A UW-Madison expert warns of “significant” economic damage in the state if a circulating strain of the bird flu hits Wisconsin’s dairy industry.

California declared an emergency in December after discovering bird flu in more than 600 dairy herds, raising concerns about the disease spreading further in 2025.

Prof. Keith Poulsen, director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, says the western state is getting hit hard by the B3.13 form of bird flu, though he added “we have no indication” that it’s currently present in Wisconsin dairy cows.

Still, Poulsen said “it wouldn’t surprise me” if the virus showed up in Wisconsin cows, noting that could happen at any time. Experts still aren’t sure exactly how it’s spreading, he explained, whether it’s through milk or respiratory secretions or on people’s shoes and clothes.

“When you look at that nationally, B3.13 is still spreading, although it’s kind of come off peak spread in many states, California is probably still our biggest hotspot,” he said in a recent interview before the first U.S. bird flu death was reported yesterday. “We are starting to see infections of farms that were previously infected, and there was one reported in Colorado and one in Texas.”

To illustrate the potential impact in Wisconsin, Poulsen pointed to estimates out of Cornell University that show the 90-day cost is about $191 per lactating cow on the farm. He says that amounts to about $1 million per month per 5,000 cows.

“Now when you think about that, the average herd size in Wisconsin is 200, and we have 5,400 dairies,” he said. “So, you know, not every farm is going to lose $1 million a month. But there are herds out there that are 5,000 head, and there’s some that are double that. So if [bird] flu were to come into Wisconsin, it would be a significant economic burden.”

At the same time, milk prices are “in a profitable zone” now while feed prices are also normal, “which is the total opposite” of recent years, Poulsen said. That raises the stakes for potential bird flu outbreaks in early 2025, as farmers are facing pressure to produce more milk in the favorable price environment, he said.

“It does represent a pretty substantial risk to a potentially very profitable year for milk production,” he said.

When bird flu does infect a dairy farm, the cost of lost production from sick cows — as well as labor and medicine — are being largely shouldered by the farmers themselves, according to Poulsen. The overall cost of the disease is on both farmers and taxpayers, as the USDA pays for testing and indemnities on lost milk, he added.

Plus, the potential risk to public health “could be very expensive.” While the CDC currently considers the risk to humans to be “low but not zero,” Poulsen said, the longer the virus is around, the more that risk goes up.

He also spotlighted the “huge strain” being put on the national supply of heifers, which are young female cows that haven’t had any offspring. The replacement cost for heifers is now two to three times as high as it was just 18 months ago.

“That’s a pretty substantial impact on farms that need to expand, or for U.S. dairy to export those animals to markets that are exploding right now, specifically in countries like Indonesia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Algeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Morocco — that’s where the markets are really, really growing quickly,” he said.

As ripple effects from the virus continue to play out, several labs in Wisconsin are conducting what Poulsen calls “soft surveillance” for bird flu, testing retail samples off the shelf. The WVDL has also been testing some milk samples, but neither have found any evidence for the virus in the state, he said. One possible reason is Wisconsin doesn’t import many lactating cows, limiting the chance for possible spread through that avenue.

The USDA in December announced plans for nationwide testing of milk for bird flu, with states being brought into the program in stages over time based on the prevalence of the virus.

In hopes of preventing an outbreak in the state, Poulsen recommends farmers should be testing all lactating animals coming on the farm, restricting non-essential people from being there and deploy stringent biosecurity measures such as requiring clean clothes, boots and handwashing.

“Those are three things that I think are low-hanging fruit and every dairy farmer can do it,” he said.

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