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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   3087 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 29, 2024

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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.

If the real fatality rate is sub-5% among young and healthy people, this kind of virus panic should be laughable.

5% is an enormous fatality rate. There's 140 million people under 25 in the country. If we assume they ~all get infected (as they did with covid) that's seven million dead. The real number would be way worse because of obesity.

Smallpox fatality rate was 3% and it was so bad that we literally drove it extinct in the wild.

We drove it extinct because there weren't any animal reservoirs of the disease.

There's plenty of diseases without animal reservoirs. We drove it extinct rather than another because of its deadliness.

I actually don't think that's true. Almost all of the infectious diseases we've driven (near) extinct were much milder than smallpox, but we still eliminated them because they had 0 significant animal reservoirs and so it was easy to do.

In high-trust societies with usual first-world levels of state capacity, any disease with a safe and effective vaccine will be eliminated. The return of measles in the US and UK is visible evidence of falling social trust in exactly the same way that locked cabinets in stores are.

The thing that is unusual about smallpox (and, hopefully, polio) is that we committed the required resources to vaccinate everyone even in hard-to-reach parts of the third world.

You're looking at it the wrong way. The question is not "do eliminated diseases have animal reservoirs", it's "are diseases with animal reservoirs eliminated". And there are plenty that are not. It took decades or even centuries depending on when you start counting to eliminate smallpox.

The rough blueprint to eradicate birdflu would be to find every live or dead, bird and mammal on earth(and at sea) and vaccinate or cremate them. What I'm trying to communicate is that any serious virus with an animal reservoir is impossible to globally eradicate without several orders of magnitude more political will or state capacity than has ever existed. Smallpox was so easy to eradicate with a vaccine and quarantines that the U.S. and USSR accidentally realized they were right next to the finish line when they set out on an initiative to globally eradicate it.

any serious virus with an animal reservoir is impossible to globally eradicate without several orders of magnitude more political will or state capacity than has ever existed

Yes, obviously. This has nothing to do with my point, which is that the only virus considered serious enough and feasible enough to fully eradicate had a fatality rate under 5%.

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