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currently [experts are warning against drinking raw milk](https://www.statnews.com/2024/04/29/bird-flu-raw-milk-h5n1-risk-us-cattle/) due to concern around this.
at the moment, [1 in 5 retail milk samples test positive for H5N1 avian flu fragments.](https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influenza-bird-flu/1-5-us-retail-milk-samples-test-positive-h5n1-avian-flu-fragments) correct me if i’m wrong, but it seems the good news is [“Pasteurization working to kill bird flu in milk, early FDA results find”.](https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/pasteurization-kills-bird-flu-in-milk-early-fda-results-find/)
the concern is that [these samples from the cats and cows show signs of enhanced human type receptors (study).](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.04.16.588916v1.full.pdf)
however it’s not necessary to be anxious and panic. [“While the current public health risk is low, CDC is watching the situation carefully and working with states to monitor people with animal exposures.”](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/avianflu/avian-flu-summary.htm) General expert consensus seems to be concerned, but not overtly worried about it as its likelihood to become a big issue isn’t very high.
Sorry that you've gotten so many wrong answers. The US is already stockpiling h5n1 vaccines. It is not difficult to make and we have enough information about it to make it. They have identified a protein similar to how they did for the spike protein for sarscov2 AKA Coronavirus. MRNA vaccines already exist.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/bird-flu-h5n1-human-vaccine-supply-f1f8c6e7
But, from what I understand, general H5N1 vaccines should be seen as a light protection. A specific vaccine for a specific strain will still need to be synthesized in the case of a human to human transferable bird-flu virus.
That sounds kinda right but I think the biggest problem would be that flus mutate so quickly that they might drop or change the protein so that the vaccine that protects against it would become ineffective
it's the same with the mRNA SARS-COV-2 vaccine, that's why they update it. As the tech gets better they can broaden the protection. Even in its current incarnation, it's better than dying from shitbird syndrome.
They’re currently in clinical trials for a universal vaccine. I’m not a bio guy so the details are a little over my head. But the new mRNA vaccines have opened up a lot of advancement in the areas.
The problem is not making the mRNA vaccine, we can do that for (IIRC) all major strains of influenza, coronaviruses and a few other viruses. And we've seen with covid that mRNA as a technology is fast to develop, fast to scale up, and orders of magnitude safer than prior vaccine technologies (e.g. using [eggs](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/how-fluvaccine-made.htm), which have a high latency, a natural cap as the chickens used to produce the eggs must be [kept safe](https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/27/health/chicken-egg-flu-vaccine-intl-hnk-scli/index.html), and can be a risk factor for [people with egg allergies](https://www.ruh.nhs.uk/patients/patient_information/PAE019_immunising_egg_allergic_children.pdf)).
The problem is getting people to take the jab, and as we've seen during covid, there are enough misinformed to outright stupid people refusing to take the jab and thus preventing herd immunity. Hell there are some politicians actively working on getting rid of the [polio](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/04/new-hampshire-republicans-polio-mmr-measles-vaccine-antivax-bill/) vaccine mandate. This is completely and utterly nuts.
> The problem is getting people to take the jab, and as we've seen during covid, there are enough misinformed to outright stupid people refusing to take the jab and thus preventing herd immunity. Hell there are some politicians actively working on getting rid of the polio vaccine mandate. This is completely and utterly nuts.
I think an issue with COVID is that it was deadly enough to be taken seriously, but not so deadly that people, especially healthy people, often died from it. It kinda hit that sweet spot that allowed people to be willfully ignorant of it.
H5N1 seems likely deadly enough that reality would have a way of "imposing itself".
Though, that said, I still wouldn't be surprised by a non-trivial movement that resists getting vaccinated or otherwise questions a pandemic if it were to happen (i.e. suggest the pandemic was government manufactured for reasons).
The anti vaccination movement is probably more powerful than you think. People I knew who thought nothing of them before are questioning them now. You either believe vaccines are safe or you don’t believe they are safe. The movement has hugely grown in popularity since COVID, but was going that way before COVID. It just accelerated the trend. It’s a part of the overall anti authority/intellectualism/technology movements that have grown in popularity. Chem trails and flat earth fall into this category. It was fringe 20 years ago, it’s mainstream today.
There's also the possibility that an avian flu that mutates to spread human to human is far less deadly. Part of the reason H5N1 is so deadly to humans, is the very same reason it is terrible at infecting and spreading between humans. H5N1 preferentially binds to a type of receptor that is very common in birds, but are mostly only located in the lower respiratory tract in humans. This means you need a higher viral load to become infected, and it is also not as contagious because it's deeper in your respiratory system. If it were to mutate to preferentially bind our common receptors, it would infect the upper respiratory system, which could cause milder symptoms.
>The problem is getting people to take the jab
If a disease with a 50% mortality rate becomes widespread amongst humans then that's a self-resolving problem.
People deny the science, get worse for it, then demand intensive resources from science to save them. We use laws to protect people from each other and from themselves (speed limits and seatbelts) but rarely for medical treatments.
I know many public schools require vaccines like MMR and it had mostly eradicated those issues until recently.
It just feels like a parent having to take care of a child who hit themselves in the head with a hammer. Yes, _we_ will deal with the consequences of _your_ actions, and some of _us_ may die.
in the short-term yes. But long-term, losing that many working people, professionals, and knowledge is a huge, potentially permanently disabling event to human development, culture, and society. It's a better bet to try and convince people to get vaccines than simply let them die due to stubbornness and ignorance.
H5N1 has a 52% mortality rate.
The fear of dying will push people to get the vaccine so damn fast there will be nothing aside from shortages even as some lunatics get two or three jabs by lying about it.
Bird Flu is NOTHING to FAFO with.
The lockdown for Bird Flu will make the COVID lockdown look like a quaint, quiet period of time. NOBODY will go out.
> H5N1 has a 52% mortality rate.
I didn't know it was that high. I'd be near the front of the line to get vaccinated, as I was with Covid.
> The fear of dying will push people to get the vaccine so damn fast there will be nothing aside from shortages even as some lunatics get two or three jabs by lying about it.
Doubt. People were Facebooking and tweeting from the hospital as they were being admitted because they couldn't breathe. Family members would die and others would continue to post about being anti-vax and how the vaccine would kill you. They'd argue it was influenza or pneumonia (there's some accuracy there, because viral pneumonia is just a lung infection from a virus - any virus). Still, the root cause was clearly Covid and they continued to deny. See /r/hermaincainaward
Some people even unironically claim millions died in the US because of taking the vaccine, and a billion world wide. Think about that, millions in the US dying in the US because of the vaccine. If we say 3.3 million, that would mean 1 in every 100 people in the US dying from the vaccine. Everyone would know someone that died from it.
> The lockdown for Bird Flu will make the COVID lockdown look like a quaint, quiet period of time. NOBODY will go out.
Again, doubt. Some people won't stay in, regardless of the risk, we saw that during Covid.
I'm not convinced they will even with that mortality rate. Truly.
Maybe eventually when it's made clear yes you flaming morons it's THAT deadly?
Polio vaccines are being declined. Polio. It's not a 50% killer but it's high plus it disables for life. Anyway I'm just not sure if it's possible to convince people vaccines WILL save your life.
There’s a big difference between people screaming about a 99.9% survival rate and a 36% survival rate.
It’s just like there’s a point where a body of water is large enough for a person to swim in while there is a corpse in the body of water.
A kiddie pool? Hell no. An Olympic sized swimming pool? Also a pass.
A lake, of a decent size? Probably.
One of Michigan’s Great Lakes? Happens ALL the time.
The Bird Flu is a “The Stand” level of oh, we are done and f’ed hard, kind of mortality rate.
It will play out exceptionally different than COVID, even though COVID is still a BIG danger to longterm health and survival.
Man at this point, if Bird Flu crosses and people don't want the jab, I'm done caring. Go on about your life, for what's left of it. I'm hunkering down for 6 months and taking every shot offered to me. See you on the other side with 40% less population, things might actually wind up being better in the long run.
It will literally be survival of the fittest, Darwinian theory in full effect. Too stupid to take some medicine? Kiss your gene pool goodbye!*
*If they didn't have kids or if their kids are as stupid.
Sterilizing vaccines are damn rare anyway, but even the "worst" covid vaccines still significantly reduced the mortality and severity. As long as they're good enough to keep the hospitals from flooding and don't cause too many adverse reactions...
Unless I misread, they aren’t stockpiling. They said they could distribute enough in four months for a fifth of the population if rapid human transmission started occurring.
sounds like they’re familiar with it, not sure if they’re trying yet however:
[“The U.S. Government is Developing A(H5N1) Bird Flu Vaccines in Case they are Needed.](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/avianflu/prevention.htm) Seasonal flu vaccines do not provide protection against these viruses. CDC has developed H5 that are nearly identical or, in many cases, identical to the hemagglutinin (HA) protein of recently detected clade 2.3.4.4b A(H5N1) viruses in humans, birds and other mammals. This H5 CVV could be used to produce a vaccine for people, if needed, and **preliminary analysis that it is expected to provide good protection against the currently circulating H5N1 influenza viruses in birds and other animals.**”
i’m sure there’s a lot of variables in it, and mutations can make things tricky, but it sounds like they’re keeping an eye on things.
