Yakima County reports bird flu death after dairy exposure

A Yakima County resident who had contact with infected dairy cattle became severely ill and died on Sunday, county health officials announced. The person had underlying health conditions, the Yakima Health District said.

CNN reported Monday that the death is the first known US bird flu death of 2026 and the third since February 2024, when the virus first spread into dairy cattle.

The health district also reported a third human case in a Yakima County resident exposed to infected cows at a county dairy. That person has not become severely ill or needed hospitalization, officials said. All three Washington cases identified since mid-October followed exposure to infected cows, county officials told CNN.

A worker at a county dairy tested positive on October 15 with a mild H5N1 infection, which CNN described as the first reported US human case in nearly a year.

Dave Atteberry, health officer for the Yakima Health District, said in a statement that avian influenza "can cause severe illness, particularly among people who have underlying health conditions." He said the risk to the general population is still low, while people who work with dairy cattle or spend extended time near infected animals or contaminated areas face a higher risk, the health district said.

By late October, the Washington State Department of Agriculture had confirmed highly pathogenic H5N1 infections in 33 Yakima County dairy herds and one herd in Benton County. The first infected dairies in the county were found in early October through milk testing by state and federal agriculture agencies, Atteberry told CNN.

The Yakima Herald-Republic listed possible human symptoms as fever, cough, a sore throat, runny or stuffy nose, muscle or body aches, headache, tiredness, and red or irritated eyes; the illness can be mild or severe. The newspaper did not attribute the symptom list to the health district.

Health officials say the virus rarely passes from one person to another, and no human-to-human transmission has been documented in the United States. The CDC has recorded more than 70 US human cases of bird flu since 2024; most have been mild, dead-end infections that did not spread, CNN reported.

County public health workers have enrolled dairy workers in a text-based screening tool that asks daily about cough, fever, or red eyes, and workers who test positive receive antiviral medicine to reduce viral load, Atteberry told CNN last month. Close contacts of the patients are also being monitored for symptoms.

Washington first found this strain of avian influenza in a backyard flock in May 2022, and a person with close contact to birds in a commercial poultry outbreak became the state's first human case in October 2024, the state Department of Health said. Twenty states have reported the virus in dairy cattle, the Yakima Herald-Republic reported.

The state Department of Agriculture is distributing disposable gloves, face masks, and eye protection to slaughterhouses, milk processing facilities, poultry producers, and dairy processors.

CNN cited ProPublica reporting that Utah's Department of Agriculture and Food would share farm outbreak details only if health officials took no steps to monitor workers' health. Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health, said the H5N1 picture is "the murkiest it's ever been."

The county did not specify the person's underlying conditions, and Washington's three cases have been reported to the CDC but do not yet appear on the agency's bird flu dashboard, CNN reported.