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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.
If the real fatality rate is sub-5% among young and healthy people, this kind of virus panic should be laughable.
To put a 5% CFR into perspective, the US military's plans for responding to a bioattack give the CFR for bubonic plague "with prompt, effective therapy" as 5%. A quick google suggests this is based on third world countries where plague is endemic, and "prompt, effective therapy" means cheap antibiotics and not much more. And of course it is a whole-population CFR.
So a disease with 5% CFR specifically among young healthy people with access to 1st-world medicine is significantly worse than the plague. I don't think we would be laughing off a plague pandemic, let alone the hypothetical @2rafa pandemic.
There is a reason why I give "Computer, what is the DNA sequence for extensively drug-resistant Yersina pestis?" as an easy example of an existential AI risk when talking to normies.
It’s worth noting that the Black Death spreads by fleas on rats- mass spread in the first world is rather unlikely, and there are periodic outbreaks these days but mostly among the homeless.
Y. pestis is really good at undergoing selection for respiratory spread during the course of a plague and is much better at being a viable respiratory pathogen than most bacteria...It still won't ever be an existential scale risk for 1st world governments no matter how extensively modified someone makes it
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