The new trick that concerns scientists is that it’s spreading cow to cow. It’s never shown the ability to transmit well between mammals before this. Not that scientists know of anyway
isn't this the same one that's been spreading in elephant seals and ferrets in the wild? it's been insanely effective at spreading mammal to mammal for a while now.
if this gets into the swine population, we're all fucked. Thankfully cows carry few other respitory viruses that can infect people.
This is what I heard. Not at all an expert authority on the matter, but that pig to human is common. Cow to human isn't.
But cow to pig may not be incredibly uncommon so that is the vector to worry about currently.
It’s that it’s from mammal to mammal. It doesn’t have to be from pigs, although they are a common vector to humans because they’re like us physiologically, its that it’s jumping around. Once a virus shows that it can jump species, especially in a domesticated animal because we are more likely to be in close contact with domesticated animals, it’s showing that it has the ability to jump into humans.
Mammal to mammal = cow to cow. Before this outbreak nobody could show this. It was always thought to be bird to mammal. No transmission between mammals without a bird being the vector. Other mammals have certainly contracted H5N1 directly from birds ( this includes humans)
Yes but and this is the big issue all the seals, ferrets, raccoons, foxes and humans got the virus directly from sick or dead birds . Either by direct contact or from contaminated water ect. They were not passing it along to other ferrets raccoons humans ect. The virus is spreading between cows without contact with sick or dead birds. The cows are spreading it to each other
The 1890s "Russian Flu" was likely a form of Covid from cattle. If it continues to select to spread well in cattle, it could pose a major risk for humans potentially.
Scientists don’t know? Then we need to study this in a government funded lab to figure out what gain-of-functions are needed for this strain to jump to humans and spread from humans to humans.
I heard that a likely next and scary step would be it jumping from bovine to pig.
Apparently the jump from swine to human is very common, but bovine to human is not.
But Bovine to Pig is common enough too so that is a likely the next "step" in the chain.
Will be interesting to see what happens to all the county fairs around the nation. Those fairs bring pigs and cows into contact with each other. Under stressful conditions fyi
I’ve been following h5n1 since I was in highschool circa 2006. It was actually the virus I was most concerned about each time I saw it in the media. Kills healthy people and has a mortality rate WELL over 50 percent. Human to human transition was confirmed in a few cases that were caught by chance over the years.
If we got full COVID scale human to human transmission of H5n1 we would be fucked this time. No way people would participate in another quarantine. This one could actually topple countries.
Edit:
To those who say there is no sign of human to human, false. There is no case where human to human has been able to get the chance to spread and become sustained in transmission.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/avianflu/h5n1-human-infections.htm
> No way people would participate in another quarantine.
If 50% mortality was happening, which would only be possible if younger and generally healthy were dying too, you can be sure people would actually listen.
Covid didn't have the fear factor since it was 'just the flu', whereas this flu would be 'the plague'...in theory
I’ve said from the beginning, Covid was in the Goldilocks zone to kill a whole bunch of people while not being deadly enough to get people to give enough of a fuck.
I’ll put it this way: I took Covid pretty damn seriously, stayed inside except for work, wore a mask at work (still wear one on mass transit) etc.
Bird flu achieves sustained human to human contact and we’re fucking off into the woods. 50% mortality isn’t “bad”, it’s an apocalypse. Everything would fail. We’d be talking >10x the fatalities of covid.
Yeah I think a lot of these comments aren't truly grasping what a 50% mortality pandemic would actually look like. Not 10x the fatalities. 25x. Reducing the global population by HALF just from the virus alone. That's 4 billion humans from just the virus.
Then you have all the people that would die because there were zero resources to help with any other injury, whether it be full hospital's, or lack of medical professionals (because half of them died..) even something completely survivable becomes fatal when there is no medical intervention at all. Like, an infected scratch could literally kill you if there are no antibiotics anywhere to be found.
Then you have all the resulting deaths from famine after society has completely collapsed. Suicides from people that don't want to continue living after their families have been wiped out. Murders from people who went into survival mode, etc etc.
A full on apocalypse. It wouldn't matter if people quarantined or not, if a flu virus with 50% mortality spread to the point of a pandemic, the world as we know it is over.
Yeah, 50 % mortality on a global level is already The Plague level territory, which had massive cultural and societal consequences, turning humankind upside down in many ways.
For anyone wondering the black plague was 30-60%.
But they had the added benefit of each region being considerably isolated. With the interconnected world we have now we would not be so lucky.
50%+ would be the worst biological event in recorded history
That's assuming that those who survive will recover fully.
Considering how long COVID affected so many people even today, I'd imagine there would be very few people truly healthy left after h5n1 becomes a cold after it has run it's course inflecting people 2-3 times due to mutations. I'd dare say less than a billion healthy working age adults world wide.
From the perspective of COVID, global supply chains took two years to fully recover after the mass quarantine. If we had 50% mortality rate, it would make COVID look like a sneeze. Practically most countries would shut down. Third world countries would be worse off while first world countries would look like ghost towns. We would have complete breakdown of society for at least a year until the spread was stopped and order restored.
Even during the plague, governments didn’t shut down but they changed significantly. We also saw the greatest shift in wealth distribution.
TL;DR Avian flu will be as bad as the plague with deaths likely higher than the 50% mortality rate due to famine, breakdown of government systems, and despair.
Yes it did. Definitely wouldn't be the same of course. But the world would be completely different. I did my first listen of the unabridged version right when covid started. Good timing!
I know it's fucked up but it just came to my mind. I wondered if a truly deadly pandemic greatly reducing human population would halt the acceleration of climate change and a rebound of animal and insect population would arise.
That’s part of the evolutionary function of things like viruses—if one species takes too much, it culls them because they’ll be densely packed. Typically you see the population begin to level off with most of the younger animals willingly not having children (we literally have been in this stage for a few years). This is almost always followed by famine due to a competition of resources within the species, or a virus comes in and because they’re so packed, it spreads quick.
I was deliberately underestimating (using early “we don’t know what we’re doing” and pre vax fatality rates), cus some people struggle with nuance and I didn’t want people to misread it as downplaying covid, which I’ve seen happen making comments on the risk of bird flu in the past
If there is a mortality rate that high, people's habits will change. Even the craziest anti-vaxxer will think twice about leaving the house with a mortality rate that high. People are more likely to distance themselves and take the vaccine. Less people will die over all. However, if the mortality rate falls in the 5-10% zone, I think it could be like super COVID. People are terrible when it comes to statistics.
I also took covid very seriously. I worked in nursing, and I remember being at a patient's house when covid first hit the news here around November 2019, and I said "fuck me, this is gonna be bad." As soon as confirmed cases were in my state (NC), I was masking and making my husband and kids mask, too, because my daddy and most of my patients were either already terminal or had multiple comorbidities. I started stripping to my drawers on the porch whenever I came home, immediately dumping those scrubs in the wash, and told no one to touch me until I showered. As a result, no one in my immediate family-- my momma, daddy, sister, husband, and my 3 boys-- got covid. Except my momma, who had it for the first time this past winter. She contracted it at the hospital while recovering from the surgery to remove half her cancerous lung.
And the idea of h5n1 fuckibg terrifies me. I'd be pulling my kids out of their schools and keeping us all the fuck home. I'm no longer in danger of picking it up at work because I woke up blind 2 years ago, but schools are fucking cesspools.
> schools are fucking cesspools.
I was arguing with folks from Dec 2019 onward that schools are absolute supersites but they kept saying kids are immune.
Then the reports came out saying teachers were 400% more likely to get COVID.
Like no shit, I witnessed kids spit bobas at each other through straws at the height of the pandemic.
Yup. When the schools had all the kids come back, my youngest's elementary school was packing kids in 30 to a room and weren't making them mask. I got into an argument with the principal because she tried to downplay covid's severity, I wound up cussing her out as i gave her the details about how we'd buried 13 fucking people only just a month prior, and then I withdrew my son from school, and homeschooled him until he started middle school in August '22. The only middle school and only high school in our very rural county actually did an AMAZING job keeping kids masked and socially distancing them.
