California Governor Declares Bird Flu Emergency

In December 2024, Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency over highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1) in California dairy cattle, following a similar declaration in Colorado that July. The move attracted considerable attention, but the practical effect was narrow.

What the Emergency Declaration Did

A state of emergency in this context did not mean lockdowns or restrictions on raw milk sales. It freed up state resources, funding, personnel, and equipment, for county and local agencies to expand testing, monitoring, and protective equipment for farm workers. Farms with positive tests were quarantined and released once subsequent tests came back negative, a process that was already underway before the declaration.

At the time, California had reported 34 of the 61 total confirmed human H5N1 cases nationwide. Nearly all of these involved farm workers with direct exposure to infected cattle, and symptoms were typically mild, most often conjunctivitis that resolved within days. No person-to-person transmission was detected.

Where Things Stand Now

No human case of H5N1 linked to drinking raw milk has been confirmed anywhere in the United States, and the CDC continues to classify the overall public risk as low. By late 2025, surveillance programs in several states, including Minnesota, had returned months of clean results, and Canadian testing of nearly 2,000 raw milk samples found zero positives.

The most serious documented harm tied to H5N1 and raw milk involved cats that died after drinking infected milk on individual farms, a real but narrow risk separate from the human cases that prompted California’s declaration. The emergency proved to be a resource-allocation measure for a virus that, in cattle and in the farm workers who had contact with them, behaved as a mild illness throughout.