CDC guidance fairs

CDC Issues Updated Guidance to Help Prevent Spread of Flu at Agricultural Fairs | NCIRD | CDC

• Don’t take toys, pacifiers, cups, bottles, strollers, or similar items into the animal areas.
• Don’t eat, drink, or touch, or put anything in your mouth or touch your eyes while in animal areas (barns, show arenas).
• Wash your hands often with soap and running water after touching animals, animal associated equipment, or their environments (like a barn or enclosure). If soap and water are not available, use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer.
• Where possible, avoid direct contact with pigs, poultry, cattle, and other animals that look or act ill. (Direct physical contact with the animal includes touching, holding, kissing, being bitten, licked, and scratched.) 
• Another article went as far to say avoid all animal barns particularly the poultry. 

Thank God I grew up in a time when going to the fair was carefree and the only worry was you eat too much. The innocence of living seems dimmed…

Bird flu outbreak at county fair time: precautions in the dairy barns | STAT

Despite bird flu anxiety in the dairy barn, a yearly tradition carries on at an Iowa county fair.

Hence the lactating cow question. “The simplest solution to reduce that risk in a drastic way is just not to have lactating dairy cows at exhibitions or shows,” said Joe Armstrong, a cattle veterinarian at the University of Minnesota Extension.

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That’s the route Michigan has taken, and certain fairs elsewhere have followed suit. Some are doing what they did in 2020, at the height of the Covid pandemic, making lactating-cow competitions virtual. But in the U.S., when there’s talk of public health restrictions, there’s disagreement — about the role of government, about how much risk is tolerable, about when it’s worth disrupting the occasions that bind communities. States like Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota have so far allowed lactating dairy cows at shows, but only if they’re flu-tested in the seven days before they arrive. In Colorado, meanwhile, such precautions are recommended but not required.