Okay... So, the person was working with dairy cows. A person working around dairy cows spends WAY more time in close contact with them that a person working around beef cattle.
There's ALL sorts of shared infections that cows can get and spread to people and people can get and spread to cows. So things like, just general staph infections and pink eye are not uncommon.
Best guess, is that a person working around the dairy cows thought they might have got pink eye or a staph infection in or around their eye and were smart enough to go get it checked out. The docs were smart enough (or maybe there's a mandatory testing/reporting like there is for stuff like Rocky Mountain Spotted Tick Fever) to check for a range of diseases that can/do jump species.
The article is unclear if the patient was found to have live virus or if there was just some immune system check that showed a past exposure to the bird flu.
Okay... So, the person was working with dairy cows. A person working around dairy cows spends WAY more time in close contact with them that a person working around beef cattle.
There's ALL sorts of shared infections that cows can get and spread to people and people can get and spread to cows. So things like, just general staph infections and pink eye are not uncommon.
Best guess, is that a person working around the dairy cows thought they might have got pink eye or a staph infection in or around their eye and were smart enough to go get it checked out. The docs were smart enough (or maybe there's a mandatory testing/reporting like there is for stuff like Rocky Mountain Spotted Tick Fever) to check for a range of diseases that can/do jump species.
The article is unclear if the patient was found to have live virus or if there was just some immune system check that showed a past exposure to the bird flu.