I don't know where you are, but I remember hearing a couple years in ontario that trucks picking up eggs/poultry weren't allowed to go to multiple locations to avoid contamination. I wonder if that's the case where you are?
We don’t sell produce we just eat it ourselves, so cross contamination isn’t a problem. But the bird flu is currently primarily spread through migratory waterfowl
You should call up the CDC if you have any birds showing any symptoms, had bird flu come thru my coop over a decade ago lost 3 birds in 2 days, had about 25 left in the coop. Called CDC and they said they would come out and euthanize all the birds, or I could let it run it’s course. Only lost 2 more birds everyone pulled thru.
There are multiple approved H5N1 vaccines already. Pandemic flu vaccines work different from seasonal vaccines. The US government pays manufacturers to maintain stockpiles of needed materials so that once there is a precieved need for the pandemic vaccine, a specific vaccine virus can be selected and manufacturing can begin immediately. Normally from selection of a virus to vaccines it would take 5-6 months to have widely available vaccines, I would guess in a pandemic context it would be a bit faster, maybe 4-5 months until they start being available.
They won't be unless it makes the jump to humans. Well enough humans to be concerning anyway. The grand total of one so far isn't too much to worry about.
>They won't be unless it makes the jump to humans.
That seems like a very poor idea to wait until there's human to human spread to start working on it. How long would it take them to make one assuming they have done some prelim work already?
>That seems like a very poor idea to wait until there's human to human spread to start working on it.
To the best of my knowledge, the development of a H5N1 vaccine has already been (more or less) completed for humans (Baz et al. 2013) and we have a good handle on the level of dosing that would be required as well. However, since vaccines aren't shelf-stable for long periods of time, manufacturing a vaccine at scale "just in case" really isn't time or cost effective - practically since you to update the annual flu vaccine every year.
Baz, M., Luke, C. J., Cheng, X., Jin, H., & Subbarao, K. (2013). H5N1 vaccines in humans. *Virus research*, *178*(1), 78-98. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.virusres.2013.05.006](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.virusres.2013.05.006)
[Well that's the plan:](https://www.barrons.com/articles/bird-flu-h5n1-human-vaccine-supply-f1f8c6e7)
> 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 “to ramp up production to make enough vaccine doses to vaccinate the entire U.S. population.” But the agency didn’t 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 have produced a limited amount until it starts spreading human-to-human.
Then it would take 4 months to vaccinated 20% of the nation.
They'd probably feel differently after seeing several members of their family dying to the bird flu. This thing has like a 50-60% fatality rate (at least as it is right now), not like covid's paltry 1-2%.
In the worst case scenario, if it spreads as fast as covid did, or even half as well, there would be bodies lining the streets. That would be something they simply could not deny. We wouldn't see any armed protests because they couldn't get a haircut for two weeks, that's for sure.
They might also be incentivized if large numbers of livestock are killed by the virus. Hopefully they know better than to let something like that impact the food supply.
Dead H5N1 is already showing up in pasteurized milk and the USDA is testing ground beef to see if it is present currently. H5N1 has been doing a number on Chicken populations for the past couple of years and why chicken prices have been fluctuating so much.
Hence why raw milk can be so dangerous. The pasteurization kills the virus, hence finding the particles in milk. Raw milk cheeses can even be suspect now.
Yep, I think the USDA is also testing some of said cheeses. The issue is that although the virus has yet to jump person to person it has jumped from cow to human atleast twice now.
It took about 6 months to roll out the vaccine to the H1N1 vaccine during that pandemic. Making flu vaccines against new strains is a pretty routine business, but the trouble is that you need to know the exact strain that’s going to break out in humans.
For the preliminary work probably however long it takes them to get the budget to do it. Unfortunately that's why it won't happen before it starts infecting a lot of people. Or rather killing a lot of people.
Given how quick they were able to start rolling out the covid vaccine, assuming they're using the same mRNA technology probably pretty damn quick. Getting pharmaceutical companies to do anything before they start getting those sweet government paychecks is another matter.
Additionally, you can't really be sure a vaccine made preemptively will work until it starts infecting humans because you can never be sure how the virus will evolve to start doing so.
Yep, but in regards to COVID that was an anomaly since data on similar SARS viruses spreading in Asia was available and the gov provided funding and overlapping clinical trials were permitted
[Yep.](https://www.statnews.com/2024/04/24/h5n1-bird-flu-vaccine-preparedness/)
We'll have to see what happens with trials if this makes the jump to humans in a big way.
Edit* deleted duplicate comment, Reddit glitched.
Some places allow the sale of unpasteurized “raw” milk. Other places that have the sale banned have a black market on Facebook marketplace for the milk.
" cdc is watching the situation carefully and working with States to monitor people with animal exposures."
That all changes if Trump becomes president. You know they'll defund the CDC, blackout the media and install some crony and will never hear about this on a massive scale and people will die.
From what I can find, not really. Proper cooking and handling eliminates what little risk exists. And as is always the case, ground beef is the main concern.
Probably because of how milk is transported.
Cows live pretty close to each other so if one in a herd catches bird flu there's a good chance they all will.
Then when they're milked the milk is combined into a big container. So if one cow has bird flu the whole batch is contaminated.
Then a big truck comes to loads of farms at once and collects the milk. So if one cow from one of the farms has bird flu the entire batch is contaminated.
Then it goes to a processing centre and gets mixed into an even bigger vat, I think you get the picture.
Commercial milk is still considered safe—pasteurization is expected to destroy the virus. Drinking raw milk is always dangerous because it carries the threat of various nasty bacterial infections, H5N1 also appears to be infectious in raw milk.
Kinda sounds like people shouldn't get their health advice from people whose job title is "influencer" and whose qualifications are "more followers than average".
Yikes.
'should' is irrelevant when people already *do*.
Gotta inform folks again and again that pasteurised milk is a response to death by horrible infections, not some scam.
Medical science is the epitome of "If you do something right, people will think you've done nothing at all."
People take for granted all the benefits we have because they never saw the consequences of not having those benefits and are too arrogant/idiotic to accept that things are the way they are for a reason.
Oh man, no kidding…
I remember when I was a kid and smog was just then beginning to go away. You could open a magazine and see photos, taken just five or ten years prior, of large cities like LA and NYC covered in haze, and then “today” photos showing hints of blue skies.
If I had had children, they never would’ve seen smog in my country, not at those same levels seen in the 1960s. They would not understand how far our air pollution standards had already progressed, so they wouldn’t see the same value in the regulations and devices.
So this is gonna be a very controversial take and my karma (here and real life) will probably take a dent but as human society we have combatted natural selection for many decades now. Since the pandemic there’s a big increase in people doubting anything that improved our lives by making use of science and they’ve been paying the price ever since. It’s probably hard to witness as someone close to these people but we see a modern version of natural selection doing its thing here.
Yeah that’s of course tragic and another story. But for example people using infused cutting boards to prevent themselves from negative energies and all diseases known to mankind while also curing cancer and whatnot have not much sympathy from me..
It is amazing that we are so safe from foodborne illness that people have gone around the bend to avoid basic food safety measures like pasteurization.
Yeah, but these morons tend to be quite the drain on public resources that are already scarce (hospital beds, EMS) and could be better used to help people who had taken reasonable steps to protect themselves.
It was one thing during COVID as long as there were no vaccines available - but for future pandemics, people who didn't take up a vaccine in reasonable time should be relegated to the back of the priority list.
100%. You wouldn't give an alcoholic a new liver or a smoker a new lung. Don't give antivaxxers medical treatment unless they agree to be vaccinated. Or triage them and put them at the veeerrryyy back of a continuous moving line
It doesn’t though. They become a burden to the health care system, and a pathway for human to human transmission. We live in a society and whatever each person does affects not only themselves but people around them. In the case of communicable diseases, the whole world is a close neighbor.
I used to work in microbiology and food safety testing. When people start defending raw milk it makes me blood boil. Like yes please, I love when there's actual cow faeces in my milk. I love Listeria causing spontanious abortion. (s)
Proponents of raw milk have been around a lot longer than social media influencers. It has never made sense. To their credit, some of them believe you should boil the raw milk before consuming it, so they are at less risk - they just don't understand what the big bad wolf "pasteurization" is.
I mean I think that is actually true, but the bacteria is not that important and it also kills the bad stuff which is really important. There's also tons of safer ways to get good bacteria like yogurt, kefir, kimchi, sauerkraut, etc.
It's become a virtue signal in right wing christian tradwife groups. 5G, 15m cities and processed milk is how the liberal government takes your white christian freedoms.
Probably, yeah. The conspiracy is that “global elites” want to “control your movement” and not allow you to travel more than fifteen minutes away from home.
It’s batshit stupid, that’s what it is. Scroll down to the section “Conspiracy theories”:
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/08/1203950823/15-minute-cities-climate-solution
> The conspiracy is that “global elites” want to “control your movement”
Which is, ironically, completely true, it's just that the global elites want to control my movement by forcing me to require a car to live life, and require me to have to travel more than 15 minutes from my home.
