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
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