Americans don’t like being told what to do, and many don’t trust government. These stubborn attitudes might turn H5N1 bird flu into a pandemic
When H5N1 avian influenza started spreading among dairy cattle across the U.S. this year, regulators warned against consuming unpasteurized milk. What happened? Raw milk sales went up.
Distributors of this unsafe-for-human-consumption product deny H5N1—which has the potential to sicken millions of people—is a danger. Dairy farmers decline to allow disease detectives onto their properties.
Nah, we'll do like we did with the Spanish flu where we put our heads in the sand about a new flu strain from a farm in Kansas and name it after the first place to publicly acknowledge it exists.
I got a shattaf (handheld bidet sprayer) at the start of the last pandemic. It’s incredible. It’s easy to install for a renter, and is so much cleaner than tp. Only downside is it’s cold water unless you run a second line from your sink’s hot water line.
I always wanted to try one of those things, but I don't want to install one. I also want one with a remote control that has a range of at least 7 yards.
The way they're usually set up here in the Nordics where they're pretty common is that the tap feeds into that sprayer, meaning that I have to open my tap and then set it to whatever water temperature I want, and then when I… err, pull the trigger on the sprayer the water flows from the sprayer and not the tap.
The best part about the bird flu in humans is that it is not airborne. And human to human transmission is, at the moment, a rare occurrence. So only the people who refuse to take precautions should be impacted.
So only the people who refuse to take precautions should be impacted.
Only if transmission between those people doesn't result in a mutation that turns it airborne. That's not an "if" I'd personally like to risk. To assume it will only affect those who don't take precaution is foolish at best and cruelly disingenuous at worst.
And there's a frankly scarily high likelihood that it's not an "if" but a "when" – some forecasters like the ALERT team, who are usually fairly accurate, give H5N1 turning into a pandemic about a 25% chance in the coming decade, which would generally mean it'd successfully specialized for infecting human lung tissues.
If or when that pandemic does happen, there's a chance it'd be extremely bad. Estimates for the infection fatality rate (IFR) range anywhere from 1 to 80%, eg. this article estimates 14 – 33%, but this article estimates 30 – 80% for the current strains. Needless to say that even a 10% fatality rate would be disastrous, something like 20x – 50x worse than COVID. Note that the IFR is distinct from the case fatality rate (CFR) which is currently something like 50% – 80%, but those are only the cases we know of and the ones bad enough to end up in hospital, but based on eg. wastewater studies the number of total infected is probably a lot higher than the cases we've seen so far.
Some estimates for eg the 1918 pandemic put its IFR at around 2% but some studies have pointed out it's likely that that's an underestimate, and eg. the ALERT team gives it a ~60% chance that the IFR for H5N1 would be ≥10%. Not letting this thing turn into a pandemic should be a top priority for health authorities, but nobody seems to be willing to actually take the steps needed, such as shutting down mink farms here in Finland – our extremist right-wing government is instead paying subsidies to a dying industry that centers around animal torture even though it's a prime zoonosis candidate. And let's not forget that H5N1 is just one of the highly pathogenic avian influenzas going around right now, although it is by far the most pressing one at the moment.
Conservatives will always prioritize money over lives. The only consolation I have is that even though they might still lead us to potentially even hundreds of millions of needless deaths if/when this does turn into a pandemic, they'll be the ones refusing to get vaccinated and therefore more likely to die.
I don't think you understand just how stupid my fellow country members are. We literally say "hey to prevent getting yourself and others sick, you should do these steps" making it a suggestion of reasonable things.
the response "my freedoms are being trampled". I fucking wish they actually were.
The problem is that we exploit the land animals are on. People build suburbs in areas where these diseases are endemic. E.g., they clear cut a forest near caves and build a massive suburb, and people move in for the cheap housing. The bats that lived in the forests and caves are pushed to the eves of houses. Ebola virus is naturally endemic in those bats, and when a bat shits, it lands on a picnic table. Some mom sets up a picnic on the table and brushes off what she thought was a stick before serving sandwiches and touching her itchy face.
She handles wet grapes that are for the entire fourth grade class picnic, and everyone ingests them. The next day, multiple children get sick, but one family flew to Yellowstone that evening, and another flew to Japan for spring break, spreading the disease internationally before humans are even aware such a disease has even started.
Three weeks later, the health authorities see a mysterious disease in local hospitals, but have no tests for it, and the local health authority doesn't issue a shutdown notice for schools because it's become politicicized and they will lose their job if they make a bad call. A few people dying will get them a repremand at most. That's how pandemics start.
Well, livestock are definitely a major source of animal contact outbreaks, but I do agree with you that wild animals displaced from their environment as a result of land use change is a factor as well.
And what is the biggest contributing factor in land use? Oh, it's animal agriculture again...
you are right that this is a legitimate source as well, but that’s why i’m suggesting that we eliminate the source that we have more control over: animal agriculture. it is far easier to adopt a plant-based diet than it is to move entire towns around geographically
For good reason. Really hard to trust politicians when they're all bought out by corporations (especially Pharma and health insurance) and billionaires.
Governments and pharmas don’t intentionally create new diseases
No, but that doesn't stop them profiteering off them when they happen, at the expense of public health
(E: though lets not act as if H5N1 isn't spreading entirely due to corporate greed and the lack of regulations and enforcement it buys from the government)
One possible scenario for spillover into the population: a raw-milk drinker or a farmworker gets infected with this strain of H5N1 that’s moving among cattle and also gets co-infected with a human-adapted strain of influenza. In such a situation viruses can swap genes in a process called reassortment. A major fear about H5N1 has always been that it might do this. H5N1 has shown it can easily move from one species to another, acquiring new genetic material in the process.
Airborne diseases don't acknowledge party registration, voting habits, or political identification. If H5N1 does reassort with influenza it's going to be killing humans.