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Under the new reign of the Trump administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is holding back important information on H5N1 bird flu. This week, the CDC appears to have published, and then quickly deleted, data in its resuscitated weekly report suggesting that H5N1 can spread between cats and people.
The CDC’s disappearing data originally appeared, albeit briefly, online in its regular Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) before being taken down, the New York Times reported on Thursday. According to a copy of the data reportedly obtained by the Times, it contained a table highlighting a case of human H5N1 that may have originated from the person’s cat. The CDC has offered no reasoning for why the report was removed or when the report will be republished.
In late January, the Trump White House issued a sweeping directive to agencies under the umbrella of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services—the CDC included—mandating that they cease most external communication with the public. While some aspects of communication did continue, such as certain drug safety alerts, the pause interrupted many other vital services, including the CDC’s MMWR: a regular repository of studies and case reports from CDC scientists and others that has been published weekly for decades.
In leaked memos obtained by various media outlets, the Trump administration claimed that the pause at the CDC and other federal agencies would last until February 1. And this week, the MMWR finally did return, though it’s clear that not everything is back to normal.
The official MMWR for February 6 contains just two reports, both related to wildfires that recently occurred in Los Angeles and Hawaii. But typical MMWRs tend to feature twice or even three times as many papers (you can take a look at the MMWRs published last year). Anonymous health officials have also previously told the media that the CDC had three reports related to bird flu expected to be published in the MMWR just prior to its communication freeze, according to the Washington Post.
Gizmodo reached out to the CDC for comments but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
The now-missing table in this week’s MMWR reportedly detailed two cat-related clusters of H5N1. In one, a house cat may have spread their infection to another cat and a teenage child; the cat subsequently died four days after getting sick. In the other, an infected dairy farmworker may have potentially spread their infection to a cat, since the person reportedly became sick first. Two days after the person’s symptoms appeared, the cat became sick and then died a day later.
H5N1 has been a concern for several years, but the danger escalated in early 2024 after a strain jumped the species barrier from birds and began to spread widely among dairy cows. There have also been dozens of H5N1 cases in cats, who appear to be more vulnerable to it than cows or humans. While cats may occasionally catch these infections from wild birds, there have been cases tied to cats consuming raw milk or food sourced from farms.
Currently, health authorities still consider H5N1 and other circulating bird flu strains to be a low risk to the public, and these strains don’t seem to be spreading easily between people. But the lack of timely data and information on these cases remains plenty concerning. Since the communication pause began, there have been several worrying developments related to bird flu.
For instance, the USDA recently discovered a novel strain of bird flu at a duck farm in California that originated from an outbreak of H5N1 (the ducks were culled in late December and no further cases of this strain have been reported to date). This week, the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service also reported finding a second type of H5N1 that jumped from birds to dairy cows—a type associated with more severe cases in people than the earlier type found in cows.
Any one of these incidents is unlikely to lead to the nightmare scenario, in which a strain of H5N1 adapts well enough to humans such that it both spreads widely and regularly, causing severe illness—a pandemic in the making. But the longer these viruses circulate in mammals, the greater that risk becomes. And right now, it’s not certain when and if the CDC and other agencies will be able to keep the public adequately informed about H5N1 and other public health threats on the horizon.
