“It started with a phone call.”
For most bovine veterinarians, those calls blend together. A producer has a sick cow. Milk production is down. Something doesn’t seem right.
For Dr. Maxwell Beal, that 2024 call changed everything.
The next morning, he drove to a dairy in Central Valley California to examine a cow that wasn’t behaving like cows with the diseases he treated every day. She was lethargic, refused to eat, presented with a high fever and her milk production had fallen off dramatically. Even the milk itself looked different.
Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) had already been confirmed in dairy cattle in Texas, Kansas and Idaho. California, however, had remained untouched.
Until now.
Standing among those cows, Beal couldn’t shake the feeling that he was looking at something far bigger than an isolated herd health problem.
“We kind of thought, ‘Hey, we think this is bird flu,’” Beal recalled during the 2026 American Association of Bovine Practitioners Emerging Disease Conference. “Obviously we had heard quite a bit about it before then with Texas, Kansas, Idaho and other places. That was the first time it had shown up here in the Central Valley.”
He didn’t wait for someone else to make the decision. Convinced something unusual was unfolding, Beal contacted state animal health officials and samples were submitted for testing. The diagnosis would confirm California’s first case of HPAI in dairy cattle.
There was no California playbook. Few veterinarians had firsthand experience with HPAI in dairy cattle, and nearly every recommendation came with a qualifier because researchers were still trying to understand how the virus behaved in cows.
Then one herd became several and the phone started ringing for a different reason. Neighboring veterinarians wanted to know what HPAI looked like in the field. Producers wanted to know whether their cows would recover. Everyone wanted answers.
“I got thrown into this role of being the bird flu guy just because I was the only one who had seen it in person for about two or three weeks,” Beal says. “I knew about as much as anyone else. It’s just that I had seen the cows.”
He wasn’t the foremost expert on HPAI, he was simply the veterinarian who had been there first.
Each new dairy became another opportunity to learn, and every conversation helped build the practical knowledge veterinarians across California were searching for.
Recognizing HPAI Before the Laboratory Confirms it
One of the first lessons came from simply walking through affected pens. When HPAI reached California, veterinarians couldn’t rely on experience because there wasn’t any. Instead, they learned to recognize the disease by paying attention to what didn’t fit.
“A bird flu cow is basically not eating, she doesn’t want to get up, she’s extremely lethargic, she has a very high fever and production is nothing,” Beal says. “It drops significantly.”
After seeing enough affected dairies, he no longer needed laboratory results to suspect what he was looking at. He could spot what he calls “a bird flu cow.”
The milk itself often changed, although Beal cautions those changes weren’t always dramatic. Fever, lethargy, anorexia and a sudden collapse in milk production proved to be the more consistent clues.
Just as striking was the speed of the disease.
“It blows up pretty quickly,” he says. “Once you saw one clinical, you usually had a very large number of clinicals not too long after that.”
Those first outbreaks changed the way he approached herd visits. Instead of focusing only on the cow in front of him, he began looking for patterns across the dairy. One clinical animal rarely stayed one clinical animal for long.
As more dairies became infected, another surprise emerged: not every outbreak looked the same.
“Repeat outbreaks were much milder, but they seemed to target animals that weren’t exposed previously,” Beal says. “Virgin heifers that had since become first-lactation cows were the ones that showed the significant clinical signs. I think they were probably affected the first time, but they paled in comparison to the older cows.”
Those observations didn’t answer every question about immunity, but they helped veterinarians prepare clients for what they might encounter if HPAI returned. Experience was beginning to fill the gaps that science hadn’t yet addressed.
When Every Producer Wants to do Something
As laboratory confirmations accumulated, the questions Beal received changed almost overnight.
The first calls asked what the disease was. The next calls asked how to stop it.
Every producer wanted to help their cows. Every conversation seemed to include another product someone had heard about or another treatment circulating through the industry.
Beal understood the instinct. When milk production disappears almost overnight and cows are running high fevers, doing nothing feels impossible. What he learned, however, was that more treatment didn’t necessarily mean better outcomes.
“Aggressive treatment seemed to have an overkill aspect to it,” he says. “If you’re drenching twice a day, you’re going to do a thousand animals today and tire your people out so much they start making mistakes. Setting parameters for which cows really needed treatment seemed to be the best middle ground.”
That realization didn’t happen after a single herd, but after weeks of walking dairies, watching employees work themselves to exhaustion and recognizing that labor could become just as limiting as medicine.
Supportive care remained the foundation of treatment. Reducing fever, maintaining hydration and identifying the animals most likely to benefit from intervention consistently proved more valuable than chasing every new recommendation that surfaced during the outbreak.
For Beal, the experience reinforced a lesson that extends well beyond HPAI:
Emerging diseases create uncertainty. Uncertainty creates pressure. Pressure creates an overwhelming desire to act.
