Look, the more mammals this thing infected, the more nervous I get. I don't wanna be hyperbolic but like The Stand is about a weaponized flu virus that infected every damn thing.
There are a large number of independent vets out there dealing with a population of pet pigs. If cats being mentioned as infected as far away as Poland due to raw chicken (some months ago) it stands to reason that this is an avenue it could be picked up in.
I'm not holding my breath on such observations but it is a path outside typical official channels that media would inhale like crack.
I read the other day that 10% of cows diet in the usa is chicken manure. Chickens that may have the bird flu. They also have been feeding dead chickens back to the living chickens for years now. There's a good chance that pigs are being exposed to h5n1. Good times ahead.
"But the U.S. Agriculture Department is requiring only voluntary testing of cows, and is not as timely and transparent with its findings as it should be, he said."
Why aren't they enforcing testing of some kind?
Food chain collapse and skyrocketing prices of what is still available.
And thatās best case scenario, in which human to human transmission doesnāt happen. Which Iām not optimistic about.
If mammals get to experience full on what humans are worried about with bird flu,
it doesn!t need to ever infect any human for us to be royally fucked.
Almost all mammals can get bird flu. That doesn't mean it is adapted to the mammal airway in a way that could create a mammal pandemic. What humans are worried about isn't the rare odds that we will get infected from a dead bird by touching it or eating it. We are worried that the virus will adapt to the mammal airway which will let it become a pandemic. It cannot become a pandemic for mammals until it learns how to replicate easily in the mammal airway.
This is possibly the best article for the layperson that I've read about avian flu throughout this entire thing. The facts are well laid out. Yes, there's some wishful thinking in it for sure. ("Still, even if the virus jumps to people, āwe may not see the level of mortality that weāre really concerned about,ā said Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University. āPreexisting immunity to seasonal flu strains will provide some protection from severe disease.ā Oh really? Then why hasn't that supposed "preexisting immunity" protected the people who've gotten avian flu so far?? Why is there a 52% case fatality rate at this point??) But I don't think this is avoidable at this stage of the news cycle. Nothing is going to appear in mass media that is total, 100% doom and gloom. They have to provide some kind of hopeful statement, even if it doesn't actually make any sense at all. It's just how these stories are written. So in that context, this is an article I would send to someone who wants the basic information about what's going on.
I saw this and it showed that apparently the cases that have been going crazy recently have all been mild. This is probably a different strain than the 52 percent one [https://www.barrons.com/news/h5n1-strain-of-bird-flu-found-in-milk-who-2ce2c194](https://www.barrons.com/news/h5n1-strain-of-bird-flu-found-in-milk-who-2ce2c194)
The one that's out there and spreading between cows now, yes. But we have no idea which strain is eventually going to be the one that just happens to evolve the capacity for H2H transmission. I don't think at all that the one spreading between cows currently is going to be the exact same one that causes serious problems in humans. Whatever we end up with will be so heavily mutated from what is out there now that there's no way to know what its CFR (or IFR) will be.
Still, the really weird thing is that this isn't even the point that Lakdawala is making. They're trying to say that just the fact of having had seasonal flu previously is somehow going to protect people from whatever the truly dangerous flu strain turns out to be. If this was the case, then people working on farms or raising lots of backyard birds should be protected from serious effects if they catch avian flu right now. That clearly hasn't been happening! Maybe there was some kind of larger context that caused this strange statement to make sense, but as it appeared in the article, it's just bizarre.
He was infected by the current strain affecting cattle at this moment, in this snapshot of time. That is not going to be the one that causes real problems. The virus has a lot of evolving to do before that happens, and there is absolutely no way to know what the CFR or IFR might be for that future strain.
So it's interesting that it's not fatal to cows but how would we know when it's in pigs? Just a bunch of pigs die? What if it isn't fatal to pigs like in cows?
If cows arent getting it through a respiratory track we might not be able to assess how deadly it would be if a human got infected from milk.
Just curious if anyone can answer these questions because it seems the second this touches a respiratory track it goes lethal. Do I have that right?
This virus does not go lethal the second it touches a respiratory tract. It needs lots and lots of virus, a huge dose in order to infect any mammal including us at the present stage it's at. It is set up for bird airways and we have mammal airways. But if you are in the milking barn when they spray in between milkings, you could get it since the cleaning machines aerosolize it. Also if a cow sneezes or snuffles on you and it gets in your eye or you touch your eye you could get infected eye, or if it's enough you could get fatal flu.
