California offering $25 gift cards to encourage bird flu testing

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now working with California on a project that is offering gift cards to encourage people to get tested or vaccinated near farms with bird flu, the state says.

Some clinics in the state are giving $25 in gift cards to people in the community to get swabbed for a potential bird flu infection or to get a shot of the regular seasonal influenza vaccine. 

California is providing the gift cards at the clinics, which are run by the state’s vendor. The CDC also has a testing van from the agency’s Avian Flu Influenza Area Surveillance Testing, or AFAST project, offering testing at some of the sites.

“Funding for the gift cards comes out of California’s bird flu state emergency declaration funds. CDC does testing only and offers no incentives of any kind,” a spokesperson for the California Department of Public Health said in an email.

The effort runs contrary to rumors on social media that states have stopped testing symptomatic farmworkers for bird flu, at the behest of the CDC under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

“There has been no change to our guidance for testing suspect cases, we are not aware of any symptomatic workers not being referred or tested for H5N1, and it is very unlikely that testing would be declined if H5N1 was suspected,” the California spokesperson said.

A CDC spokesperson also said their guidance had not changed. The agency continues to recommend people with symptoms seek testing from their doctor or local health department.

Authorities in neighboring Nevada told CBS News they are also continuing to offer testing and treatment to farm workers exposed to bird flu infections in their animals. In Idaho, another state that had seen bird flu infections in farms, authorities said they had not heard of symptomatic workers being discouraged from getting tested.

“We have no knowledge of this happening and have not heard any recent reports of symptomatic workers,” AJ McWhorter, a spokesperson for the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, said in an email.

Labs run by state and local health departments are usually the first to conduct initial testing for bird flu, before forwarding the samples on to the CDC for confirmation. Health departments typically announce those “presumptive” detections, even if they turn out later not to be confirmed.

In addition to testing people exposed to the virus on farms, California said it is also continuing to check whether other flu cases elsewhere in the state are being caused by bird flu.

“To date, all samples tested have been confirmed as seasonal subtypes H1 or H3, which rules out infection with H5N1 [bird flu]. The fact that no other human cases of H5N1 have been identified via subtyping efforts is reassuring,” the California spokesperson said.