Mooching around MooCows in the US

The old geezers are a curious bunch, we get easily distracted and fascinated by where our stories take us.

As the avian MooCow story gathered pace and models appeared, we looked for licensed animal vaccines by the US FDA. However, this is the wrong agency. The Department of Agriculture (USDA) seems to be calling the shots in the US.

For starters, they have some up to date groovy maps showing the epidemic's progression.

This one shows confirmed cases for the last year: 976 in 17 states. However, we do not know what “confirmed case” means.

This is the one for the last two weeks, 16 cases in three US States:

You can play with the maps for any time you want over the last 12 months.

The USDA is taking the threat to poultry and cattle seriously with a five-pronged plan. We had difficulty locating it on the USDA website (unless it’s this one, which is pretty old), but it is summarised here. You can also read the latest scare stories.

We have written to FDA to ask them exactly how many avian influenza vaccines they have licensed as that information is, again, not easy to find. There is at least one, but we may find more.

We will be sure to keep you posted.

Two old geezers with no MooCows in their back garden wrote this post.