LINCOLN, Neb. (KOLN) - The Good Life is joining forces with other states to protect consumers from the bird flu or H5N1 virus. It’s part of a national program being adopted on a state-to-state basis.

The National Milk Testing Strategy was launched by the USDA to get states involved in testing and eliminating the virus in dairy cattle.

In March of 2024, the USDA announced that Texas, one of the country’s largest dairy distributors, had cattle affected by H5N1.

It happened during a spill-over event from wild waterfowl that traveled into a dairy farm--infecting cows.

The rest of the dairy industry in the country has been shaky for the past couple of months, as the top production states like California detected avian flu in their cattle.

Dr. Roger Dudley with the Department of Agriculture says Nebraska will be one of those states testing within the next week.

“We expect it to come back negative because we have not had any symptoms of highly pathogenic aviation influenza in dairy cattle,” said Dr. Dudley. “If that’s the case then we just keep doing that and we’ll be sampling those silos at processing plants on a regular basis.”

According to the USDA’s testing site, four of the five states in the program have dairy cattle that have been affected by the bird flu. Those states include Texas, California, Michigan, and Nevada.

Mississippi has also been testing for the bird flu and they are unaffected.

Dr. Dudley said Nebraska will begin testing for H5N1 by testing products at their milk processing silos.

“If we had to go to every farm then we’re talking about 70-something dairy farms and that gets to be a huge undertaking, but by testing at the processing plant, which there are only 6 in Nebraska that we sample at, by doing that we can get an overview fairly quickly.”

He said if there are affected silos, they will immediately begin an investigation to track down affected herds.