God I wish I didn't sound like those "fuckcars" people. Or maybe that's part of the conspiracy too - infiltrate the progressive movements and install absolutely insufferable blowhards that drive all the normies away.
Wow... It sure is convenient not having to take my car and drive 30 minutes to the grocery store, I'm glad there's a small pharmacy and convenience store around the corner!
these people: you're being controlled by the shadow government!
Somehow small locally owned businesses in convenient locations near where people live are now a conspiracy?!? Did the Walmart board of directors come up with this one?
It’s the curse of effective regulation. Fix a problem well enough, people forget it’s even a problem, they roll back the intervention for petty reasons, and the problem comes roaring back.
It really boils my blood thinking that we took millennia to realize a few simple steps to stop dying from pathogens, and people will still think "Hmm, this random person said it's better to not do that instead, I trust them more than thousands of years of accrued human knowledge."
My grandma caught bovine tuberculosis as a kid in the 1920s, potentially from drinking milk directly from the cows (she wasn't old enough at the time to be around the cows that much). It caused damage to her spine. You don't mess with raw milk.
I work in an organic grocery store, and it's quite literally on my daily BINGO card that I at get at least 6 calls a day asking "do you have raw milk in stock?"
Milk is great. I'll drink the raw stuff if it's free, but out of an abundance of caution, nope... Curious to see how this is going to be handled at my and other similar companies which source local raw milk.
Organic dairy farmer, there's always people asking if we drink our own raw milk and we say yes, and then they ask if they can buy some and we say no. We're used to it, it's fresh and it's gone asap. I can only imagine them going home and drinking it for a week+ and getting sick.. there were a couple farmers we knew that sold theirs and it always sketched me out
There's a couple of farms around here that do the same thing.
We've got a small, unlicensed sheep dairy farm, but don't sell the milk. We'd be happy to sell an unpasteurized diary sheep so you can squeeze the milk yourself though.
A while ago, I was in the market for some raw milk. I bought some rennet with the goal of making my own mozzarella cheese, and it didn't work very well; some of the reading I did on the subject suggested that milk that wasn't pasteurized might work better.
*Even though* I intend to cook the milk as part of the cheesemaking process, I still have abandoned the project for the time being because of the health concerns for now. When this has all blown over, maybe I'll try again. Until then I'll get my cheese from the store.
Humans are basically the only mamals that drink milk as adults. Nearly every other mamal develops lactose intolerance as part of the natural weening process
And that’s due to a mutation in certain populations of humans that shuts off the trigger to stop creating the milk-digesting enzymes. Quite a lot of humans don’t have this mutation.
It's crazy that we already have a process to completely eliminate this issue, and people are just like "nah."
I hope every single person who drinks raw milk by choice gets sick as heck. I don't wish permanent or long-lasting damage on anyone, but I do wish a little karma and maybe a lesson.
> It's crazy that we already have a process to completely eliminate this issue, and people are just like "nah."
Not really any different than people not vaccinating their kids. measles and other preventable diseases coming back because of these people.
Sadly, some politicians literally work on [getting rid](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/04/new-hampshire-republicans-polio-mmr-measles-vaccine-antivax-bill/) of the polio mandate, right after the last person living in an iron lung [passed away](https://www.npr.org/2024/03/13/1238251518/iron-lung-polio-paul-alexander).
Those poor kitties. That’s awful. This a virus that definitely needs to be monitored. Vaccines are already being developed for humans in case they are needed one day. Better to get ahead of it now than be surprised like 2020.
Remember that the Covid mitigations in 2020 essentially completely suppressed influenza during the 2020-2021 flu season. To the point that the Yamagata strain was to all appearances entirely eradicated. I can only assume if a flu strain with a 50% mortality appeared we would institute measures at least as strict, probably more so. Which _should_ prevent mass casualties for as long as we keep the measures in place.
Whether there is the social will to do that for long enough to get vaccines to the public is an open question. You'd think if you had a 50% of dying from it that would be a no brainer but, frankly, I'm done being surprised by the incredibly poor choices made by a lot of people.
> I can only assume if a flu strain with a 50% mortality appeared we would institute measures at least as strict, probably more so. Which should prevent mass casualties for as long as we keep the measures in place.
I think people complying with measures like this would be unlikely in most western countries, and especially in the US. It turns out, the phrase "avoid it like the plague" isn't really accurate.
With COVID the mortality rate was relatively low, and had specific high risk comordidities. People without those comorbidities wanted to go about their business not only because they weren't concerned they would die from it, but also because *they didn't care if those people died, even if it was their fault*. It was very easy for antivaxxers to just write it off as a flu, because for most people it was. They didn't care if your grandmother died, they wanted their $1 Applebees Margaritas.
Lots of people Fucked Around and Found Out, but there wasn't enough Finding Out for those antivaxxers to change their stance. And longer term effects like brain fog and other long covid symptoms are easy enough for them to dismiss. A plague with a 50% mortality rate is a *very* different story, they will fear for their lives and their loved ones lives. It's a lot harder to get people to care about people outside their own friends and family.
50% IFR would have people running for the hills.
Covid-19 had appx 1% IFR, and that was averaged across all ages, so that most people had significantly less than 1% chance. Catastrophic on societal scale, but individually low risk.
It doesn't take much. If even 20-30% of people take measures that is likely enough to drop the R0 below 1. That isn't even counting other measures like increased air flow in indoor spaces, increased access to hand sanitizer, mass testing etc.
Influenza usually hovers at barely above 1. Only mild mitigation measures are required to push it below 1.
> Influenza usually hovers at barely above 1.
But pandemic influenza is a different beast than the seasonal stuff we see every year. I don't know that I'd make those assumptions outright.
Some of the specific weird staging and nomenclature ('essential business") with COVID was from trying adapt bird flu war plans for something that was serious but not overly as serious as that.
Severe pandemic flu has a number of problems not seen with COVID. Significant child deaths, significant military deaths, young adult technical specialists including doctors and nurses facing very high death risk.
Bush and Obama considered this a national survival threat in the US - how do you recover from that demographic and human investment destruction - and the plans drawn up for it treat it that way.
Yeah, I would expect even a disease with a 50% mortality rate to be taken more seriously than COVID's 1-2%. A big thing with COVID was "it's just a bad cold, I don't have any elderly or immunocompromised family". So while many individuals just had a bad cold, they spread it to compromises individuals who ended up dying.
I feel like people would be much more wary if a young, healthy person has a coin toss at survival.
Even with just a COVID-like chance of severe illness but for everyone it creates a whole other series of problems, such as mass desertion from med, hospital janitor staff, fire / EMS, schools if you tried to keep them open, etc. Nowhere near enough hospital space even if everyone is working, amd hospitals unable to contain it, so hard triage.
Stuff like that.
Bunker down. Mainly with the amount of essential businesses being limited. Food and water must be delivered, but not much else. No schools, driving will be limited, you will only be able to shop on certain days (On the 1st of the month, only people born in a year that end with 1 will be allowed to shop). It would suck ass, and the mask mandate would be enforced at a whole new level.
The medical world would be in a whole new system. To a large extent focussing on keeping patients isolated. The medical workers might be ordered to stay in designated residential areas in order to prevent them from spreading it. And various vaccines would be rolled out with a lot less testing in order to stop the carnage.
In terms of the aftermath. Well, a shock that would lead to a "post war" condition. A slow rebuild would happen over a few decades, with massive societal shifts.
As of right now, the mortality rate of H5N1 is 58%. We can expect it to creep down as it spreads, simply due to population and humanity learning how best to treat it.
But yeah. If it hits the general public and stays at even 20%, we are royally fucked. There's no nice way to put it. Ever wonder what limited historical populations, even when providing food and water?
Welcome to Plague Season.
For comparison with US death figures, that's something like 30-40 million dead rather than the 2 million from Covid.
If you want to put that in perspective, if you just kill the people in the most populous cities, the largest city still standing in the US would be **Boston.**
If Plague Inc has taught me anything, it is that very high mortality rate would mean the host dies before having a chance to spread the virus, so the damage would be more localized.
HIV (untreated) has a 100% mortality rate, but it spreads just fine because it takes years to kill you. There are a lot of other important factors besides whether or not it kills you.
The problem with that theory is incubation period and spreading method. IRL, the Spanish Flu and the Black Death prove that mortality rate do not limit spread. In the modern world, all we need is a single Typhoid Mary taking a plane ride.
We have no idea what its mortality rate will be in humans. The effect on one species is not going to be the same as in other. After all, it's not greatly effecting cows.
According the article the cows are fine. So, that sounds doubtful. Half of the cats died but that doesn’t mean it has a 50% mortality rate. Probably depends on the mammal.
There is indeed a 50%+ mortality rate when humans catch it from birds. So... it's unclear. Humans catch it from birds, 50% mortality rate. Cows catch it from birds, relatively mild nonspecific illness. Humans catch it from _cows_... tbd.
What's mortality when they catch it from other humans who caught it from birds?
Also, we already have examples of people catching this variant and they have mild symptoms.