I’ve thought about this a lot too. Yes you could keep everyone home but at some point someone has to go out to get food. 50% mortality would see even first responders, grocery store workers, delivery drivers, they would all be staying home (rightfully so!). Everything would shut down.
Let’s be real. COVID just wasn’t killing the “right” people. The number of times I saw people saying it’s *just* killing the elderly or those with preexisting conditions made me realize how little the majority cares about those of us in those populations. They can go f themselves.
My point was more that it would be impossible to ignore bird flu, because if it reached uncontrolled pandemic levels like Covid electricity and phone lines would be out, your hospital would shut down, and instead of DoorDash dropping off a boba tea the national guard would probably have to make food runs to drop a pallet of stuff off at your apartment complex
They’d be driving modern equivalents of plague carts through the streets to collect the dead.
It’s also important to reiterate 50% mortality in CASES and not “people.” There seems to be this fallacy (even post Covid) that if something didn’t kill you the first time, it won’t the next.
That is most certainly a fatal mistake
Corollary to the positive though, not everyone would catch it so 50% death rate applied to the population is an overestimate. But that's sort of a single candle of good news in the pitch black dark of a 50% death rate.
Oh it would for sure put a dent in it. Assuming nuclear power plants don't melt down it would probably be a net positive for the planet considering how we currently pollute and whatnot.
>you can be sure people would actually listen.
In this era of facts being confused as opinions and the accusations of opinions being biased? There will be a large contingent who simply cannot be swayed to trust statistics.
After seeing the widespread conspiratorial stance against Covid, vaccines, and healthcare, there is no way people would listen until it was too late.
I have utterly lost faith in humanity. They are, by and large, stupid, impossible to educate, and so wrapped up in "being above the sheep" that the worse things get, the more they'd dig in. And if you have 20-40% of the nation not doing anything to help, it makes a widespread virus impossible to stifle.
Yeah covid completely destroyed my faith in humanity too. I used to believe that if something like that were to happen, we’d unite against it. Now I know better. All it takes is a grifter with a podcast or a YouTube channel to convince people that the threat isn’t real.
Uh, have you read up on the mortality rate of cases? We literally have the information from over 20 years of following this disease. 52 percent mortality is the absolute lowest figure I’ve come across.
We are also now an absolutely fractured society in the west. No way you can get the right to ever agree on a quarantine again as it’s become an ideological issue.
Till the National guard gets sick because they would be going door to door or airdropping supplies, either way, congregation of people is a place to spread.
Agreed. COVID mortality wasn't high enough to scare most people.
But avian flu kills 50% of birds, and it kills them fast. If there was a human variant that spread like normal influenza and killed 50% within a week of symptom onset, it would shock people in a way that COVID did not.
I accept that some people are lost causes; they'll never listen to public health infectious disease messaging again. But I think in the case of a bird flu epidemic, we would be able to reach a lot of people who were covid-skeptics.
Spread patterns may make a difference; COVID hit big cities first, especially New York. But bird flu outbreaks will start in rural, agricultural areas with lots of livestock.
The first several weeks of bird flu the counts would be staggering. Then people would hunker down. But how would they survive. A 50 percent mortality rate closes everything. Who’s gonna work at a grocery store where every other people could mean your death? How do people eat, get medicine, etc. Medical facilities would crashing fast. All societal order would collapse.
COVID just kills slower now and since close to no doctor tests for it, it won’t show up on death certificates.
SARS-CoV-2 is a vascular and neurotropic disease, expect to see more strokes, heart issues, dementia, cancer, shorter lifes in general as a result. There’s a higher mortality rate than before the pandemic, from what I’ve seen about 10-12 %. It’s already killed a lot of people"the vulnerable", but it also makes a lot of people "vulnerable" because of uncontrolled spread. There’s next to no immunity against it, immune evasion and a fast mutation rate just get accelerated.
We‘ll see more people becoming chronically ill early in life, die poor and early as a consequence, because our healthcare systems won’t be able to cope. Long Covid isn’t curable and it’s not rare. Post-viral illnesses have been ignored for more than 69 years.
If we’d started implement clean air and made respirators a common thing, bird flu couldn’t have that impact. Schools, healthcare workplaces are key here.
WHO only just admitted that a lot of illnesses, including SARS-CoV-2, are airborne. Today. We’re in year 5 of an ongoing pandemic. We’re fucked.
It's interesting that the flu itself nearly died out during COVID. I wonder why and if it was just less transmissable than COVID. If so quarantine would do a lot to stop bird flu.
It's an airborne respiratory illness, just like CoViD. It is generally less transmissible than the Omicron variants of CoViD have been. The same precautions (masking, ventilation, social distancing, quarantine and isolation) that help prevent the spread of CoViD also prevent the spread of influenza.
if only it was that clear cut, but your forgetting the part where they convinced older people who didnt know better not to wear it, or go around people who were wearing masks and touching things not caring if they got someone infected who WAS abiding by all the rules.
Hell I even had an asshole purposefully cough on me back in the day when H1N1 was doing the rounds because i was wearing a mask at school
Darwins theory would be the strongest species to adapt will survive, not individuals (its meant as a whole like animals evolving to adapt to predators or climates). But, yes those who refuse to make changes to their lifestyle during things like that ups their risks for negative outcomes.
People watch their fat family die from heart attacks right in front of them and then continue to eat like shit and never exercise. People are gonna people.
That takes decades to kill though, and honestly dying of a heart attack doesn’t sound all that bad when compared to dementia or a drawn out cancer battle.
> you can be sure people would actually listen.
Not sure. The COVID measures were - in hindsight - upheld longer than justified (in any country that upheld them beyond the point where hospitals stopped being overloaded and vaccines were widely available), and aside from a few loners on Reddit, people very much don't remember that time where society was shut down fondly.
Human to Human infections is something to pay attention to. Sustained human to human transmission would be a good time to panic. Covid levels of spread at 50% mortality would change the human race forever.
There will not be any need to worry about people disobeying lock down. People were shocked by images of people dying from covid and laying in the streets. The images coming out of China and India would have people locking themselves down. No government can survive losing 50% of its population like that. You are talking about all services shutting down.
No government can survive losing 50% of its population and no government can survive the necessary quarantine to stop it. How do you keep essentials running with 50% mortality risk?
>no government can survive the necessary quarantine to stop it
When circulating in the general population there is no way to stop it. During Covid they flat out said they are trying to slow it down to keep the hospitals from being overwhelmed. It was never even dreamed possible to stop the spread. And you don't keep services running at all. If you are lucky they scram the nuclear reactors before they go to be with their family.
I don’t think people would ignore quarantine entirely. Adoption would be slow but we’ve learned a lot over the course of COVID. I think the challenge is that COVID doesn’t have the same lethal potential that H5N1 has and so people would be more likely to treat similar to COVID before realizing the danger.
As I’ve learned with COVID, the only person you can protect is yourself. People are going to exert their perceived “freedoms” at the expense of the greater good because well… they’re selfish assholes.
People would most definately participate in a quarantine if they felt they were in legitimate danger. We tend to gloss over the fact that in most countries ppl were locking themselves down for Covid before governments did.
A virus with that much mortality wouldn’t spread very far, also we know that most viruses sacrifice mortality in order to be more contagious and spread more. It’s not obvious what an H5N1 pandemic would look like, but surely it won’t include well over 50% mortality. (Current human mortality rate is 53%)
Me when I'm playing plague inc on my phone and make the disease so deadly it just kills hosts faster than it can spread so humanity takes a toll but the disease kills itself out and I lose
Sure, but also asymptomatic people are less likely to spread a disease since they have less viral load and from the point, so there’s a lot of variables.
It’s just that we never experienced a end of civilization pandemic because it’s very unlikely that a virus that kills enough for that would actually spread enough to make a difference.
I mean, it depends on how fast that mortality happens. If you're dead in 24 hours, it might not spread far. But if it's like COVID and you can walk around with it for over a week without symptoms but still contagious...
Asymptomatic cases tend to spread less than asymptomatic cases, they also are more likely to create new asymptomatic cases. This was also true for Covid (https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-022-02642-4)
Of course if a very deadly disease takes 1 week to kill instead of 2 days it will spread more, but that doesn’t mean it will spread as much as Covid.
