Why unprecedented birdflu outbreaks sweeping the world are concerning scientists | Hacker News Reader

Why unprecedented birdflu outbreaks sweeping the world are concerning scientists

nature.com

93 pointsrntn99 comments

I’m worried about my 5 chickens and what happens if they catch it(I know they will die but like does the USDA come knocking and then burn my flock and coop to the ground?). I’ve taken down the feeders and gotten a fake owl to try to get rid of birds in the vicinity but they are still all over the place. There is not really anything more I can do but lock them up in the coop all summer but that would drive them nuts and could stress them out to the point of death anyway. This sucks.

So this would be a very HN thing to do, but what about building autonomous turrets that identify birds and shoot them with something that scares them away? (Note that killing them is not only distasteful, but adds another problem: those bird corpses will attract other unwanted animals, so it's a non-starter anyway).

EDIT: instead of downvoting, please comment so I can understand why you don't like this idea.

Another guess at tomorrow's top submission: "Show HN: I turned my coop into a 3D CAVE to keep my chickens from going crazy" ;)

Well, now that you mention it, it would be interesting to see if a screen, or the content of the screen, had any impact on the chickens. Probably the easiest thing to measure would be egg production, but you might be able to measure "well-being" in some way. (I don't know much about chickens, but I've heard they are extremely stupid, so it may have no impact.)

they are very responsive to light spectrum; intensity; and periodicity. you can manipulate egg production, and breeding cycles by manipulating lighting parameters, and providing specific nutritional supplements.

> I don't know much about chickens, but I've heard they are extremely stupid, so it may have no impact.

They are instinctive rather than intelligent, but strongly exhibit stress symptoms when kept in tiny overcrowded pens. A screen in an otherwise bare box might not provide sufficient stimulation and reward, e.g. the 'pleasure' of finding food when chasing small bugs across the floor.

just putting in 2 cents, first is the harsh reality of using lethal means to defend a flock is not somthing most people want to handle; second is a domestic flock is a smaller priority than a large wild bird die off event. these are reasons right there, but not reason enough for me

I would probably be raising chickens in something like a greenhouse/pavillion, and using hygienic technique to minimize crossover events.

Your model would have to differentiate between birds and chicken, sounds like an interesting problem to solve.

Playing a loud noise would probably be enough, but you obviously don't want to scare your chickens, so maybe a auto-aiming nerf gun that shoots 20cm below the detected target?.

I know chickens can fly a little, but I imagine they don’t really do so — so only targeting and acting on things above ground level should be largely sufficient

ERROR: UPS man is now detected as a buzzard.

> Your model would have to differentiate between birds and chicken

Sounds like a job for XKCD 1425.

The noise would work for a week, tops. The birds would get used to it.

Just actually shoot 1 in 100 or so and that’ll keep them away.

Hum... Somebody posted an automated water pistol for scaring pigeons not long ago.

Possible alternative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarecrow

Yeah that would work, but how will I be able to put it on my resume?

If you could put constructing straw men on your resume then you'd be competing with tons of internet trolls.

They said they tried a "fake owl", but yes maybe a human-like scarecrow would work better. If so it would certainly be simpler and cheaper!

Obligatory mention that killing most birds is a federal crime under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

Well, yet another good reason to just scare them away!

Also, chickens will eat small animals, though usually more like mice than small birds. But I wouldn't put it past my chickens to at least peck at a dead bird, thus negating the whole exercise.

There's nothing actually wrong with this idea but it does read almost as satire. It sounds like an Onion article.

> Onion article

Remember ThinkGeek's SkyTag?

https://web.archive.org/web/20120218133853/http://www.thinkg...

Put poison high off the ground out of reach of the chickens. Eventually the birds will figure out that area is bad news and avoid it.

Then you have dead, poisoned birds for them to peck at.

Ten years ago, somebody built a squirrel detector/watergun combo to protect their bird feeders without harming the squirrels, [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPgqfnKG_T4

> So this would be a very HN thing to do, but what about building autonomous turrets that identify birds and shoot them with something that scares them away?