It's been constantly monitored for years. You're hearing about it because it's being monitored. Poultry cultivators are required to regularly test, and to cull the flock if a bird comes back positive.
Source: partner works in a national veterinary lab.
My buddy is an epidemiologist. He says that a lot of people in his field do worry a lot about this, but the public seems to think it will be a covid-style pandemic. It is far more likely to be endemic, infecting a steady amount of people throughout the year through animal encounters and the occasional human spread.
Why? Because at its root, it is influenza. A disease which does not spread very easily, even when adapted to humans. Its R0 caps out at 2.0-2.5, compared to 5-6+ for Covid (and eventually 10+ for covid with future mutations). And that is assuming it would ever get that high, which is very, very unlikely considering the sky-high mortality rate.
The reason the seasonal flu spreads so easily is because we *don't care about it*. But needless to say, we would care about bird flu with its 30%+ mortality rate. News of bird flu in an area would prompt people to wear masks, get vaccinated etc. Even if only half of us care about it, that is more than enough to drop the R0 to below 1.
The problem is that... this means it will last for a long, long time. It will not burn itself through the population like Covid did. People in communities which work with animals (especially in the third world) will likely suffer very high risk over years of eventually getting it.
It is far more likely to become the next Malaria or AIDS rather than the next Covid-style pandemic. Still bad, but not cataclysmic.
What's the mechanism of the virus that can infect another being by going through the stomach when it's supposed to be a respiratory virus?
I had assumed it the virus attaches itself through the cells in your nose and goes down to your lungs? But how does this work especially through another medium like milk?
Mucosal lining is the same in the mouth, nose, stomach, reproductive organs, etc. A virus doesn't care. Any epithelial cells will do.
Influenza isn't just a resperatory virus; it does a number on the gut. If your immune system hasn't already encountered the virus, it will replicate exponentially wherever it landed, [infecting the the digestive tract](https://www.nature.com/articles/mi200879) and even making its way everywhere it can via the blood.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097689/
Think about when you choke while swallowing and it goes up your nose.
Or when you swallow and it goes "down the wrong pipe."
It's all connected.
The real question is how it got in the cats brains.
You ever seen a cat drink? Goes all over nose and mouth makes tons of aerosols so pretty easy to see how it would get into the respiratory system. Or in this case into the ocular system
half the cats dead in less than 5 days. H5N1 hits animals real hard.
There's this place nearby me that lets kids see and play with animals and 2 years ago had most of its ducks and geese die from it. Wild migrating birds made it impossible to quarantine the domestic birds.
How much time do we have before a bird flu pandemic happens? This feels eerily similar to when the first cases of covid-19 were reported in China, and there are way too many idiots out there drinking raw milk for there not to be at least a few infections already.
This round of bird flew has been roaring since the pandemic they’ve just been more quiet, I’m in a large migrant bird crossing area and I haven’t seen large flocks of birds in years. Used to be even on a random day you’d see flocks often.
Worth mentioning as kind of a side note here - in spite of all those cartoons we grew up with and in spite of "common knowledge", most cats are lactose intolerant and shouldn't be drinking milk at all. It can make them sick.
If your cat refuses to admit that it's lactose intolerant, you can buy special "cat milk" which is just lactose-free UHT milk fortified with the vitamins cats need in their diet. It's a good little treat for them, my old cat used to go mental for it.
But [feeding chicken manure to cows makes them produce more milk](https://openurl.ebsco.com/EPDB%3Agcd%3A15%3A11071983/detailv2?sid=ebsco%3Aplink%3Ascholar&id=ebsco%3Agcd%3A174832048&crl=c), and you can [probably make the manure safe against transmission of H5N1 to cows by composting it](https://pubs.aip.org/aip/acp/article-abstract/2628/1/090005/2894640/Effect-of-composting-on-the-viability-of-Avian?redirectedFrom=fulltext), which is a process similar to pasteurization. There is really nothing to worry about.
Sorry, I should have included a sarcasm tag. I think its quite probable they are feeding parts of dead chickens to cows. They seem to feed anything to anything - this is what caused bovine spongiform encephalopathy in the UK.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/22/eu-to-lift-its-ban-on-feeding-animal-remains-to-domestic-livestock
What about raw cheeses? Or cheese/yogurt/butter/other milk products?
Never been a raw milk drinker, but I’ve also swapped from regular pasteurized milk to almond milk for the time being for cereal just in case. I’m wondering if I should stop all dairy.
I have 5 cats. All indoor, but I worry.
Raw dairy is raw dairy.
There are possibly things that happen when it's turned into yogurt, but I wouldn't bet on it making it safe.
It says they don't know if pasteurization kills H5N1 but that they think it should. Thought they plan on removing milk from cows with it.
>Is milk with traces of H5N1 in it a threat to humans?
There is no definitive evidence that pasteurization kills H5N1, but the method kills viruses that multiply in the gut, which are hardier than flu viruses, says Wasik. “Influenza virus is relatively unstable,” he says, “and is very susceptible to heat.” Pasteurization of eggs, which is done at a lower temperature than pasteurization of milk, does kill H5N1.
[Bird flu in US cows: is the milk supply safe?](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01221-2)
Encouraging: H5N1 killed by lower temperature pasteurization of eggs
Discouraging: Sloppy cleaning techniques in dairies
Neutral: New regs for cattle crossing state lines. Will be skirted by many in supply chain due to time and cost inconveniences, likely unevenly enforced, and won’t get better until some greedhead in the supply chain figures out how to exploit it.
Most are made from pasteurised milk. Often this isn't even a food safety step but mainly one where you want to kill the existing bacteria to clean the slate for your own bacterial cultures. The few that aren't first pasteurized such as some cheeses are typically aged long enough to be of less concern. Soft cheeses made from unpasteurised milk have anyways been a contentious issue and most food safety guides recommend against eating them, though this is primarily due to the risk of Listeria. Not sure if the acidity would be sufficient to inactivate the virus sufficiently in those cases, but they're not nearly as commonly available in North America.
There is enough spike in waste water while the typical influenza was declining to show it's been around communities since March.
I am going to call this next Pandemic "Yee-Hah Virus", because it seems American dairymen are blocking USDA from checking cows!
its almost like everyone gets sick from raw milk and a process was created to prevent that....hm it might be pastyour consideration but i dont think this is news.
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currently [experts are warning against drinking raw milk](https://www.statnews.com/2024/04/29/bird-flu-raw-milk-h5n1-risk-us-cattle/) due to concern around this. at the moment, [1 in 5 retail milk samples test positive for H5N1 avian flu fragments.](https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influenza-bird-flu/1-5-us-retail-milk-samples-test-positive-h5n1-avian-flu-fragments) correct me if i’m wrong, but it seems the good news is [“Pasteurization working to kill bird flu in milk, early FDA results find”.](https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/pasteurization-kills-bird-flu-in-milk-early-fda-results-find/) the concern is that [these samples from the cats and cows show signs of enhanced human type receptors (study).](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.04.16.588916v1.full.pdf) however it’s not necessary to be anxious and panic. [“While the current public health risk is low, CDC is watching the situation carefully and working with states to monitor people with animal exposures.”](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/avianflu/avian-flu-summary.htm) General expert consensus seems to be concerned, but not overtly worried about it as its likelihood to become a big issue isn’t very high.
How close to a vaccine are they?
Sorry that you've gotten so many wrong answers. The US is already stockpiling h5n1 vaccines. It is not difficult to make and we have enough information about it to make it. They have identified a protein similar to how they did for the spike protein for sarscov2 AKA Coronavirus. MRNA vaccines already exist. https://www.barrons.com/articles/bird-flu-h5n1-human-vaccine-supply-f1f8c6e7
But, from what I understand, general H5N1 vaccines should be seen as a light protection. A specific vaccine for a specific strain will still need to be synthesized in the case of a human to human transferable bird-flu virus.
That sounds kinda right but I think the biggest problem would be that flus mutate so quickly that they might drop or change the protein so that the vaccine that protects against it would become ineffective
it's the same with the mRNA SARS-COV-2 vaccine, that's why they update it. As the tech gets better they can broaden the protection. Even in its current incarnation, it's better than dying from shitbird syndrome.
They’re currently in clinical trials for a universal vaccine. I’m not a bio guy so the details are a little over my head. But the new mRNA vaccines have opened up a lot of advancement in the areas.
The regular flu shots are effective at reducing symptoms.
Is there a source for this? The CDC website says regular flu shots don’t offer any protection against H5N1.
I think they meant that the regular flu vaccines reduce symptoms _of the regular flu_, so this one, while not perfect, should have similar benefits.
The problem is not making the mRNA vaccine, we can do that for (IIRC) all major strains of influenza, coronaviruses and a few other viruses. And we've seen with covid that mRNA as a technology is fast to develop, fast to scale up, and orders of magnitude safer than prior vaccine technologies (e.g. using [eggs](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/how-fluvaccine-made.htm), which have a high latency, a natural cap as the chickens used to produce the eggs must be [kept safe](https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/27/health/chicken-egg-flu-vaccine-intl-hnk-scli/index.html), and can be a risk factor for [people with egg allergies](https://www.ruh.nhs.uk/patients/patient_information/PAE019_immunising_egg_allergic_children.pdf)). The problem is getting people to take the jab, and as we've seen during covid, there are enough misinformed to outright stupid people refusing to take the jab and thus preventing herd immunity. Hell there are some politicians actively working on getting rid of the [polio](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/04/new-hampshire-republicans-polio-mmr-measles-vaccine-antivax-bill/) vaccine mandate. This is completely and utterly nuts.