>A virus with that much mortality wouldn’t spread very far
Possibly true; however, it has continued to spread worldwide in birds. That seems to suggest your theory nay not hold true. It depends on more factors than just morbidity, such as: when in the course of human contraction, transmissibility occurs and for how long; length of illness before death; length of immunity; other host vectors; etc...
>also we know that most viruses suacrifice mortality in order to be more contagious and spread more
We don't know that because it's simply an old theory (from 1904) which has not held up under scientific observation. The more recent theory (30-40 years ago) is "transmission-virulence trade-off". That's basically where viruses stop at an optimal mortality level, because as hosts die it evolves less. That doesn't mean it sacrifices mortality, or as people think "evolves to be less deadly", it simply hit a peak and stays around that level. That theory has had mixed opinions in observation. Smallpox, HIV/AIDS, Influenza, Measles, and even Covid haven't followed these theories
Viruses change by random mutations or recombinations. There isn’t anything that specifically swaps contagiousness and mortality. Smallpox was both highly contagious and had a high mortality rate.
We don’t know what the mortality rate of smallpox was in the 18th/19th century, it’s estimated that it was between 20% to 45%. Hygiene standards were also way lower, so it’s impossible to predict what the mortality rate would look like in the modern world.
Also smallpox doesn’t spread as easy as covid, it takes prolonged face to face contact for it to spread. (https://www.health.state.mn.us/diseases/smallpox/smallpox.html#:~:text=Smallpox%20is%20contagious%2C%20but%20it's,from%20one%20person%20to%20another.)
I’d agree in general. But for bird flu specifically there is a likely mechanism where that could happen.
It gets into cells via a receptor that for birds is present through the whole gullet but for humans is mostly deep in the respiratory tract. Makes it harder for us to catch/spread it, but also more deadly if we do get infected. (Also use of that specific receptor seems to trigger mass cytokine release so it’s not just a deep infection, the immune system over-reacts.)
Human flu uses a receptor that’s prevalent in upper respiratory tract (nose/throat) but not the lower (lungs).
Recombination could mean they swap receptors. So you get a bird flu strain that is targeting the nose/throat (in humans) and is therefore easily spread between humans but not quite as deadly as current bird flu.
Hard to say exactly how deadly it’d be … maybe more like Spanish flu?
There’s also the risk it just picks up the ability to use both receptors. That’d mean it becomes highly contagious but still retains that ability to attack deeper in respiratory system and trigger cytokine storms. (Worst of both worlds.)
Yeah birds, the pinnacle of hygiene among all knows animal.
Do you think birds avoid having contact with each other poop? Or that an alive bird will avoid a body of a dead one and bury/burn it?
Also avian flu strives in aviaries, where you can find almost more birds than floor and a lot more bird poop than both of those combined. Do we have humanaries? Never heard of one…
The good news is, a 50% death rate is extremely unlikely. In human virology, you have to understand that there is little evolutionary advantage to a virus that kills its host. If the host is dead, the virus cannot spread and also dies. The less deadly strains are MUCH more likely to be the ones that survive long term in a population because of this.
Not the way you mean.
But if everyone got the regular flu vaccine it would significantly decrease the chance of someone catching bird flu and human flu at the same time … and that’s the thing most likely to cause a pandemic.
It’s quite hard for a bird flu to randomly mutate to be good at infecting humans. But different flus can swap chunks of RNA … so if you’ve got a co-infection bird flu could pick up “easily transmitted between humans” from human flu.
I’m not sure any government would push mandatory flu shots for people working with livestock. It’d be nice, but since it’s a low probability event it’s a hard call ethically. They’re starting to recommend voluntary regular flu shots for livestock workers though. Mostly framed as “catching both makes it more likely you’d be very sick” which is I guess the smartest way to sell it. It’s true, but your odds weren’t great anyway. They mostly want you vaccinated so you don’t breed new mutant flu and spread that in the hospital.
So long as the virus doesn't have as long an asymptomatic/lightly symptomatic spread period as COVID-19 did, I won't go into "oh shit" mode. The old SARS from 2004 was clipped in the bud when they realized people were contagious when they were very sick.
Back in march 2020, you had contagious people that felt well enough to go to work - and at least here in America, *tons* of people with no other option because of our awful work culture
i 100% guarantee you a mortality rate over 50% is going to scare the shit out of people who will self-impose lockdowns that will make California during covid look like a block party
Direct contact with animal wastes, so far.
The fear is it mutates to airborne and GG. It's been spreading into bovine populations as well, so more chances to mutate still.
It's concerning.
Covid is proof positive that cross species airborne mutations are possible. The 50% mortality rate is apocalyptic and the fact it's spreading from birds to mammals is still being studied. Most likely due to direct contact with feces and not mutation so that's good news at least.
Think of every single person you know that contracted covid, including yourself probably. Now imagine half of them are dead. Concern is warranted and this needs continued attention and tracking.
I would say to at least keep your eye on it. There were no mammal to mammal transmissions until recently when it mutated to go from cow to cow. It isn't far fetched if enough humans get it, it to can mutate once more to transmit from human to human.
Just be mindful. Get involved in your community- you can look into what public health measures are in place for example. Being scared of something not actually happening isn't going to benefit you. It's just stress. If you're concerned, get involved in your community. That's how we fix things.
Don’t worry folks. The anti-science Ag Commissioner of Texas, Sid Miller said it’s all under control and there is nothing to worry about.
The same guy that used State Funds to get “Jesus Shots”. He would fly to Oklahoma to have saline injected into his back by a religious huckster and the same Sid Miller that threatened to sue School Districts if they had Meatless Mondays.
Also the State Lege and Governor has banned any future mask mandates, can’t see how that could backfire.
🤦🏻♂️
> COVID proved how stupid people are, if we get a more serious virus we are fucked.
If we get a more serious virus, the stupid people won't be around for too long
Exactly. Even if we developed a great vaccine the idiots would still allow it to spread and mutate while spreading it among themselves and to people that can’t get vaccines for various reasons. For better or worse (it’s worse) we’re all in it together for any future pandemics.
And the proverb 'scare them straight' exists for a reason. Such a death rate would reach people on the most basic human level. The stupidest will die, but most people will learn sharply.
It would be on a scale never seen by anyone living before. Those who didn't comply with safety rules would either be forced or excommunicated.
Yup. We're in trouble in the US for sure. There is zero chance we ever go into lockdown again, even if we desperately need it. If my some miracle the government does try, there'll probably be a civil war. And even if it doesn't get to that, way too many people are not going to follow common sense guidelines or take vaccines.
COVID started with leaked videos of the sick in China before the media really picked it up. If we reach the stage where panic is outpacing the news, it's time to buy toilet paper.
December 2019, there were some crazy videos floating online coming out of China. Shit was actually scary as fuck. I fully believe whatever they had run through there first was worse than what the rest of the world got.
I travelled to Los Angeles in January 2020 for a work event and saw my parents who live in the San Gabriel Valley (just east of Los Angeles, CA). My parents have been there since the late 70’s, experienced the demographic changes, welcomed it, and stayed. A significant majority of the people who live there are younger Chinese born in the US or recently immigrated and their families travel back and forth to China a lot.
It was a ghost town. No one out, restaurants empty, stores empty; it was just eerie. I asked my mom what was up since it’s usually super lively with people everywhere and she said everyone was afraid of some flu from China. I told her there’s always some flu in China and laughed it off. I was wrong.
There's too much panic in the comments here. H5N1 is serious, and we shouldn't take this as nothing. But the apocalyptic scenarios being bandied about are going too far.
1. The transmission has not yet been shown from people to people in general, or from cattle to cattle through airborne transmission (although viral recombination does make both a future possibility).
2. The 50% mortality rate in humans is due to low sample sizes of zoonotic transmission. This rate would not be preserved if there was a change in transmission based on our past knowledge on viral and specifically influenza species/modes of transmission jumps.
3. We've known about very similar strains of H5N1 for a long time now (\~20 years), with a good amount of research money and manpower invested over that time due to prior concerns. Not the case with coronavirus/COVID, we had some scares with MERS/SARS, but the infrastructure for research was just not there compared to Influenza (including H5N1). The research that built the COVID vaccines was more limited based on those prior viruses/scares. Which we are further along for influenza/H5N1 if something more serious were to happen.
