THE WAY THE NEXT PANDEMIC WORKS

A virus run rampant, health systems hollowed, public trust destroyed ... Can anything stop bird flu?

- CHRISTOPHER COX

IN FEBRUARY 2024, dairy farmers in the northwest corner of the Texas Panhandle noticed that their herds were getting sick. A cow’s temperature would spike, and she would stop eating. Soon, her milk would dry up or turn thick—tests would reveal the milk had twice the normal number of white blood cells. The feverish cows would barely drink any water. As they grew dehydrated, their eyes sank into their heads. Nearly all of them had mastitis: a swollen, painful udder and teats, which made milking difficult.

The disease seemed to be spreading; veterinarians in the region heard from colleagues in Kansas and New Mexico who reported the same constellation of symptoms. On March 14, a group of them got on a conference call with animal-health specialists from around the country, trading information on what they had begun calling “mystery cow disease.” “We made a master list of causes and just started checking it twice,” said Barb Petersen, a veterinarian who cares for 40,000 cows on several dairies near Amarillo. Was it heavy metals in the feed? That could explain why so many herds had gotten sick so quickly. But no, the feed was okay. A bacterial infection? A coronavirus? Every test they ran came back negative. Whatever this was, it wasn’t something any of them had seen in cows before.

Around the same time, some of the farmworkers Petersen saw on her rounds started to fall ill. Most had conjunctivitis, or pink eye, but some developed fevers bad enough to keep them home from work. “We felt like, Gosh, we don’t think this is a coincidence,” Petersen said. “We’ve got to get to the bottom of this.”