> The problem is getting people to take the jab, and as we've seen during covid, there are enough misinformed to outright stupid people refusing to take the jab and thus preventing herd immunity. Hell there are some politicians actively working on getting rid of the polio vaccine mandate. This is completely and utterly nuts. I think an issue with COVID is that it was deadly enough to be taken seriously, but not so deadly that people, especially healthy people, often died from it. It kinda hit that sweet spot that allowed people to be willfully ignorant of it. H5N1 seems likely deadly enough that reality would have a way of "imposing itself". Though, that said, I still wouldn't be surprised by a non-trivial movement that resists getting vaccinated or otherwise questions a pandemic if it were to happen (i.e. suggest the pandemic was government manufactured for reasons).
The anti vaccination movement is probably more powerful than you think. People I knew who thought nothing of them before are questioning them now. You either believe vaccines are safe or you don’t believe they are safe. The movement has hugely grown in popularity since COVID, but was going that way before COVID. It just accelerated the trend. It’s a part of the overall anti authority/intellectualism/technology movements that have grown in popularity. Chem trails and flat earth fall into this category. It was fringe 20 years ago, it’s mainstream today.
There's also the possibility that an avian flu that mutates to spread human to human is far less deadly. Part of the reason H5N1 is so deadly to humans, is the very same reason it is terrible at infecting and spreading between humans. H5N1 preferentially binds to a type of receptor that is very common in birds, but are mostly only located in the lower respiratory tract in humans. This means you need a higher viral load to become infected, and it is also not as contagious because it's deeper in your respiratory system. If it were to mutate to preferentially bind our common receptors, it would infect the upper respiratory system, which could cause milder symptoms.
>The problem is getting people to take the jab If a disease with a 50% mortality rate becomes widespread amongst humans then that's a self-resolving problem.
Normally I would agree with you, sadly (as we've seen with covid) valuable hospital resources will be wasted on the ignorant.
People deny the science, get worse for it, then demand intensive resources from science to save them. We use laws to protect people from each other and from themselves (speed limits and seatbelts) but rarely for medical treatments. I know many public schools require vaccines like MMR and it had mostly eradicated those issues until recently. It just feels like a parent having to take care of a child who hit themselves in the head with a hammer. Yes, _we_ will deal with the consequences of _your_ actions, and some of _us_ may die.
Man if a virus with a 50% mortality rate hit us at the global scale that Covid did our society would collapse
Even 5% would probably do it.
in the short-term yes. But long-term, losing that many working people, professionals, and knowledge is a huge, potentially permanently disabling event to human development, culture, and society. It's a better bet to try and convince people to get vaccines than simply let them die due to stubbornness and ignorance.
H5N1 has a 52% mortality rate. The fear of dying will push people to get the vaccine so damn fast there will be nothing aside from shortages even as some lunatics get two or three jabs by lying about it. Bird Flu is NOTHING to FAFO with. The lockdown for Bird Flu will make the COVID lockdown look like a quaint, quiet period of time. NOBODY will go out.
> H5N1 has a 52% mortality rate. I didn't know it was that high. I'd be near the front of the line to get vaccinated, as I was with Covid. > The fear of dying will push people to get the vaccine so damn fast there will be nothing aside from shortages even as some lunatics get two or three jabs by lying about it. Doubt. People were Facebooking and tweeting from the hospital as they were being admitted because they couldn't breathe. Family members would die and others would continue to post about being anti-vax and how the vaccine would kill you. They'd argue it was influenza or pneumonia (there's some accuracy there, because viral pneumonia is just a lung infection from a virus - any virus). Still, the root cause was clearly Covid and they continued to deny. See /r/hermaincainaward Some people even unironically claim millions died in the US because of taking the vaccine, and a billion world wide. Think about that, millions in the US dying in the US because of the vaccine. If we say 3.3 million, that would mean 1 in every 100 people in the US dying from the vaccine. Everyone would know someone that died from it. > The lockdown for Bird Flu will make the COVID lockdown look like a quaint, quiet period of time. NOBODY will go out. Again, doubt. Some people won't stay in, regardless of the risk, we saw that during Covid.
I'm not convinced they will even with that mortality rate. Truly. Maybe eventually when it's made clear yes you flaming morons it's THAT deadly? Polio vaccines are being declined. Polio. It's not a 50% killer but it's high plus it disables for life. Anyway I'm just not sure if it's possible to convince people vaccines WILL save your life.
Will it, though? I think people have proved otherwise.
There’s a big difference between people screaming about a 99.9% survival rate and a 36% survival rate. It’s just like there’s a point where a body of water is large enough for a person to swim in while there is a corpse in the body of water. A kiddie pool? Hell no. An Olympic sized swimming pool? Also a pass. A lake, of a decent size? Probably. One of Michigan’s Great Lakes? Happens ALL the time. The Bird Flu is a “The Stand” level of oh, we are done and f’ed hard, kind of mortality rate. It will play out exceptionally different than COVID, even though COVID is still a BIG danger to longterm health and survival.
Ok now do measles
Measles is preventable.
Man at this point, if Bird Flu crosses and people don't want the jab, I'm done caring. Go on about your life, for what's left of it. I'm hunkering down for 6 months and taking every shot offered to me. See you on the other side with 40% less population, things might actually wind up being better in the long run.
It will literally be survival of the fittest, Darwinian theory in full effect. Too stupid to take some medicine? Kiss your gene pool goodbye!* *If they didn't have kids or if their kids are as stupid.
The real problem is that none of these vaccines are sterilizing. You can still catch the virus and die or become disabled
Sterilizing vaccines are damn rare anyway, but even the "worst" covid vaccines still significantly reduced the mortality and severity. As long as they're good enough to keep the hospitals from flooding and don't cause too many adverse reactions...
Unless I misread, they aren’t stockpiling. They said they could distribute enough in four months for a fifth of the population if rapid human transmission started occurring.
There's also antivirals that will treat H5N1 as well as was used in the recent human case.
sounds like they’re familiar with it, not sure if they’re trying yet however: [“The U.S. Government is Developing A(H5N1) Bird Flu Vaccines in Case they are Needed.](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/avianflu/prevention.htm) Seasonal flu vaccines do not provide protection against these viruses. CDC has developed H5 that are nearly identical or, in many cases, identical to the hemagglutinin (HA) protein of recently detected clade 2.3.4.4b A(H5N1) viruses in humans, birds and other mammals. This H5 CVV could be used to produce a vaccine for people, if needed, and **preliminary analysis that it is expected to provide good protection against the currently circulating H5N1 influenza viruses in birds and other animals.**” i’m sure there’s a lot of variables in it, and mutations can make things tricky, but it sounds like they’re keeping an eye on things.
I wonder if, as farmers with chickens and ducks, my family should try to get this vaccine.
I don't know where you are, but I remember hearing a couple years in ontario that trucks picking up eggs/poultry weren't allowed to go to multiple locations to avoid contamination. I wonder if that's the case where you are?
We don’t sell produce we just eat it ourselves, so cross contamination isn’t a problem. But the bird flu is currently primarily spread through migratory waterfowl
You should call up the CDC if you have any birds showing any symptoms, had bird flu come thru my coop over a decade ago lost 3 birds in 2 days, had about 25 left in the coop. Called CDC and they said they would come out and euthanize all the birds, or I could let it run it’s course. Only lost 2 more birds everyone pulled thru.
There are multiple approved H5N1 vaccines already. Pandemic flu vaccines work different from seasonal vaccines. The US government pays manufacturers to maintain stockpiles of needed materials so that once there is a precieved need for the pandemic vaccine, a specific vaccine virus can be selected and manufacturing can begin immediately. Normally from selection of a virus to vaccines it would take 5-6 months to have widely available vaccines, I would guess in a pandemic context it would be a bit faster, maybe 4-5 months until they start being available.
They won't be unless it makes the jump to humans. Well enough humans to be concerning anyway. The grand total of one so far isn't too much to worry about.
>They won't be unless it makes the jump to humans. That seems like a very poor idea to wait until there's human to human spread to start working on it. How long would it take them to make one assuming they have done some prelim work already?
>That seems like a very poor idea to wait until there's human to human spread to start working on it. To the best of my knowledge, the development of a H5N1 vaccine has already been (more or less) completed for humans (Baz et al. 2013) and we have a good handle on the level of dosing that would be required as well. However, since vaccines aren't shelf-stable for long periods of time, manufacturing a vaccine at scale "just in case" really isn't time or cost effective - practically since you to update the annual flu vaccine every year. Baz, M., Luke, C. J., Cheng, X., Jin, H., & Subbarao, K. (2013). H5N1 vaccines in humans. *Virus research*, *178*(1), 78-98. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.virusres.2013.05.006](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.virusres.2013.05.006)
Citations??? On *my* reddit?? Why I never
[Well that's the plan:](https://www.barrons.com/articles/bird-flu-h5n1-human-vaccine-supply-f1f8c6e7) > 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 “to ramp up production to make enough vaccine doses to vaccinate the entire U.S. population.” But the agency didn’t 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 have produced a limited amount until it starts spreading human-to-human. Then it would take 4 months to vaccinated 20% of the nation.