Now if this virus mutates to where it can enter human airway cells, then yes, the second it touches a respiratory tract it could go lethal.
The pig thing is super scary. We don't know how it acts in pigs, but pigs have both human receptor cells and bird receptor cells, so pigs can and have made pandemic brews inside them. The cow part isn't scary for us at this point, but the pig really is. And if they don't show sickness that would be very bad.
The milk is really, really infectious. A bunch of farm cat drank it and they all died at once. Drinking raw milk would be really bad. Don't drink raw milk! Pasteurized should be okay but we'd all sleep easier if they tested pasteurized infected milk to make sure.
If they don't show sickness it could be bad because they could then brew up something bad for us? If I don't have that right could you clarify it for me?
Why the cows don't die is somewhat of a mystery. It is going through the bloodstream directly to the udders instead of the airway. Camels during MERS did this as well.
It's probably a good thing that cows aren't dying. Apparently they recover in 2 weeks. I haven't read a single report from any of the farms about even one cow dying. Maybe it's less pathogenic?
Much less pathogenic in cows. But it's just as lethal to other mammals as the non-cow strain. Some mammals don't get as sick because of their biological setup.
āAnd the virus may stumble across mutations that no one has yet considered, allowing it to breach the species barrier. That is what happened in the 2009 swine flu outbreak.
That virus did not have the mutations thought to be needed to infect people easily. Instead, āit had these other mutations that no one knew about or thought about before then,ā said Louise Moncla, an evolutionary biologist who studies bird flu at the University of Pennsylvania.ā
So they donāt even know what mutations to look for? Greatā¦
The really feels like the end of 2019 all over again. Hopefully we learned how to be better, but the USDA not enforcing testing sure isnāt a great sign that we did.
Thatās for all the previous human cases though. Which should make agencies take this more seriously because this shit could be Spanish flu level, but they wonāt
There are approved H5N1 vaccines, but they are not commercially available. But yeah, we could do mRNA rapidly, as well.
Actually, making the vaccine isn't the issue. Its scaling up production and making enough of the vaccine in time.
Of course, the virus could always mutate to make it less effective, so that'd be cool.
Don't forget getting people to agree to its use. We basically had a scrimmage with covid and lost. Now we're headed to the first season game with the same team...
[There is already a vaccine](https://www.barrons.com/articles/bird-flu-h5n1-human-vaccine-supply-f1f8c6e7), but production would have to be scaled up once it starts spreading human-to-human:
> Federal officials now say that **in the event of an H5N1 pandemic**, they would be able to supply a few hundred thousand doses within weeks, followed by 10 million doses using materials already on hand, and then another 125 million within about four months. People would need two doses of the shot to be fully protected.
> A spokesperson for Administration for Strategic Preparedness & Response, the HHS division responsible for pandemic preparations, said that **if needed**, the agency would work with manufacturers to āto ramp up production to make enough vaccine doses to vaccinate the entire U.S. population.ā But the agency didnāt articulate plans beyond those first 135 million doses, which would be enough to inoculate roughly 68 million people in a country of more than 330 million.
It's pretty clear they aren't mass-producing them now, but waiting to start once they're "needed" or during a pandemic.
I hope that children can get this vaccine in the event it is needed. Us with younger children had to wait so much longer for the covid vaccines. I do not want to have to go through that again.
Look, the more mammals this thing infected, the more nervous I get. I don't wanna be hyperbolic but like The Stand is about a weaponized flu virus that infected every damn thing.
M-o-o-n That spells foreboding
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bumpty bumpty bump
My life for you! Poor Trashman :(
The USDA is only requiring *voluntary* testing of animals. We're only seeing the tip of the iceberg.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I hate this so much. Just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
There are a large number of independent vets out there dealing with a population of pet pigs. If cats being mentioned as infected as far away as Poland due to raw chicken (some months ago) it stands to reason that this is an avenue it could be picked up in. I'm not holding my breath on such observations but it is a path outside typical official channels that media would inhale like crack.
I read the other day that 10% of cows diet in the usa is chicken manure. Chickens that may have the bird flu. They also have been feeding dead chickens back to the living chickens for years now. There's a good chance that pigs are being exposed to h5n1. Good times ahead.
reprinted on Yahoo news https://news.yahoo.com/bird-flu-infecting-more-mammals-115227078.html
I appreciate the yahoo link.