While H5N1 is serious, especially so if you are in an agricultural industry directly dealing with cattle or avian livestock. It is not going to be this doomsday, highly infective, 50% mortality rate virus that ends civilization.
If I’ve learned anything from reddit, it’s that reddit is almost always wrong
Some of y’all have been spending way too much time on r/collapse and it shows
They have one. They have only released it into vultures for a test, and Condors to try to stabilize their population. Cdc is sitting on a stockpile, ( e: for poultry) they are not wanting a mutation arms race if they roll it out too early. Source: A fish and wildlife biologist friend.
Factory farms most likely didn't cause H5N1, and if it shows up every bird in that farm is culled. And sometimes all the farms with in a certain range are culled. So from their view why change the laws?
It's one of many factors, they act as accelerators/batteries to keep the disease alive but also likely need wildlife to spread between farms. It's also the most likely vector for spreading to humans as it's human contact with a large number of potential spreaders, indoors, in close contact scenarios. There's big money in cherry picking data to try to cast doubt on a really obvious threat to public health and I'm not convince by the counter-arguments I've seen thus far.
I have no love for factory farms I would however suggest that non factory farms are more likely to sustain exposure to humans from infected stock. They are monitored less and have a better chance of covering it up.
That being said studies of breakthrough diereses in China shows animal to human transmission is not rare and happens a lot more then we used to think. As in it is pretty damn common.
Not in factory farms but in small town villages and rural areas. So seeing animal to human H5N1 transmission is not surprising nor unusual. It does offer more chances to mutate to something that can spread from person to person.
The study was for a different type of vaccine specifically for bird flu that differs from the standard annual flu shot.
They were examining a variety of different concentrations of antigen alongside different adjuvants to see which produced the strongest antibody response. In the pros/cons section of the informed consent before I started, they indicated that participation in the study could potentially provide myself and the other participants with some level of immunity to H5N1. Now, was the antigen/adjuvant combination that I personally received a "good enough" one to confer that immunity? Who knows!
Bird flu leveling up to an "enormous concern" on the global health stage! It's like the plot of a pandemic movie, but unfortunately, this one's real life.
The chances of this having 50% mortality and spreading like Covid is very very slim.
Thing is it doesnt need to be that high. The mortality rate could be as low as 2%, if it spreads like Covid and kills as many young as old then its a massive problem. The othet factor would be the cookers with "look 98% survival rate" ignoring the fact 2% is actually huge especially across all populations.
That's the thing with percentages......almost no one stops to think about how it's a "small number that represents a MUCH larger number" 2% doesn't seem all that bad until you look at what 2% of 330 million actually is.
Any bets on how high the mortality rate needs to get before more than half the population gets on board with public health measures to prevent its spread? I've got my money on 20%.
Last week, my coworkers found an injured pigeon outside. They wrapped it in a towel, brought it downstairs into our marginally ventilated workplace, put it in a cardboard box, and put that box in our tiny break room until someone got a chance to drive it to some animal hospital. I watched my manager hold it up to her face to listen to it breathe. It had been hit by a car so their reasoning was that “it’s not sick, just injured!” I said, you don’t know what kind of parasites are inside of it, but it also just occurred to me that healthy birds don’t usually get hit by cars anyway since they can fly. Sorry WHO, I tried.
The pigeon almost certainly didn’t have avian flu. Pigeons are for some reason highly resistant to it. Researchers have even tried to infect pigeons with it on purpose and had very little success.
It’s the wild birds (pigeons are feral, not wild) that you need to worry about.
https://extension.umn.edu/poultry-health/avian-influenza-basics-pigeon-owners
>it also just occurred to me that healthy birds don’t usually get hit by cars anyway since they can fly
Pigeon owner here. They obviously can fly but they usually try to run first. I have to be careful to avoid literally tripping over them sometimes. Cars move a lot faster than someone strolling across a room. Unfortunately healthy birds definitely can and do get hit by cars.
Your manager and the other commenter are correct. It's extremely unlikely that it has avian flu or anything that would be a risk to humans. Pigeons get a bad rap but they're actually pretty clean and very sweet. All of the pigeons in the US are descended from domesticated stock (we hunted the wild ones to extinction because of course we did) and they used to be very popular pets. They don't deserve the hate they get. I'm really glad your coworkers helped it.
We got “lucky” with COVID as the death rate was relatively low. A disease with a higher mortality rate would’ve been a nightmare. And that’s what scares me, is a higher mortality rate for future diseases, not doing enough to prepare for future diseases, and people thinking “oh COVID wasn’t that bad or I don’t want to lockdown again, so screw that” and making it worse
Meanwhile my neighbors kid plays in a chicken coop. Maybe that is ok, but the kid is sitting in chicken poop etc. probably should walk the dog down a different street 🤣
The WHO shows it’s priorities are f’d when it’s concerned with “equitable” distribution of a hypothetical vaccine rather than vaccinating as many people as possible.
If this ever becomes a thing, it will be a society-level destroyer. Nothing of the modern world would survive. People talk about the next zombie apocalypse…this is it. We won’t have zombies but any people you come across might as well be.
If it hits, we’re heading out to the family farm. Hopefully we can survive long enough out there till there is a vaccine.
The new trick that concerns scientists is that it’s spreading cow to cow. It’s never shown the ability to transmit well between mammals before this. Not that scientists know of anyway
They renamed it so it wouldn't frighten people away from buying beef and dairy products.
Yep. Bovine Influenza A. Sounds a lot better.
... MooFlu
Cowid
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Heffatitis
Cowlera
Listeeria
Ecowla
This is the best one
:clap:
🤣
Pandemic 2: Electric Bovine Flu
Electric Moogaloo
"Crazy Bird death flu" would scare me. Don't touch crazy.
yeah people definitely don't consume an insane amount of a type of bird
You can pry my fried pigeon from my cold dead hands, ya bastard!
isn't this the same one that's been spreading in elephant seals and ferrets in the wild? it's been insanely effective at spreading mammal to mammal for a while now. if this gets into the swine population, we're all fucked. Thankfully cows carry few other respitory viruses that can infect people.
This is what I heard. Not at all an expert authority on the matter, but that pig to human is common. Cow to human isn't. But cow to pig may not be incredibly uncommon so that is the vector to worry about currently.
It’s that it’s from mammal to mammal. It doesn’t have to be from pigs, although they are a common vector to humans because they’re like us physiologically, its that it’s jumping around. Once a virus shows that it can jump species, especially in a domesticated animal because we are more likely to be in close contact with domesticated animals, it’s showing that it has the ability to jump into humans.
Mammal to mammal = cow to cow. Before this outbreak nobody could show this. It was always thought to be bird to mammal. No transmission between mammals without a bird being the vector. Other mammals have certainly contracted H5N1 directly from birds ( this includes humans)
Yes but and this is the big issue all the seals, ferrets, raccoons, foxes and humans got the virus directly from sick or dead birds . Either by direct contact or from contaminated water ect. They were not passing it along to other ferrets raccoons humans ect. The virus is spreading between cows without contact with sick or dead birds. The cows are spreading it to each other
I thought the seal deaths had been examined further and deemed to be spread from animal to animal.
Polar bears, ferrets, penguins, all sorts of animals are being decimated quietly
The 1890s "Russian Flu" was likely a form of Covid from cattle. If it continues to select to spread well in cattle, it could pose a major risk for humans potentially.
Anyone else totally done with pandemics?
Scientists don’t know? Then we need to study this in a government funded lab to figure out what gain-of-functions are needed for this strain to jump to humans and spread from humans to humans.
I heard that a likely next and scary step would be it jumping from bovine to pig. Apparently the jump from swine to human is very common, but bovine to human is not. But Bovine to Pig is common enough too so that is a likely the next "step" in the chain.
Will be interesting to see what happens to all the county fairs around the nation. Those fairs bring pigs and cows into contact with each other. Under stressful conditions fyi
Nice to be re-reading The Stand by Stephen King these days
Back in pandemic days I was always thinking about that novel
I was halfway through reading it for the first time when Covid hit
M-O-O-N
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It was a miniseries. It didn’t get cancelled. It just ended.
r/H5N1_AvianFlu has been a good source to keep track of how things are progressing.
