USDA's APHIS exemption from pre-movement H5N1 testing for lactating dairy cattle moving from "Unaffected State Status" jurisdictions enters its third operational day Friday. [1] Idaho's surge is unchanged — CIDRAP carries the state at 17-plus confirmed dairies under quarantine in Gooding, Jerome, Twin Falls, and Cassia counties, with B3.13 sequencing still pending and the artificial-insemination/bull-semen vector hypothesis unresolved. [2] Yesterday's paper named the gap between the policy and the surveillance — that eliminating pre-movement testing in unaffected states removes the mechanism that catches the next index herd before it ships; Day 3 brings no rollback. The Eurasian-lineage clade 2.3.4.4b virus has now circulated in U.S. cattle for more than thirteen months; APHIS's exemption restricts itself to states whose ongoing surveillance demonstrates absence, but the index herd in any new state is by definition the one that brings that state from unaffected to affected. [3] The next state to log a first case will arrive into a thinner net by federal design. The Idaho vector still has no name.

-- NORA WHITFIELD, Chicago