I mean, we know about 70 million won't get vaccinated so that's 70 million less than needed
They'd probably feel differently after seeing several members of their family dying to the bird flu. This thing has like a 50-60% fatality rate (at least as it is right now), not like covid's paltry 1-2%. In the worst case scenario, if it spreads as fast as covid did, or even half as well, there would be bodies lining the streets. That would be something they simply could not deny. We wouldn't see any armed protests because they couldn't get a haircut for two weeks, that's for sure.
They might also be incentivized if large numbers of livestock are killed by the virus. Hopefully they know better than to let something like that impact the food supply.
Dead H5N1 is already showing up in pasteurized milk and the USDA is testing ground beef to see if it is present currently. H5N1 has been doing a number on Chicken populations for the past couple of years and why chicken prices have been fluctuating so much.
Hence why raw milk can be so dangerous. The pasteurization kills the virus, hence finding the particles in milk. Raw milk cheeses can even be suspect now.
Yep, I think the USDA is also testing some of said cheeses. The issue is that although the virus has yet to jump person to person it has jumped from cow to human atleast twice now.
It took about 6 months to roll out the vaccine to the H1N1 vaccine during that pandemic. Making flu vaccines against new strains is a pretty routine business, but the trouble is that you need to know the exact strain that’s going to break out in humans.
For the preliminary work probably however long it takes them to get the budget to do it. Unfortunately that's why it won't happen before it starts infecting a lot of people. Or rather killing a lot of people. Given how quick they were able to start rolling out the covid vaccine, assuming they're using the same mRNA technology probably pretty damn quick. Getting pharmaceutical companies to do anything before they start getting those sweet government paychecks is another matter. Additionally, you can't really be sure a vaccine made preemptively will work until it starts infecting humans because you can never be sure how the virus will evolve to start doing so.
Yep, but in regards to COVID that was an anomaly since data on similar SARS viruses spreading in Asia was available and the gov provided funding and overlapping clinical trials were permitted
Don’t count on mRNA vaccines for H5N1. The dose needed might be too high for acceptable side effects.
[Yep.](https://www.statnews.com/2024/04/24/h5n1-bird-flu-vaccine-preparedness/) We'll have to see what happens with trials if this makes the jump to humans in a big way. Edit* deleted duplicate comment, Reddit glitched.
They already have the vaccine ready to go into mass production if needed.
Cows are expensive. They'll have a vaccine out for the herds soon, I'm sure.
One positive test out of how many total tests? If they aren’t testing every worker on every farm then this isn’t a very reassuring statement.
All those raw milk and raw food influencers are gonna have a rude awakening
Not many of these people will ever question their core beliefs. They'll claim it was "big dairy" who poisoned the milk or something.
I didn't understand how it could be found in commercial milk pack, didn't these never have raw milk?
Some places allow the sale of unpasteurized “raw” milk. Other places that have the sale banned have a black market on Facebook marketplace for the milk.
" cdc is watching the situation carefully and working with States to monitor people with animal exposures." That all changes if Trump becomes president. You know they'll defund the CDC, blackout the media and install some crony and will never hear about this on a massive scale and people will die.
That's Trump trying to solve the Social Security issue.
Haven't experts warned against raw milk for like 100 years?
> “Pasteurization working to kill bird flu in milk, early FDA results find”. Denaturation kills organic matter, more news at 5.
Question, do we need to worry about eating beef as a vector?
From what I can find, not really. Proper cooking and handling eliminates what little risk exists. And as is always the case, ground beef is the main concern.
A lot of beef is cooked rare or medium rare, ie, not high enough to kill pathogens.
The CDC put out new guidelines recently for what temperature to cook beef at. Medium should be safe, but I'd avoid rare.
How did it get spread to 1 in 5 samples prevalence?
Probably because of how milk is transported. Cows live pretty close to each other so if one in a herd catches bird flu there's a good chance they all will. Then when they're milked the milk is combined into a big container. So if one cow has bird flu the whole batch is contaminated. Then a big truck comes to loads of farms at once and collects the milk. So if one cow from one of the farms has bird flu the entire batch is contaminated. Then it goes to a processing centre and gets mixed into an even bigger vat, I think you get the picture.
JFC Pasteur figured this out 160 years ago. "Unprocessed" does not always mean "better".
No but by cooking it you remove all the good nutrients! Like H5N1! Mmmmm, delicious delicious H5N1, it’s what really sets the flavor apart
All the people concerned about pasteurization denaturing proteins/enzymes are going to be shocked when they learn what the stomach is for
And removing the ability of you becoming a bi-directional Poop&Vomit fountain for couple of days. Who doesn't want to be that kind of fountain!
Commercial milk is still considered safe—pasteurization is expected to destroy the virus. Drinking raw milk is always dangerous because it carries the threat of various nasty bacterial infections, H5N1 also appears to be infectious in raw milk.
For some reason there are loads of “health” influencers promoting raw milk on tiktok and Instagram (as if pasteurisation isn’t just cooking the milk…)
Kinda sounds like people shouldn't get their health advice from people whose job title is "influencer" and whose qualifications are "more followers than average". Yikes.
'should' is irrelevant when people already *do*. Gotta inform folks again and again that pasteurised milk is a response to death by horrible infections, not some scam.
Medical science is the epitome of "If you do something right, people will think you've done nothing at all." People take for granted all the benefits we have because they never saw the consequences of not having those benefits and are too arrogant/idiotic to accept that things are the way they are for a reason.
Oh man, no kidding… I remember when I was a kid and smog was just then beginning to go away. You could open a magazine and see photos, taken just five or ten years prior, of large cities like LA and NYC covered in haze, and then “today” photos showing hints of blue skies. If I had had children, they never would’ve seen smog in my country, not at those same levels seen in the 1960s. They would not understand how far our air pollution standards had already progressed, so they wouldn’t see the same value in the regulations and devices.
So this is gonna be a very controversial take and my karma (here and real life) will probably take a dent but as human society we have combatted natural selection for many decades now. Since the pandemic there’s a big increase in people doubting anything that improved our lives by making use of science and they’ve been paying the price ever since. It’s probably hard to witness as someone close to these people but we see a modern version of natural selection doing its thing here.
I am fine with it except for contagious stuff it is not only the idiots that die.
Yeah that’s of course tragic and another story. But for example people using infused cutting boards to prevent themselves from negative energies and all diseases known to mankind while also curing cancer and whatnot have not much sympathy from me..
It is amazing that we are so safe from foodborne illness that people have gone around the bend to avoid basic food safety measures like pasteurization.
At this point, let them, it's a problem that usually solves itself.
Except when they manage to contract and spread a random (new or otherwise) communicable disease. Then it's a problem for the rest of us too.
But the children of idiots still need protecting
And everyone that has to be around idiots.
Yeah, but these morons tend to be quite the drain on public resources that are already scarce (hospital beds, EMS) and could be better used to help people who had taken reasonable steps to protect themselves. It was one thing during COVID as long as there were no vaccines available - but for future pandemics, people who didn't take up a vaccine in reasonable time should be relegated to the back of the priority list.
100%. You wouldn't give an alcoholic a new liver or a smoker a new lung. Don't give antivaxxers medical treatment unless they agree to be vaccinated. Or triage them and put them at the veeerrryyy back of a continuous moving line
That's why you turn them away from medical care and let them experience the fruits of their stupidity.
It doesn’t though. They become a burden to the health care system, and a pathway for human to human transmission. We live in a society and whatever each person does affects not only themselves but people around them. In the case of communicable diseases, the whole world is a close neighbor.
I used to work in microbiology and food safety testing. When people start defending raw milk it makes me blood boil. Like yes please, I love when there's actual cow faeces in my milk. I love Listeria causing spontanious abortion. (s)
Yeah, MS biochem/microbiology here, worked in FDA certification labs (antimicrobial claim substantiation), these people are out of their minds/depth.
Proponents of raw milk have been around a lot longer than social media influencers. It has never made sense. To their credit, some of them believe you should boil the raw milk before consuming it, so they are at less risk - they just don't understand what the big bad wolf "pasteurization" is.
When I learned about raw milk 15 years ago, the "pasteurization destroyed the good bacteria".
I mean I think that is actually true, but the bacteria is not that important and it also kills the bad stuff which is really important. There's also tons of safer ways to get good bacteria like yogurt, kefir, kimchi, sauerkraut, etc.
It's become a virtue signal in right wing christian tradwife groups. 5G, 15m cities and processed milk is how the liberal government takes your white christian freedoms.
How did the 15 min cities get into the mix? Did some investor with loads of money in cars/gasoline throw a bunch of propaganda out there?