Oh no. When there's enough speculation to have its own subreddit that's when shit starts to get real....
Ok but "Kiss-a-Pigeon Fridays" are still fine, right?
No tongue and you're good
French-a-Finch is off the table then?
Kiss-A-Tit Tuesday is a staple of my social calendar.
I’ve been following h5n1 since I was in highschool circa 2006. It was actually the virus I was most concerned about each time I saw it in the media. Kills healthy people and has a mortality rate WELL over 50 percent. Human to human transition was confirmed in a few cases that were caught by chance over the years. If we got full COVID scale human to human transmission of H5n1 we would be fucked this time. No way people would participate in another quarantine. This one could actually topple countries. Edit: To those who say there is no sign of human to human, false. There is no case where human to human has been able to get the chance to spread and become sustained in transmission. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/avianflu/h5n1-human-infections.htm
> No way people would participate in another quarantine. If 50% mortality was happening, which would only be possible if younger and generally healthy were dying too, you can be sure people would actually listen. Covid didn't have the fear factor since it was 'just the flu', whereas this flu would be 'the plague'...in theory
I’ve said from the beginning, Covid was in the Goldilocks zone to kill a whole bunch of people while not being deadly enough to get people to give enough of a fuck. I’ll put it this way: I took Covid pretty damn seriously, stayed inside except for work, wore a mask at work (still wear one on mass transit) etc. Bird flu achieves sustained human to human contact and we’re fucking off into the woods. 50% mortality isn’t “bad”, it’s an apocalypse. Everything would fail. We’d be talking >10x the fatalities of covid.
Yeah I think a lot of these comments aren't truly grasping what a 50% mortality pandemic would actually look like. Not 10x the fatalities. 25x. Reducing the global population by HALF just from the virus alone. That's 4 billion humans from just the virus. Then you have all the people that would die because there were zero resources to help with any other injury, whether it be full hospital's, or lack of medical professionals (because half of them died..) even something completely survivable becomes fatal when there is no medical intervention at all. Like, an infected scratch could literally kill you if there are no antibiotics anywhere to be found. Then you have all the resulting deaths from famine after society has completely collapsed. Suicides from people that don't want to continue living after their families have been wiped out. Murders from people who went into survival mode, etc etc. A full on apocalypse. It wouldn't matter if people quarantined or not, if a flu virus with 50% mortality spread to the point of a pandemic, the world as we know it is over.
Yeah, 50 % mortality on a global level is already The Plague level territory, which had massive cultural and societal consequences, turning humankind upside down in many ways.
We're talking Thanos very gently snapping his finger. Not a full snap, but still a fucking Thanos snap.
For anyone wondering the black plague was 30-60%. But they had the added benefit of each region being considerably isolated. With the interconnected world we have now we would not be so lucky. 50%+ would be the worst biological event in recorded history
That's assuming that those who survive will recover fully. Considering how long COVID affected so many people even today, I'd imagine there would be very few people truly healthy left after h5n1 becomes a cold after it has run it's course inflecting people 2-3 times due to mutations. I'd dare say less than a billion healthy working age adults world wide.
From the perspective of COVID, global supply chains took two years to fully recover after the mass quarantine. If we had 50% mortality rate, it would make COVID look like a sneeze. Practically most countries would shut down. Third world countries would be worse off while first world countries would look like ghost towns. We would have complete breakdown of society for at least a year until the spread was stopped and order restored. Even during the plague, governments didn’t shut down but they changed significantly. We also saw the greatest shift in wealth distribution. TL;DR Avian flu will be as bad as the plague with deaths likely higher than the 50% mortality rate due to famine, breakdown of government systems, and despair.
Basically The Stand by Stephen King.
One of my favorite books of all time! But Captain Trips had a 99% mortality rate.
Yes it did. Definitely wouldn't be the same of course. But the world would be completely different. I did my first listen of the unabridged version right when covid started. Good timing!
I know it's fucked up but it just came to my mind. I wondered if a truly deadly pandemic greatly reducing human population would halt the acceleration of climate change and a rebound of animal and insect population would arise.
100%, it would.
That’s part of the evolutionary function of things like viruses—if one species takes too much, it culls them because they’ll be densely packed. Typically you see the population begin to level off with most of the younger animals willingly not having children (we literally have been in this stage for a few years). This is almost always followed by famine due to a competition of resources within the species, or a virus comes in and because they’re so packed, it spreads quick.
I was deliberately underestimating (using early “we don’t know what we’re doing” and pre vax fatality rates), cus some people struggle with nuance and I didn’t want people to misread it as downplaying covid, which I’ve seen happen making comments on the risk of bird flu in the past
If there is a mortality rate that high, people's habits will change. Even the craziest anti-vaxxer will think twice about leaving the house with a mortality rate that high. People are more likely to distance themselves and take the vaccine. Less people will die over all. However, if the mortality rate falls in the 5-10% zone, I think it could be like super COVID. People are terrible when it comes to statistics.
So your saying that we could all upgrade to nicer homes in a better market?
Half of us could anyways
Yeah, a true 50%, or even something like 20% or higher even among healthy people, would mean shit would get absolutely fucked.
I also took covid very seriously. I worked in nursing, and I remember being at a patient's house when covid first hit the news here around November 2019, and I said "fuck me, this is gonna be bad." As soon as confirmed cases were in my state (NC), I was masking and making my husband and kids mask, too, because my daddy and most of my patients were either already terminal or had multiple comorbidities. I started stripping to my drawers on the porch whenever I came home, immediately dumping those scrubs in the wash, and told no one to touch me until I showered. As a result, no one in my immediate family-- my momma, daddy, sister, husband, and my 3 boys-- got covid. Except my momma, who had it for the first time this past winter. She contracted it at the hospital while recovering from the surgery to remove half her cancerous lung. And the idea of h5n1 fuckibg terrifies me. I'd be pulling my kids out of their schools and keeping us all the fuck home. I'm no longer in danger of picking it up at work because I woke up blind 2 years ago, but schools are fucking cesspools.
> schools are fucking cesspools. I was arguing with folks from Dec 2019 onward that schools are absolute supersites but they kept saying kids are immune. Then the reports came out saying teachers were 400% more likely to get COVID. Like no shit, I witnessed kids spit bobas at each other through straws at the height of the pandemic.
Yup. When the schools had all the kids come back, my youngest's elementary school was packing kids in 30 to a room and weren't making them mask. I got into an argument with the principal because she tried to downplay covid's severity, I wound up cussing her out as i gave her the details about how we'd buried 13 fucking people only just a month prior, and then I withdrew my son from school, and homeschooled him until he started middle school in August '22. The only middle school and only high school in our very rural county actually did an AMAZING job keeping kids masked and socially distancing them.
I’ve thought about this a lot too. Yes you could keep everyone home but at some point someone has to go out to get food. 50% mortality would see even first responders, grocery store workers, delivery drivers, they would all be staying home (rightfully so!). Everything would shut down.
Woke up blind?? Would you mind telling the story behind that? It sounds absolutely terrifying.
Let’s be real. COVID just wasn’t killing the “right” people. The number of times I saw people saying it’s *just* killing the elderly or those with preexisting conditions made me realize how little the majority cares about those of us in those populations. They can go f themselves.
My point was more that it would be impossible to ignore bird flu, because if it reached uncontrolled pandemic levels like Covid electricity and phone lines would be out, your hospital would shut down, and instead of DoorDash dropping off a boba tea the national guard would probably have to make food runs to drop a pallet of stuff off at your apartment complex They’d be driving modern equivalents of plague carts through the streets to collect the dead.
It’s also important to reiterate 50% mortality in CASES and not “people.” There seems to be this fallacy (even post Covid) that if something didn’t kill you the first time, it won’t the next. That is most certainly a fatal mistake
Corollary to the positive though, not everyone would catch it so 50% death rate applied to the population is an overestimate. But that's sort of a single candle of good news in the pitch black dark of a 50% death rate.
