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The USDA-approved lab authorized to test the milk for the H5N1 bird flu virus called the farms to seek their permission to examine the milk, then also declined to test the milk for bird flu when the farmers did not grant it.

“[The farms] are aware of what a nonnegative test would do to their business,” said Brandon Dominguez, the Veterinary Services Section Head at the Texas A&M Veterinary Medical Diagnostic laboratory in College Station, Texas. “They asked that we do not run the test.”

After NPR reported that the USDA had confirmed the agency does not require labs to have permission from farms to test milk samples for bird flu, Amy Swinford, the director of the Texas A&M lab, added that another reason the lab could not perform the test is that reporters did not provide the premise identification numbers for each of the farms. Those numbers are not publicly available; reporters did include the license numbers of each of the farms when they submitted samples for testing.

The lab and the farms’ refusal to test samples of raw milk comes as scientists have criticized the federal government for being slow to collect and report information about the virus. There has been no widespread testing of dairy workers to understand how many may be infected, no mandate that dairy farms test their herds if they aren’t moving cattle between states, and no clear testing data to support federal authorities’ warnings of a potential threat of bird flu in raw milk that people drink.

Head in the sand: what could go wrong?

Nice to see US leadership continue to work on things that matter.