — with at best BSL 2 level protections is playing with fire.
This lack of protection leaves farmworkers who interact with potentially infected animals, including dairy cows, chickens, and alpacas, at risk for infection with a virus that has killed half of the people in whom it was diagnosed. And the more H5N1 is able to interact with and infect people, the greater the risk that it might accumulate the handful of mutations it needs to become capable of human-to-human transmission, a stepping stone to a possible epidemic.
