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Notes -
https://fortune.com/2024/09/26/bird-flu-us-health-officials-h5n1-cdc-information/
This is concerning IMO. Avian flu slowly but surely gets closer to becoming a human pandemic. The CDC and other officals drag their heels and drip-feed information each Friday afternoon. Farmers are reluctant to test their animals. The authorities lack authority to enforce testing.
There has been a human hospital patient with bird flu in Missouri. Why is that interesting? Because he had not been in direct contact with likely animal sources. A household contact of the patient became sick but was not tested. Several of the healthcare workers who cared for the patient have become sick too. It's too soon to declare human to human transmission however. It may be the case that the healthcare workers got covid or something.
The problem as a whole is not taken nearly seriously enough. My only hope is that the vaccines for both animal and human use are developed quickly enough to prevent a pandemic, or to or mitigate it before it starts. It's a race against the clock and the officials don't seem motivated to run.
I’m not 100 percent sure of how bad this could be, no idea. But one thing to point out is that just because we’re about 4 years past a major pandemic, I suspect that things like this happen all the time, but don’t really turn into anything major. And so while I think watching this might be warranted, I think it’s much much too early to decide that this is the Next Big Thing.
The last major pandemic was in 1970s or so. The one before that was in 1918. And most other Viruses didn’t really turn into major world pandemics. We’ve had several iterations of this. A couple of versions of swine flu, a couple versions of bird flu, monkeypox, Ebola a few times. Running the health department as though every novel virus that shows a potential for human to human transmission as if it’s going to require global lockdowns is ridiculous.
I’ll also point out that our common flu viruses of the HxNx varieties are descended from bird flus so even if this bird flu starts spreading in humans, there’s likely to be at least some immunity simply because almost everyone has at some point been exposed to a related virus or gotten a flu shot (probably both). If you’re really worried, get the standard flu shot and you’ll likely have at least some protection.
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