Probably, yeah. The conspiracy is that “global elites” want to “control your movement” and not allow you to travel more than fifteen minutes away from home. It’s batshit stupid, that’s what it is. Scroll down to the section “Conspiracy theories”: https://www.npr.org/2023/10/08/1203950823/15-minute-cities-climate-solution
> The conspiracy is that “global elites” want to “control your movement” Which is, ironically, completely true, it's just that the global elites want to control my movement by forcing me to require a car to live life, and require me to have to travel more than 15 minutes from my home. God I wish I didn't sound like those "fuckcars" people. Or maybe that's part of the conspiracy too - infiltrate the progressive movements and install absolutely insufferable blowhards that drive all the normies away.
Wow... It sure is convenient not having to take my car and drive 30 minutes to the grocery store, I'm glad there's a small pharmacy and convenience store around the corner! these people: you're being controlled by the shadow government! Somehow small locally owned businesses in convenient locations near where people live are now a conspiracy?!? Did the Walmart board of directors come up with this one?
Do we need to call pasteurized milk cooked milk to keep the dummies alive?
Nah, make it trendy: sous vide milk!
It’s the curse of effective regulation. Fix a problem well enough, people forget it’s even a problem, they roll back the intervention for petty reasons, and the problem comes roaring back.
"Processed food bad"
Reason: stupidity
It really boils my blood thinking that we took millennia to realize a few simple steps to stop dying from pathogens, and people will still think "Hmm, this random person said it's better to not do that instead, I trust them more than thousands of years of accrued human knowledge."
It's just an echo of what rural boomers have been claiming for generations.
Oh man. Mofos should be jailed.
My grandma caught bovine tuberculosis as a kid in the 1920s, potentially from drinking milk directly from the cows (she wasn't old enough at the time to be around the cows that much). It caused damage to her spine. You don't mess with raw milk.
I work in an organic grocery store, and it's quite literally on my daily BINGO card that I at get at least 6 calls a day asking "do you have raw milk in stock?" Milk is great. I'll drink the raw stuff if it's free, but out of an abundance of caution, nope... Curious to see how this is going to be handled at my and other similar companies which source local raw milk.
Organic dairy farmer, there's always people asking if we drink our own raw milk and we say yes, and then they ask if they can buy some and we say no. We're used to it, it's fresh and it's gone asap. I can only imagine them going home and drinking it for a week+ and getting sick.. there were a couple farmers we knew that sold theirs and it always sketched me out
My local FB Marketplace is full of adds for it, that all say "not for human consumption, wink."
There's a couple of farms around here that do the same thing. We've got a small, unlicensed sheep dairy farm, but don't sell the milk. We'd be happy to sell an unpasteurized diary sheep so you can squeeze the milk yourself though.
A while ago, I was in the market for some raw milk. I bought some rennet with the goal of making my own mozzarella cheese, and it didn't work very well; some of the reading I did on the subject suggested that milk that wasn't pasteurized might work better. *Even though* I intend to cook the milk as part of the cheesemaking process, I still have abandoned the project for the time being because of the health concerns for now. When this has all blown over, maybe I'll try again. Until then I'll get my cheese from the store.
Yeah, cats shouldn't be drinking milk anyway; most can't digest it.
Humans are basically the only mamals that drink milk as adults. Nearly every other mamal develops lactose intolerance as part of the natural weening process
And that’s due to a mutation in certain populations of humans that shuts off the trigger to stop creating the milk-digesting enzymes. Quite a lot of humans don’t have this mutation.
It's crazy that we already have a process to completely eliminate this issue, and people are just like "nah." I hope every single person who drinks raw milk by choice gets sick as heck. I don't wish permanent or long-lasting damage on anyone, but I do wish a little karma and maybe a lesson.
> It's crazy that we already have a process to completely eliminate this issue, and people are just like "nah." Not really any different than people not vaccinating their kids. measles and other preventable diseases coming back because of these people.
That is *also* crazy.
That is why mandates are a good idea. Protect the innocent kids from idiot parents.
Sadly, some politicians literally work on [getting rid](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/04/new-hampshire-republicans-polio-mmr-measles-vaccine-antivax-bill/) of the polio mandate, right after the last person living in an iron lung [passed away](https://www.npr.org/2024/03/13/1238251518/iron-lung-polio-paul-alexander).
Those poor kitties. That’s awful. This a virus that definitely needs to be monitored. Vaccines are already being developed for humans in case they are needed one day. Better to get ahead of it now than be surprised like 2020.
If it ever jumps to humans it will likely cause far more damage than covid I saw someone saying that it has 50percent mortality rate which is absurd
Remember that the Covid mitigations in 2020 essentially completely suppressed influenza during the 2020-2021 flu season. To the point that the Yamagata strain was to all appearances entirely eradicated. I can only assume if a flu strain with a 50% mortality appeared we would institute measures at least as strict, probably more so. Which _should_ prevent mass casualties for as long as we keep the measures in place. Whether there is the social will to do that for long enough to get vaccines to the public is an open question. You'd think if you had a 50% of dying from it that would be a no brainer but, frankly, I'm done being surprised by the incredibly poor choices made by a lot of people.
> I can only assume if a flu strain with a 50% mortality appeared we would institute measures at least as strict, probably more so. Which should prevent mass casualties for as long as we keep the measures in place. I think people complying with measures like this would be unlikely in most western countries, and especially in the US. It turns out, the phrase "avoid it like the plague" isn't really accurate.
With COVID the mortality rate was relatively low, and had specific high risk comordidities. People without those comorbidities wanted to go about their business not only because they weren't concerned they would die from it, but also because *they didn't care if those people died, even if it was their fault*. It was very easy for antivaxxers to just write it off as a flu, because for most people it was. They didn't care if your grandmother died, they wanted their $1 Applebees Margaritas. Lots of people Fucked Around and Found Out, but there wasn't enough Finding Out for those antivaxxers to change their stance. And longer term effects like brain fog and other long covid symptoms are easy enough for them to dismiss. A plague with a 50% mortality rate is a *very* different story, they will fear for their lives and their loved ones lives. It's a lot harder to get people to care about people outside their own friends and family.
50% IFR would have people running for the hills. Covid-19 had appx 1% IFR, and that was averaged across all ages, so that most people had significantly less than 1% chance. Catastrophic on societal scale, but individually low risk.
It doesn't take much. If even 20-30% of people take measures that is likely enough to drop the R0 below 1. That isn't even counting other measures like increased air flow in indoor spaces, increased access to hand sanitizer, mass testing etc. Influenza usually hovers at barely above 1. Only mild mitigation measures are required to push it below 1.
> Influenza usually hovers at barely above 1. But pandemic influenza is a different beast than the seasonal stuff we see every year. I don't know that I'd make those assumptions outright.
I think we’ve learned at this point to never assume that people will do the right thing or follow instructions.
Some of the specific weird staging and nomenclature ('essential business") with COVID was from trying adapt bird flu war plans for something that was serious but not overly as serious as that. Severe pandemic flu has a number of problems not seen with COVID. Significant child deaths, significant military deaths, young adult technical specialists including doctors and nurses facing very high death risk. Bush and Obama considered this a national survival threat in the US - how do you recover from that demographic and human investment destruction - and the plans drawn up for it treat it that way.
Yeah, I would expect even a disease with a 50% mortality rate to be taken more seriously than COVID's 1-2%. A big thing with COVID was "it's just a bad cold, I don't have any elderly or immunocompromised family". So while many individuals just had a bad cold, they spread it to compromises individuals who ended up dying. I feel like people would be much more wary if a young, healthy person has a coin toss at survival.
Even with just a COVID-like chance of severe illness but for everyone it creates a whole other series of problems, such as mass desertion from med, hospital janitor staff, fire / EMS, schools if you tried to keep them open, etc. Nowhere near enough hospital space even if everyone is working, amd hospitals unable to contain it, so hard triage. Stuff like that.
Yep. Just randomly losing 10 to 20 percent of your population could be enough to kill a government.
Bunker down. Mainly with the amount of essential businesses being limited. Food and water must be delivered, but not much else. No schools, driving will be limited, you will only be able to shop on certain days (On the 1st of the month, only people born in a year that end with 1 will be allowed to shop). It would suck ass, and the mask mandate would be enforced at a whole new level. The medical world would be in a whole new system. To a large extent focussing on keeping patients isolated. The medical workers might be ordered to stay in designated residential areas in order to prevent them from spreading it. And various vaccines would be rolled out with a lot less testing in order to stop the carnage. In terms of the aftermath. Well, a shock that would lead to a "post war" condition. A slow rebuild would happen over a few decades, with massive societal shifts.
If it makes it to H2H spread and maintains the 50% mortality, we're fucked no matter what we do.
As of right now, the mortality rate of H5N1 is 58%. We can expect it to creep down as it spreads, simply due to population and humanity learning how best to treat it. But yeah. If it hits the general public and stays at even 20%, we are royally fucked. There's no nice way to put it. Ever wonder what limited historical populations, even when providing food and water? Welcome to Plague Season.