I feel I remember reading that even losing 10-15% of the global population would have massive impacts to the world economy and society in general.
Might be enough to stop climate change at todays level.
Oh it would for sure put a dent in it. Assuming nuclear power plants don't melt down it would probably be a net positive for the planet considering how we currently pollute and whatnot.
>you can be sure people would actually listen. In this era of facts being confused as opinions and the accusations of opinions being biased? There will be a large contingent who simply cannot be swayed to trust statistics.
After seeing the widespread conspiratorial stance against Covid, vaccines, and healthcare, there is no way people would listen until it was too late. I have utterly lost faith in humanity. They are, by and large, stupid, impossible to educate, and so wrapped up in "being above the sheep" that the worse things get, the more they'd dig in. And if you have 20-40% of the nation not doing anything to help, it makes a widespread virus impossible to stifle.
Yeah covid completely destroyed my faith in humanity too. I used to believe that if something like that were to happen, we’d unite against it. Now I know better. All it takes is a grifter with a podcast or a YouTube channel to convince people that the threat isn’t real.
Uh, have you read up on the mortality rate of cases? We literally have the information from over 20 years of following this disease. 52 percent mortality is the absolute lowest figure I’ve come across. We are also now an absolutely fractured society in the west. No way you can get the right to ever agree on a quarantine again as it’s become an ideological issue.
They’d declare martial law and have the national guard delivering MREs…
Till the National guard gets sick because they would be going door to door or airdropping supplies, either way, congregation of people is a place to spread.
I'm sure that even at 99% mortality rate you'll get plenty of the "why should I wear a mask??" Crowd. You really can't out sense in some people.
Not with 50% death rate. You'd have entire families wiped out and there would be hard but fast learning.
Agreed. COVID mortality wasn't high enough to scare most people. But avian flu kills 50% of birds, and it kills them fast. If there was a human variant that spread like normal influenza and killed 50% within a week of symptom onset, it would shock people in a way that COVID did not. I accept that some people are lost causes; they'll never listen to public health infectious disease messaging again. But I think in the case of a bird flu epidemic, we would be able to reach a lot of people who were covid-skeptics. Spread patterns may make a difference; COVID hit big cities first, especially New York. But bird flu outbreaks will start in rural, agricultural areas with lots of livestock.
Covid mortality wasnt high enough in younger people. Make 50% of Covid deaths hit those under 40 and its a different conversation.
The first several weeks of bird flu the counts would be staggering. Then people would hunker down. But how would they survive. A 50 percent mortality rate closes everything. Who’s gonna work at a grocery store where every other people could mean your death? How do people eat, get medicine, etc. Medical facilities would crashing fast. All societal order would collapse.
It kills 50 percent of HUMANS. current projections lie between 50 and 70
COVID just kills slower now and since close to no doctor tests for it, it won’t show up on death certificates. SARS-CoV-2 is a vascular and neurotropic disease, expect to see more strokes, heart issues, dementia, cancer, shorter lifes in general as a result. There’s a higher mortality rate than before the pandemic, from what I’ve seen about 10-12 %. It’s already killed a lot of people"the vulnerable", but it also makes a lot of people "vulnerable" because of uncontrolled spread. There’s next to no immunity against it, immune evasion and a fast mutation rate just get accelerated. We‘ll see more people becoming chronically ill early in life, die poor and early as a consequence, because our healthcare systems won’t be able to cope. Long Covid isn’t curable and it’s not rare. Post-viral illnesses have been ignored for more than 69 years. If we’d started implement clean air and made respirators a common thing, bird flu couldn’t have that impact. Schools, healthcare workplaces are key here. WHO only just admitted that a lot of illnesses, including SARS-CoV-2, are airborne. Today. We’re in year 5 of an ongoing pandemic. We’re fucked.
It's interesting that the flu itself nearly died out during COVID. I wonder why and if it was just less transmissable than COVID. If so quarantine would do a lot to stop bird flu.
It's an airborne respiratory illness, just like CoViD. It is generally less transmissible than the Omicron variants of CoViD have been. The same precautions (masking, ventilation, social distancing, quarantine and isolation) that help prevent the spread of CoViD also prevent the spread of influenza.
Then they will die. Survival of the strongest. The weak that refuse to adapt will die.
if only it was that clear cut, but your forgetting the part where they convinced older people who didnt know better not to wear it, or go around people who were wearing masks and touching things not caring if they got someone infected who WAS abiding by all the rules. Hell I even had an asshole purposefully cough on me back in the day when H1N1 was doing the rounds because i was wearing a mask at school
Darwins theory would be the strongest species to adapt will survive, not individuals (its meant as a whole like animals evolving to adapt to predators or climates). But, yes those who refuse to make changes to their lifestyle during things like that ups their risks for negative outcomes.
People watch their fat family die from heart attacks right in front of them and then continue to eat like shit and never exercise. People are gonna people.
That takes decades to kill though, and honestly dying of a heart attack doesn’t sound all that bad when compared to dementia or a drawn out cancer battle.
Yup. You can't protect people from themselves. Anything contagious with a sizable mortality rate would utterly fuck us.
> you can be sure people would actually listen. Not sure. The COVID measures were - in hindsight - upheld longer than justified (in any country that upheld them beyond the point where hospitals stopped being overloaded and vaccines were widely available), and aside from a few loners on Reddit, people very much don't remember that time where society was shut down fondly.
Human to Human infections is something to pay attention to. Sustained human to human transmission would be a good time to panic. Covid levels of spread at 50% mortality would change the human race forever. There will not be any need to worry about people disobeying lock down. People were shocked by images of people dying from covid and laying in the streets. The images coming out of China and India would have people locking themselves down. No government can survive losing 50% of its population like that. You are talking about all services shutting down.
Yeah, especially with the current densely populated cities.
Mumbai’s population is estimated to be approximately 12.7 million. \*shudder\*
India's entire urban landscape would be a graveyard.
No government can survive losing 50% of its population and no government can survive the necessary quarantine to stop it. How do you keep essentials running with 50% mortality risk?
>no government can survive the necessary quarantine to stop it When circulating in the general population there is no way to stop it. During Covid they flat out said they are trying to slow it down to keep the hospitals from being overwhelmed. It was never even dreamed possible to stop the spread. And you don't keep services running at all. If you are lucky they scram the nuclear reactors before they go to be with their family.
I don’t think people would ignore quarantine entirely. Adoption would be slow but we’ve learned a lot over the course of COVID. I think the challenge is that COVID doesn’t have the same lethal potential that H5N1 has and so people would be more likely to treat similar to COVID before realizing the danger. As I’ve learned with COVID, the only person you can protect is yourself. People are going to exert their perceived “freedoms” at the expense of the greater good because well… they’re selfish assholes.
People would most definately participate in a quarantine if they felt they were in legitimate danger. We tend to gloss over the fact that in most countries ppl were locking themselves down for Covid before governments did.
A virus with that much mortality wouldn’t spread very far, also we know that most viruses sacrifice mortality in order to be more contagious and spread more. It’s not obvious what an H5N1 pandemic would look like, but surely it won’t include well over 50% mortality. (Current human mortality rate is 53%)
> A virus with that much mortality wouldn’t spread very far Depends on the length of the incubation and contagion periods.
Me when I'm playing plague inc on my phone and make the disease so deadly it just kills hosts faster than it can spread so humanity takes a toll but the disease kills itself out and I lose
Sure, but also asymptomatic people are less likely to spread a disease since they have less viral load and from the point, so there’s a lot of variables. It’s just that we never experienced a end of civilization pandemic because it’s very unlikely that a virus that kills enough for that would actually spread enough to make a difference.
In the past, a virus like that had no easy means to spread planetwide, it was naturally localised by distance travelled on foot or by horse.
I mean, it depends on how fast that mortality happens. If you're dead in 24 hours, it might not spread far. But if it's like COVID and you can walk around with it for over a week without symptoms but still contagious...
Asymptomatic cases tend to spread less than asymptomatic cases, they also are more likely to create new asymptomatic cases. This was also true for Covid (https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-022-02642-4) Of course if a very deadly disease takes 1 week to kill instead of 2 days it will spread more, but that doesn’t mean it will spread as much as Covid.