The veterinarian’s job is to make sure those actions remain grounded in evidence rather than emotion.
More than the “Bird Flu Guy”
As more dairies became infected, Beal’s days settled into an unfamiliar rhythm. Mornings often began with another herd visit. Afternoons brought calls from neighboring veterinarians comparing notes or asking what he was seeing. Evenings were spent talking with producers trying to make sense of a disease that seemed to rewrite the rules every week.
No one had all the answers, but Beal had the experience.
The more outbreaks he managed, the more he realized veterinarians weren’t just treating a virus. They were helping producers navigate uncertainty.
“Remain calm in the middle of the storm that’s going on around you,” he advises. “That brings a lot of peace to your clients when you are not freaking out about it.”
That calm didn’t come from pretending to know everything. It came from acknowledging what was known, admitting what wasn’t and helping producers make the best decisions possible with the information available.
Every new outbreak brought another opportunity to learn, but it also brought another opportunity to communicate.
Lead Clients Through Uncertainty
Looking back, Beal believes one of the biggest challenges wasn’t medical at all. It was recognizing the emotional weight producers and employees were carrying.
“Be realistic and have empathy for your clients,” he says. “Some of the guys here worked insanely hard to get through their outbreaks. They were very tired and had put in a lot of effort.”
By the time a veterinarian arrived, many dairy teams had already spent days treating sick cows, reorganizing workflows and watching milk production fall. Long hours turned into long weeks. Employees were physically exhausted, while producers struggled with the uncertainty of not knowing how long the outbreak would last or what tomorrow might bring.
Those realities influenced every recommendation Beal made.
A treatment protocol that looked ideal on paper wasn’t particularly useful if it required labor the dairy simply didn’t have. Likewise, recommendations had to evolve as new information became available. The outbreak was moving quickly, and veterinarians were learning alongside researchers.
That required a willingness to adapt without losing the confidence of clients.
The Industry’s Fact Checker
As HPAI spread across California, so did opinions. Every week seemed to bring another product, another protocol or another claim that someone had heard might stop the disease.
Beal found himself serving as much as an information filter as a clinician.
“You’re a fact disseminator at that point,” he says. “You’ve seen the disease, you have some experience and you can really help your clients prepare.”
That responsibility included helping producers separate evidence from speculation and resisting the temptation to recommend every promising idea before data existed to support it.
It also meant remaining open to changing course as better evidence emerged.
“Focus on areas that work, but don’t be so confident in your experience that you’re closed off to other opinions,” Beal says. “Everybody else is going to start seeing it and become more knowledgeable as things progress.”
For Beal, that balance became one of the defining lessons of the outbreak.
Experience and research both mattered. Neither could stand alone.
Why Biosecurity Still Deserves Attention
As the months passed and outbreaks became more familiar, Beal noticed another shift. Some producers began assuming HPAI was simply unavoidable. If neighboring dairies had become infected, why continue worrying about biosecurity?
He challenges that way of thinking.
“It’s never inevitable that everybody gets it. It’s possible to miss it,” he says. “If people let their guard down, they make it way more possible that they get it.”
That message became increasingly important as the emergency phase of the outbreak faded. The urgency surrounding HPAI may have changed, but opportunities for disease transmission had not.
For Beal, maintaining practical biosecurity wasn’t about eliminating every risk. It was about stacking the odds in a producer’s favor and avoiding the complacency that often follows prolonged disease outbreaks.
The Lessons that Lasted
Eventually, the pace slowed. The emergency that had dominated Beal’s fall gradually gave way to something he hadn’t experienced in months: time to reflect.
By New Year’s, his final affected herd was recovering and the constant stream of emergency calls had finally begun to quiet. For the first time since that initial phone call months earlier, there was an opportunity to look back.
“At the end of the outbreak you’re looking back and saying, ‘This is what worked. This is what didn’t work,’” Beal says. “Then you become the person with information to help other people who maybe haven’t had it.”
Those months changed the way Beal thinks about disease outbreaks, but perhaps more importantly, they changed the way he thinks about the veterinarian’s role.
Emerging diseases don’t just test diagnostic skills. They also test judgment, communication and leadership.
The next foreign animal disease won’t look exactly like HPAI. The clinical signs will be different. The treatment recommendations will evolve. The questions producers ask, however, are likely to sound familiar: What is this? What should we do? Are we going to get through it?
Somewhere, another veterinarian will answer what seems like an ordinary phone call, drive to a farm expecting a routine herd visit and realize something doesn’t fit.
When that happens, Beal believes the lessons from California’s first HPAI outbreak will still apply.
“We learned a lot that can be applied to things like foot-and-mouth disease and New World screwworm,” he concludes. “There’s a lot more that goes into this as a veterinarian than just knowing the disease. There’s a big psychological aspect to foreign animal disease and emerging disease outbreaks. You play that role whether you want it or not.”