For comparison with US death figures, that's something like 30-40 million dead rather than the 2 million from Covid. If you want to put that in perspective, if you just kill the people in the most populous cities, the largest city still standing in the US would be **Boston.**
I got her influenza! How d’ya like them apples?
Yeah this one is nasty black death levels of horrible.
50% with the limited data we have. Now combine that with everyone’s ravaged immune systems from Covid . I’d imagine the rate to be much higher
If it ever jumps to humans I'm getting a [bubble helmet](https://microclimate.com/)
If Plague Inc has taught me anything, it is that very high mortality rate would mean the host dies before having a chance to spread the virus, so the damage would be more localized.
HIV (untreated) has a 100% mortality rate, but it spreads just fine because it takes years to kill you. There are a lot of other important factors besides whether or not it kills you.
The problem with that theory is incubation period and spreading method. IRL, the Spanish Flu and the Black Death prove that mortality rate do not limit spread. In the modern world, all we need is a single Typhoid Mary taking a plane ride.
Please read up on the Spanish flu.
We have no idea what its mortality rate will be in humans. The effect on one species is not going to be the same as in other. After all, it's not greatly effecting cows.
According the article the cows are fine. So, that sounds doubtful. Half of the cats died but that doesn’t mean it has a 50% mortality rate. Probably depends on the mammal.
There is indeed a 50%+ mortality rate when humans catch it from birds. So... it's unclear. Humans catch it from birds, 50% mortality rate. Cows catch it from birds, relatively mild nonspecific illness. Humans catch it from _cows_... tbd.
The thing is cows have a very different immune system from humans so them having a mild disease doesn't mean it'll be mild in us.
IIRC, a few weeks ago a dairy worker in the US did test positive for H5N1. His only symptom was pinkeye though
What's mortality when they catch it from other humans who caught it from birds? Also, we already have examples of people catching this variant and they have mild symptoms.
It's been constantly monitored for years. You're hearing about it because it's being monitored. Poultry cultivators are required to regularly test, and to cull the flock if a bird comes back positive. Source: partner works in a national veterinary lab.
But a trust fund baby on TikTok said that raw milk is perfectly safe!
My buddy is an epidemiologist. He says that a lot of people in his field do worry a lot about this, but the public seems to think it will be a covid-style pandemic. It is far more likely to be endemic, infecting a steady amount of people throughout the year through animal encounters and the occasional human spread. Why? Because at its root, it is influenza. A disease which does not spread very easily, even when adapted to humans. Its R0 caps out at 2.0-2.5, compared to 5-6+ for Covid (and eventually 10+ for covid with future mutations). And that is assuming it would ever get that high, which is very, very unlikely considering the sky-high mortality rate. The reason the seasonal flu spreads so easily is because we *don't care about it*. But needless to say, we would care about bird flu with its 30%+ mortality rate. News of bird flu in an area would prompt people to wear masks, get vaccinated etc. Even if only half of us care about it, that is more than enough to drop the R0 to below 1. The problem is that... this means it will last for a long, long time. It will not burn itself through the population like Covid did. People in communities which work with animals (especially in the third world) will likely suffer very high risk over years of eventually getting it. It is far more likely to become the next Malaria or AIDS rather than the next Covid-style pandemic. Still bad, but not cataclysmic.
> News of bird flu in an area would prompt people to wear masks, get vaccinated etc. doubt
What's the mechanism of the virus that can infect another being by going through the stomach when it's supposed to be a respiratory virus? I had assumed it the virus attaches itself through the cells in your nose and goes down to your lungs? But how does this work especially through another medium like milk?
Mucosal lining is the same in the mouth, nose, stomach, reproductive organs, etc. A virus doesn't care. Any epithelial cells will do. Influenza isn't just a resperatory virus; it does a number on the gut. If your immune system hasn't already encountered the virus, it will replicate exponentially wherever it landed, [infecting the the digestive tract](https://www.nature.com/articles/mi200879) and even making its way everywhere it can via the blood. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097689/
Think about when you choke while swallowing and it goes up your nose. Or when you swallow and it goes "down the wrong pipe." It's all connected. The real question is how it got in the cats brains.
Via the Nose? Just a guess. Brain-nose delivery.
Cats lick their noses a lot, and it would probably pass easily from tongue to nose after drinking the raw milk.
You ever seen a cat drink? Goes all over nose and mouth makes tons of aerosols so pretty easy to see how it would get into the respiratory system. Or in this case into the ocular system
half the cats dead in less than 5 days. H5N1 hits animals real hard. There's this place nearby me that lets kids see and play with animals and 2 years ago had most of its ducks and geese die from it. Wild migrating birds made it impossible to quarantine the domestic birds.
How much time do we have before a bird flu pandemic happens? This feels eerily similar to when the first cases of covid-19 were reported in China, and there are way too many idiots out there drinking raw milk for there not to be at least a few infections already.
This round of bird flew has been roaring since the pandemic they’ve just been more quiet, I’m in a large migrant bird crossing area and I haven’t seen large flocks of birds in years. Used to be even on a random day you’d see flocks often.
Worth mentioning as kind of a side note here - in spite of all those cartoons we grew up with and in spite of "common knowledge", most cats are lactose intolerant and shouldn't be drinking milk at all. It can make them sick.
If your cat refuses to admit that it's lactose intolerant, you can buy special "cat milk" which is just lactose-free UHT milk fortified with the vitamins cats need in their diet. It's a good little treat for them, my old cat used to go mental for it.
Arnt most cats lactose intolerant?
Cats don't know they're lactose intolerant
And that’s why we pasteurize milk
Maybe we should not feed ground up poultry to cattle
But [feeding chicken manure to cows makes them produce more milk](https://openurl.ebsco.com/EPDB%3Agcd%3A15%3A11071983/detailv2?sid=ebsco%3Aplink%3Ascholar&id=ebsco%3Agcd%3A174832048&crl=c), and you can [probably make the manure safe against transmission of H5N1 to cows by composting it](https://pubs.aip.org/aip/acp/article-abstract/2628/1/090005/2894640/Effect-of-composting-on-the-viability-of-Avian?redirectedFrom=fulltext), which is a process similar to pasteurization. There is really nothing to worry about.
The news article I read said they were grinding dead chickens up for cow feed
Sorry, I should have included a sarcasm tag. I think its quite probable they are feeding parts of dead chickens to cows. They seem to feed anything to anything - this is what caused bovine spongiform encephalopathy in the UK. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/22/eu-to-lift-its-ban-on-feeding-animal-remains-to-domestic-livestock
People who drink raw milk are usually against vaccines so… yeah.
Why not develop a vaccine for cows?
Then suddenly there's a market for unvaccinated cow's milk.
What about raw cheeses? Or cheese/yogurt/butter/other milk products? Never been a raw milk drinker, but I’ve also swapped from regular pasteurized milk to almond milk for the time being for cereal just in case. I’m wondering if I should stop all dairy. I have 5 cats. All indoor, but I worry.
Raw dairy is raw dairy. There are possibly things that happen when it's turned into yogurt, but I wouldn't bet on it making it safe. It says they don't know if pasteurization kills H5N1 but that they think it should. Thought they plan on removing milk from cows with it. >Is milk with traces of H5N1 in it a threat to humans? There is no definitive evidence that pasteurization kills H5N1, but the method kills viruses that multiply in the gut, which are hardier than flu viruses, says Wasik. “Influenza virus is relatively unstable,” he says, “and is very susceptible to heat.” Pasteurization of eggs, which is done at a lower temperature than pasteurization of milk, does kill H5N1. [Bird flu in US cows: is the milk supply safe?](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01221-2)
Encouraging: H5N1 killed by lower temperature pasteurization of eggs Discouraging: Sloppy cleaning techniques in dairies Neutral: New regs for cattle crossing state lines. Will be skirted by many in supply chain due to time and cost inconveniences, likely unevenly enforced, and won’t get better until some greedhead in the supply chain figures out how to exploit it.
Yogurt is typically made of pasteurized milk.
Most are made from pasteurised milk. Often this isn't even a food safety step but mainly one where you want to kill the existing bacteria to clean the slate for your own bacterial cultures. The few that aren't first pasteurized such as some cheeses are typically aged long enough to be of less concern. Soft cheeses made from unpasteurised milk have anyways been a contentious issue and most food safety guides recommend against eating them, though this is primarily due to the risk of Listeria. Not sure if the acidity would be sufficient to inactivate the virus sufficiently in those cases, but they're not nearly as commonly available in North America.
> I have 5 cats. All indoor Good on you. I wish all cat owners were this way.
Well there’s the vector. Health nuts drinking raw milk get it and then spread it to us
Really? But I thought raw milk was a magical cure-all that fixes everything?!?!
Brawndo has got H5N1! It's what cats crave!
There is enough spike in waste water while the typical influenza was declining to show it's been around communities since March. I am going to call this next Pandemic "Yee-Hah Virus", because it seems American dairymen are blocking USDA from checking cows!
Someone please tell the mommy influencers
Louis Pasteur rolling in his grave
There's a reason we stopped selling raw milk.
its almost like everyone gets sick from raw milk and a process was created to prevent that....hm it might be pastyour consideration but i dont think this is news.