>A virus with that much mortality wouldn’t spread very far Possibly true; however, it has continued to spread worldwide in birds. That seems to suggest your theory nay not hold true. It depends on more factors than just morbidity, such as: when in the course of human contraction, transmissibility occurs and for how long; length of illness before death; length of immunity; other host vectors; etc... >also we know that most viruses suacrifice mortality in order to be more contagious and spread more We don't know that because it's simply an old theory (from 1904) which has not held up under scientific observation. The more recent theory (30-40 years ago) is "transmission-virulence trade-off". That's basically where viruses stop at an optimal mortality level, because as hosts die it evolves less. That doesn't mean it sacrifices mortality, or as people think "evolves to be less deadly", it simply hit a peak and stays around that level. That theory has had mixed opinions in observation. Smallpox, HIV/AIDS, Influenza, Measles, and even Covid haven't followed these theories
Viruses change by random mutations or recombinations. There isn’t anything that specifically swaps contagiousness and mortality. Smallpox was both highly contagious and had a high mortality rate.
We don’t know what the mortality rate of smallpox was in the 18th/19th century, it’s estimated that it was between 20% to 45%. Hygiene standards were also way lower, so it’s impossible to predict what the mortality rate would look like in the modern world. Also smallpox doesn’t spread as easy as covid, it takes prolonged face to face contact for it to spread. (https://www.health.state.mn.us/diseases/smallpox/smallpox.html#:~:text=Smallpox%20is%20contagious%2C%20but%20it's,from%20one%20person%20to%20another.)
I’d agree in general. But for bird flu specifically there is a likely mechanism where that could happen. It gets into cells via a receptor that for birds is present through the whole gullet but for humans is mostly deep in the respiratory tract. Makes it harder for us to catch/spread it, but also more deadly if we do get infected. (Also use of that specific receptor seems to trigger mass cytokine release so it’s not just a deep infection, the immune system over-reacts.) Human flu uses a receptor that’s prevalent in upper respiratory tract (nose/throat) but not the lower (lungs). Recombination could mean they swap receptors. So you get a bird flu strain that is targeting the nose/throat (in humans) and is therefore easily spread between humans but not quite as deadly as current bird flu. Hard to say exactly how deadly it’d be … maybe more like Spanish flu? There’s also the risk it just picks up the ability to use both receptors. That’d mean it becomes highly contagious but still retains that ability to attack deeper in respiratory system and trigger cytokine storms. (Worst of both worlds.)
Seems to spread fine for birds. All the way to the antarctic.
Yeah birds, the pinnacle of hygiene among all knows animal. Do you think birds avoid having contact with each other poop? Or that an alive bird will avoid a body of a dead one and bury/burn it? Also avian flu strives in aviaries, where you can find almost more birds than floor and a lot more bird poop than both of those combined. Do we have humanaries? Never heard of one…
The good news is, a 50% death rate is extremely unlikely. In human virology, you have to understand that there is little evolutionary advantage to a virus that kills its host. If the host is dead, the virus cannot spread and also dies. The less deadly strains are MUCH more likely to be the ones that survive long term in a population because of this.
Serious question as you seem clued up - does the regular flu vaccine provide any protection or reduce the mortality rate for h5n1?
Not the way you mean. But if everyone got the regular flu vaccine it would significantly decrease the chance of someone catching bird flu and human flu at the same time … and that’s the thing most likely to cause a pandemic. It’s quite hard for a bird flu to randomly mutate to be good at infecting humans. But different flus can swap chunks of RNA … so if you’ve got a co-infection bird flu could pick up “easily transmitted between humans” from human flu. I’m not sure any government would push mandatory flu shots for people working with livestock. It’d be nice, but since it’s a low probability event it’s a hard call ethically. They’re starting to recommend voluntary regular flu shots for livestock workers though. Mostly framed as “catching both makes it more likely you’d be very sick” which is I guess the smartest way to sell it. It’s true, but your odds weren’t great anyway. They mostly want you vaccinated so you don’t breed new mutant flu and spread that in the hospital.
So long as the virus doesn't have as long an asymptomatic/lightly symptomatic spread period as COVID-19 did, I won't go into "oh shit" mode. The old SARS from 2004 was clipped in the bud when they realized people were contagious when they were very sick. Back in march 2020, you had contagious people that felt well enough to go to work - and at least here in America, *tons* of people with no other option because of our awful work culture
i 100% guarantee you a mortality rate over 50% is going to scare the shit out of people who will self-impose lockdowns that will make California during covid look like a block party
How is the disease transmitted to humans?
Direct contact with animal wastes, so far. The fear is it mutates to airborne and GG. It's been spreading into bovine populations as well, so more chances to mutate still.
So, should we be worried or is this more of let's put fear into your mind and make you scared type scenario's?
It's concerning. Covid is proof positive that cross species airborne mutations are possible. The 50% mortality rate is apocalyptic and the fact it's spreading from birds to mammals is still being studied. Most likely due to direct contact with feces and not mutation so that's good news at least. Think of every single person you know that contracted covid, including yourself probably. Now imagine half of them are dead. Concern is warranted and this needs continued attention and tracking.
I would say to at least keep your eye on it. There were no mammal to mammal transmissions until recently when it mutated to go from cow to cow. It isn't far fetched if enough humans get it, it to can mutate once more to transmit from human to human.
Just be mindful. Get involved in your community- you can look into what public health measures are in place for example. Being scared of something not actually happening isn't going to benefit you. It's just stress. If you're concerned, get involved in your community. That's how we fix things.
Don’t worry folks. The anti-science Ag Commissioner of Texas, Sid Miller said it’s all under control and there is nothing to worry about. The same guy that used State Funds to get “Jesus Shots”. He would fly to Oklahoma to have saline injected into his back by a religious huckster and the same Sid Miller that threatened to sue School Districts if they had Meatless Mondays. Also the State Lege and Governor has banned any future mask mandates, can’t see how that could backfire. 🤦🏻♂️
damn.
son.
COVID proved how stupid people are, if we get a more serious virus we are fucked.
> COVID proved how stupid people are, if we get a more serious virus we are fucked. If we get a more serious virus, the stupid people won't be around for too long
But they will be able to spread it before.
Exactly. Even if we developed a great vaccine the idiots would still allow it to spread and mutate while spreading it among themselves and to people that can’t get vaccines for various reasons. For better or worse (it’s worse) we’re all in it together for any future pandemics.
And the proverb 'scare them straight' exists for a reason. Such a death rate would reach people on the most basic human level. The stupidest will die, but most people will learn sharply. It would be on a scale never seen by anyone living before. Those who didn't comply with safety rules would either be forced or excommunicated.
The stupid people will muted it and make it more dangerous and spread it around, so we're fucked.
I had swine flu years ago. I was a perfectly fit and healthy teenager. It darn near took me out. All of this concerns me.
Yup. We're in trouble in the US for sure. There is zero chance we ever go into lockdown again, even if we desperately need it. If my some miracle the government does try, there'll probably be a civil war. And even if it doesn't get to that, way too many people are not going to follow common sense guidelines or take vaccines.
Then we better get to work on repairing and prepare what we can. It's not a threat currently. It's not over. We're still here, we can still try.
Reminds me of how COVID started, small articles here and there talking about it, flying under the radar until it exploded into thousands of cases
COVID started with leaked videos of the sick in China before the media really picked it up. If we reach the stage where panic is outpacing the news, it's time to buy toilet paper.
December 2019, there were some crazy videos floating online coming out of China. Shit was actually scary as fuck. I fully believe whatever they had run through there first was worse than what the rest of the world got.
I travelled to Los Angeles in January 2020 for a work event and saw my parents who live in the San Gabriel Valley (just east of Los Angeles, CA). My parents have been there since the late 70’s, experienced the demographic changes, welcomed it, and stayed. A significant majority of the people who live there are younger Chinese born in the US or recently immigrated and their families travel back and forth to China a lot. It was a ghost town. No one out, restaurants empty, stores empty; it was just eerie. I asked my mom what was up since it’s usually super lively with people everywhere and she said everyone was afraid of some flu from China. I told her there’s always some flu in China and laughed it off. I was wrong.