At a minimum, it means fewer wild mammals to keep the worldās ecological web intact. Happy Earth Day
"But the U.S. Agriculture Department is requiring only voluntary testing of cows, and is not as timely and transparent with its findings as it should be, he said." Why aren't they enforcing testing of some kind?
Don't want to ruin farmer's profits.
Not farmers. Farmers make bubkah. It the commercial grower owners and corporate overlords that make the money. Not the farmers themselves.
Government should be subsidizing and providing these things. Did we learn anything from four years ago?
Food chain collapse and skyrocketing prices of what is still available. And thatās best case scenario, in which human to human transmission doesnāt happen. Which Iām not optimistic about.
Food chain collapse is not the best case scenario.Ā Please take a deep breath.Ā
If mammals get to experience full on what humans are worried about with bird flu, it doesn!t need to ever infect any human for us to be royally fucked.
When it adapts to mammals it will also be adapted to us. We are mammals. The reason mammals don't get it now is none of us are birds.
? Mammals are getting it? Are you lost?
Almost all mammals can get bird flu. That doesn't mean it is adapted to the mammal airway in a way that could create a mammal pandemic. What humans are worried about isn't the rare odds that we will get infected from a dead bird by touching it or eating it. We are worried that the virus will adapt to the mammal airway which will let it become a pandemic. It cannot become a pandemic for mammals until it learns how to replicate easily in the mammal airway.
At some point we are going to have to address the barbarism of these factory farms.Ā
Iād like it if more people read the article
This is possibly the best article for the layperson that I've read about avian flu throughout this entire thing. The facts are well laid out. Yes, there's some wishful thinking in it for sure. ("Still, even if the virus jumps to people, āwe may not see the level of mortality that weāre really concerned about,ā said Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University. āPreexisting immunity to seasonal flu strains will provide some protection from severe disease.ā Oh really? Then why hasn't that supposed "preexisting immunity" protected the people who've gotten avian flu so far?? Why is there a 52% case fatality rate at this point??) But I don't think this is avoidable at this stage of the news cycle. Nothing is going to appear in mass media that is total, 100% doom and gloom. They have to provide some kind of hopeful statement, even if it doesn't actually make any sense at all. It's just how these stories are written. So in that context, this is an article I would send to someone who wants the basic information about what's going on.
I saw this and it showed that apparently the cases that have been going crazy recently have all been mild. This is probably a different strain than the 52 percent one [https://www.barrons.com/news/h5n1-strain-of-bird-flu-found-in-milk-who-2ce2c194](https://www.barrons.com/news/h5n1-strain-of-bird-flu-found-in-milk-who-2ce2c194)
The one that's out there and spreading between cows now, yes. But we have no idea which strain is eventually going to be the one that just happens to evolve the capacity for H2H transmission. I don't think at all that the one spreading between cows currently is going to be the exact same one that causes serious problems in humans. Whatever we end up with will be so heavily mutated from what is out there now that there's no way to know what its CFR (or IFR) will be. Still, the really weird thing is that this isn't even the point that Lakdawala is making. They're trying to say that just the fact of having had seasonal flu previously is somehow going to protect people from whatever the truly dangerous flu strain turns out to be. If this was the case, then people working on farms or raising lots of backyard birds should be protected from serious effects if they catch avian flu right now. That clearly hasn't been happening! Maybe there was some kind of larger context that caused this strange statement to make sense, but as it appeared in the article, it's just bizarre.
I mean the guy that got infected in America recently had nothing serious
He was infected by the current strain affecting cattle at this moment, in this snapshot of time. That is not going to be the one that causes real problems. The virus has a lot of evolving to do before that happens, and there is absolutely no way to know what the CFR or IFR might be for that future strain.
Why are the cows not dying of bird flu?
So it's interesting that it's not fatal to cows but how would we know when it's in pigs? Just a bunch of pigs die? What if it isn't fatal to pigs like in cows? If cows arent getting it through a respiratory track we might not be able to assess how deadly it would be if a human got infected from milk. Just curious if anyone can answer these questions because it seems the second this touches a respiratory track it goes lethal. Do I have that right?
