The discovery of bird flu in dairy cow milk highlighted a previously overlooked target for the H5N1 virus: mammary glands. A new study suggests it’s not unique to cows.
An H5N1 virus isolated from an infected cow spread to the mammary glands of mice and some ferrets — common stand-ins to study flu infections in mammals — exposed to the virus directly in their noses, virologist Amie Eisfeld of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and colleagues report July 8 in Nature. A bird flu virus taken from an infected person in 2004 also made it to the mouse and ferret mammary glands. But additional experiments show that the virus isn’t very effective at spreading through the air.
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