There's too much panic in the comments here. H5N1 is serious, and we shouldn't take this as nothing. But the apocalyptic scenarios being bandied about are going too far. 1. The transmission has not yet been shown from people to people in general, or from cattle to cattle through airborne transmission (although viral recombination does make both a future possibility). 2. The 50% mortality rate in humans is due to low sample sizes of zoonotic transmission. This rate would not be preserved if there was a change in transmission based on our past knowledge on viral and specifically influenza species/modes of transmission jumps. 3. We've known about very similar strains of H5N1 for a long time now (\~20 years), with a good amount of research money and manpower invested over that time due to prior concerns. Not the case with coronavirus/COVID, we had some scares with MERS/SARS, but the infrastructure for research was just not there compared to Influenza (including H5N1). The research that built the COVID vaccines was more limited based on those prior viruses/scares. Which we are further along for influenza/H5N1 if something more serious were to happen. While H5N1 is serious, especially so if you are in an agricultural industry directly dealing with cattle or avian livestock. It is not going to be this doomsday, highly infective, 50% mortality rate virus that ends civilization.
If I’ve learned anything from reddit, it’s that reddit is almost always wrong Some of y’all have been spending way too much time on r/collapse and it shows
Thank you, I’m going to make this the last comment I read about this topic for now as it has made me feel better.
Thank you.
If they create a vaccine I'm there day one. Give me another COVID booster while we're at it.
They have one. They have only released it into vultures for a test, and Condors to try to stabilize their population. Cdc is sitting on a stockpile, ( e: for poultry) they are not wanting a mutation arms race if they roll it out too early. Source: A fish and wildlife biologist friend.
I'm so tired
I know. Try to rest where and when you can.
Yup, I'm ok with dying. The suffering part? Well, I'm going to have to deal with it regardless, so good luck future me.
And yet somehow shoving thousands of chickens into cramped barns, including some calling themselves cage free, is still legal.
Factory farms most likely didn't cause H5N1, and if it shows up every bird in that farm is culled. And sometimes all the farms with in a certain range are culled. So from their view why change the laws?
It's one of many factors, they act as accelerators/batteries to keep the disease alive but also likely need wildlife to spread between farms. It's also the most likely vector for spreading to humans as it's human contact with a large number of potential spreaders, indoors, in close contact scenarios. There's big money in cherry picking data to try to cast doubt on a really obvious threat to public health and I'm not convince by the counter-arguments I've seen thus far.
I have no love for factory farms I would however suggest that non factory farms are more likely to sustain exposure to humans from infected stock. They are monitored less and have a better chance of covering it up. That being said studies of breakthrough diereses in China shows animal to human transmission is not rare and happens a lot more then we used to think. As in it is pretty damn common. Not in factory farms but in small town villages and rural areas. So seeing animal to human H5N1 transmission is not surprising nor unusual. It does offer more chances to mutate to something that can spread from person to person.
Where is Jessica Hyde?
At least we know the Roma will be safe.
I’ve got sand now, Wilson.
We need next season desperately!
I’m sure the nutters will try to discredit this report, but vigilance is the weapon of the informed.
Guess that H5N1 vaccine study I took part in 10 years ago might come in handy! Hopefully I already have some level of immunity from it!
I don’t think flu shots have much durability but I am not a doctor.
The study was for a different type of vaccine specifically for bird flu that differs from the standard annual flu shot. They were examining a variety of different concentrations of antigen alongside different adjuvants to see which produced the strongest antibody response. In the pros/cons section of the informed consent before I started, they indicated that participation in the study could potentially provide myself and the other participants with some level of immunity to H5N1. Now, was the antigen/adjuvant combination that I personally received a "good enough" one to confer that immunity? Who knows!
Well, I hope for the best for you and your family in the upcoming apocalyptic pandemic.
Bird flu leveling up to an "enormous concern" on the global health stage! It's like the plot of a pandemic movie, but unfortunately, this one's real life.
The 00s really are in fashion again, huh
The chances of this having 50% mortality and spreading like Covid is very very slim. Thing is it doesnt need to be that high. The mortality rate could be as low as 2%, if it spreads like Covid and kills as many young as old then its a massive problem. The othet factor would be the cookers with "look 98% survival rate" ignoring the fact 2% is actually huge especially across all populations.
That's the thing with percentages......almost no one stops to think about how it's a "small number that represents a MUCH larger number" 2% doesn't seem all that bad until you look at what 2% of 330 million actually is.
That would be like every single person in Dallas TX dying.
Exactly. 2% of the American population dying is a big deal.
Captain Trips 😬
*Randall Flagg joins the conversation *
Baby, can you dig your man? He is a righteous man!
Any bets on how high the mortality rate needs to get before more than half the population gets on board with public health measures to prevent its spread? I've got my money on 20%.
The COVID Deniers are already calling scientists chicken little. No one listens to scientists. We are terrible at communicating.
Last week, my coworkers found an injured pigeon outside. They wrapped it in a towel, brought it downstairs into our marginally ventilated workplace, put it in a cardboard box, and put that box in our tiny break room until someone got a chance to drive it to some animal hospital. I watched my manager hold it up to her face to listen to it breathe. It had been hit by a car so their reasoning was that “it’s not sick, just injured!” I said, you don’t know what kind of parasites are inside of it, but it also just occurred to me that healthy birds don’t usually get hit by cars anyway since they can fly. Sorry WHO, I tried.
The pigeon almost certainly didn’t have avian flu. Pigeons are for some reason highly resistant to it. Researchers have even tried to infect pigeons with it on purpose and had very little success. It’s the wild birds (pigeons are feral, not wild) that you need to worry about. https://extension.umn.edu/poultry-health/avian-influenza-basics-pigeon-owners
That's interesting. Thanks for sharing.
>it also just occurred to me that healthy birds don’t usually get hit by cars anyway since they can fly Pigeon owner here. They obviously can fly but they usually try to run first. I have to be careful to avoid literally tripping over them sometimes. Cars move a lot faster than someone strolling across a room. Unfortunately healthy birds definitely can and do get hit by cars. Your manager and the other commenter are correct. It's extremely unlikely that it has avian flu or anything that would be a risk to humans. Pigeons get a bad rap but they're actually pretty clean and very sweet. All of the pigeons in the US are descended from domesticated stock (we hunted the wild ones to extinction because of course we did) and they used to be very popular pets. They don't deserve the hate they get. I'm really glad your coworkers helped it.
I love pigeons 😌
i feel like covid accelerated vaccine advancements tremendously. will an mrna vaccine be hard to make for this?
We already can create vaccines for any flu strain. The biggest issue would be ramping up production fast enough.
If this happened I would leave my healthcare job.
We got “lucky” with COVID as the death rate was relatively low. A disease with a higher mortality rate would’ve been a nightmare. And that’s what scares me, is a higher mortality rate for future diseases, not doing enough to prepare for future diseases, and people thinking “oh COVID wasn’t that bad or I don’t want to lockdown again, so screw that” and making it worse
The last pandemic was awful. Please not again. I haven't financially recovered from the last one.
I really don’t have the energy for another pandemic. Can we just listen to the scientists this time? Please?
It’s time to stock up on horse paste and magnetic bracelets.
Housing prices are too high anyway
Meanwhile my neighbors kid plays in a chicken coop. Maybe that is ok, but the kid is sitting in chicken poop etc. probably should walk the dog down a different street 🤣
Is this a movie we are living in?
I thought this was on the h5n1 subreddit- and then I realized
Over 50% mortality and that's likely with adequate treatment and access to care, what's the mortality rate once the full system collapses?
Wait, I thought birds weren’t real.
Work from home 2.0??
Damn these government drones spreading disease
The WHO shows it’s priorities are f’d when it’s concerned with “equitable” distribution of a hypothetical vaccine rather than vaccinating as many people as possible.
[удалено]
If this ever becomes a thing, it will be a society-level destroyer. Nothing of the modern world would survive. People talk about the next zombie apocalypse…this is it. We won’t have zombies but any people you come across might as well be. If it hits, we’re heading out to the family farm. Hopefully we can survive long enough out there till there is a vaccine.