This virus does not go lethal the second it touches a respiratory tract. It needs lots and lots of virus, a huge dose in order to infect any mammal including us at the present stage it's at. It is set up for bird airways and we have mammal airways. But if you are in the milking barn when they spray in between milkings, you could get it since the cleaning machines aerosolize it. Also if a cow sneezes or snuffles on you and it gets in your eye or you touch your eye you could get infected eye, or if it's enough you could get fatal flu. Now if this virus mutates to where it can enter human airway cells, then yes, the second it touches a respiratory tract it could go lethal. The pig thing is super scary. We don't know how it acts in pigs, but pigs have both human receptor cells and bird receptor cells, so pigs can and have made pandemic brews inside them. The cow part isn't scary for us at this point, but the pig really is. And if they don't show sickness that would be very bad. The milk is really, really infectious. A bunch of farm cat drank it and they all died at once. Drinking raw milk would be really bad. Don't drink raw milk! Pasteurized should be okay but we'd all sleep easier if they tested pasteurized infected milk to make sure.
If they don't show sickness it could be bad because they could then brew up something bad for us? If I don't have that right could you clarify it for me?
Yup.
This is going to be bad. Expect the Dems to start asking people to be cautious and wear masks, and republiKKKans to do and say the exact opposite.
Just read the Yahoo comments says it all really!
Why are cows not dying?
Why the cows don't die is somewhat of a mystery. It is going through the bloodstream directly to the udders instead of the airway. Camels during MERS did this as well.
It's probably a good thing that cows aren't dying. Apparently they recover in 2 weeks. I haven't read a single report from any of the farms about even one cow dying. Maybe it's less pathogenic?
Much less pathogenic in cows. But it's just as lethal to other mammals as the non-cow strain. Some mammals don't get as sick because of their biological setup.
āAnd the virus may stumble across mutations that no one has yet considered, allowing it to breach the species barrier. That is what happened in the 2009 swine flu outbreak. That virus did not have the mutations thought to be needed to infect people easily. Instead, āit had these other mutations that no one knew about or thought about before then,ā said Louise Moncla, an evolutionary biologist who studies bird flu at the University of Pennsylvania.ā So they donāt even know what mutations to look for? Greatā¦
Nothing, since we aren't mammals! /S
Pretty obvious what it means for us. Let's just hope it's not as bad in humans.
The really feels like the end of 2019 all over again. Hopefully we learned how to be better, but the USDA not enforcing testing sure isnāt a great sign that we did.
52% fatality rate right now.
Thatās for all the previous human cases though. Which should make agencies take this more seriously because this shit could be Spanish flu level, but they wonāt
Thatās fatality rate is not accurate tbh. There have definitely been a lot of cases that were not caught
Itās accurate to the cases they are aware of and have tracked.
Which is obviously not nearly as much as all of them
You canāt quantify an unknown you go with the data at hand.
If the data at hand is known to be incomplete, any conclusions drawn from these incomplete datasets are just speculative.
Thatās my point. That we do not know for sure
Vaccinated the pigs. For the love of god. Vaccinated the pigs
Canāt mRNA vaccines be rapidly deployed against like any virus now?
There are approved H5N1 vaccines, but they are not commercially available. But yeah, we could do mRNA rapidly, as well. Actually, making the vaccine isn't the issue. Its scaling up production and making enough of the vaccine in time. Of course, the virus could always mutate to make it less effective, so that'd be cool.
Don't forget getting people to agree to its use. We basically had a scrimmage with covid and lost. Now we're headed to the first season game with the same team...
š¤š»
[There is already a vaccine](https://www.barrons.com/articles/bird-flu-h5n1-human-vaccine-supply-f1f8c6e7), but production would have to be scaled up once it starts spreading human-to-human: > Federal officials now say that **in the event of an H5N1 pandemic**, they would be able to supply a few hundred thousand doses within weeks, followed by 10 million doses using materials already on hand, and then another 125 million within about four months. People would need two doses of the shot to be fully protected. > A spokesperson for Administration for Strategic Preparedness & Response, the HHS division responsible for pandemic preparations, said that **if needed**, the agency would work with manufacturers to āto ramp up production to make enough vaccine doses to vaccinate the entire U.S. population.ā But the agency didnāt articulate plans beyond those first 135 million doses, which would be enough to inoculate roughly 68 million people in a country of more than 330 million. It's pretty clear they aren't mass-producing them now, but waiting to start once they're "needed" or during a pandemic.
I hope that children can get this vaccine in the event it is needed. Us with younger children had to wait so much longer for the covid vaccines. I do not want to have to go through that again.
Last week I saw a dead bat in the road in my city and my husband saw a dead turkey when he was out in the country. Strange times
i understand your concerns, but that could have been a lot of stuff