Indeed it is a very HN thing to do:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30642632

Consider installing anti-bird netting (or wires, if you have a big range)

Same, I live in CA and thankfully it hasn't been reported in CA at all somehow. I live by a popular bird flyway so it's a tad concerning.

Uh curious how your hens feel about the fake owl watching over them.

Chickens don't seem all that smart to me. Either that, or they've become so domesticated they just assume whatever is going on around them is okay because humans are allowing it to happen. In either case, my suspicion is that they won't give a cluck about some silly fake owl hanging around their coop.

the poultry free range birds are being moved indoors and still allowed to be labeled free range. The risk to flocks is so great.

Sucks for everyone involved, but not as much as euthanizing the flock

Buy new ones if they die? Looks like they cost $20 each.

Prices would go up in a bird flu epidemic

I'm under the impression song birds and the like don't really transmit too well, mostly its waterfowl. Having ducks, geese etc flapping about your yard would be something to worry about.

Victoria BC recently imposed social distancing rules on wild birds. People are being told to pull down feeders, to ignore those birds now begging for food at the window. Good luck enforcing that rule.

That sounds like an article that should be in the Onion. Life imitating art.

I've got to squint pretty hard to see this. Seems pretty mundane and non-satirical to me. Birds have viruses and bird sociality contributes to them. Just stands to reason that controlling contributing factors like bird feeders would be among the mitigation strategies.

P.E.I the same rules

It's actually controversial rule for bird feeders. It's not conclusive that the bird feeders do more harm than help. Some research indicates birds living near bird feeders have better immune system and can cope with diseases better.

I'm not sure it would even reduce their social distancing. Maybe being more hungry increases their flocking behaviors.

Yes, but they can still spread it to birds that don’t have that benefit. So does that make them a more viable disease vector than if they just dropped dead?

> People are being told to pull down feeders, to ignore those birds now begging for food at the window. Good luck enforcing that rule.

"Bird-feeder? No no, that's my squirrel feeder."

An upside-down funnel on the pole (into the ground) solves the squirrel feeder issue :)

Except when the squirrels can leap and land on the feeder itself. There are few good squirrel solutions

It might slow them down a few minutes but they will figure it out. There is no such thing as a squirrel-proof bird feeder.

Not a stable one, anyway. A normal feeder, hung from a drone flying 50' over a field, is squirrel-proof until the battery runs out.

Fifty feet in the air, swinging below a drones ... such a feeder would also be bird-proof.

broke: pffft, a trifling concern

woke: three drones, to stabilize the swinging, and hanging far enough that the noise wouldn't be a bother.

bespoke: a 50' pole interrupted by a 500rpm lawnmower blade at about 15' up, and topped with a bird feeder. The only reason people think squirrel-proof bird feeders are impossible is because they don't want to harm the squirrels. (and, for the record, neither do I)

My bird feeder does pretty well. https://morebirds.com/collections/caged-squirrel-proof-bird-...

Outside my office last winter: https://imgur.com/gallery/LTVz9t0

Perhaps, but only if you define the "issue" as squirrels getting bored because the feeder is too easy to get into.

My favorite in this vein was a metal sleeve on the pole holding the bird feeder that was held up by a weight inside the pole. Squirrel climbs up sleeve, which then falls down due to the squirrel's added weight. Disappointed squirrel deposited back on the ground. It worked until one of the squirrels chewed a hole in the pole and ate through the cord holding the weight. This really happened on a bird feeder belonging to a friend's parents. (Related question: how on earth did the squirrel figure that out?)

I had a squirrel unscrew a bird feeder and dump its contents out.

Squirrels are smart. :-D

Squirrel maze 1.0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFZFjoX2cGg

Squirrel maze 2.0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTvS9lvRxZ8

Oh, and be cautious with those squirrels....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpZZQ2ov4lc&t=30s

I had no idea about this.

https://www.cheknews.ca/public-asked-to-remove-bird-feeders-...

My yard is crawling (hopping?) with birds all day, every day. I don't even have feeders, though. Victoria is bird country.

I would just assume any source of food (say, an oak tree) would concentrate birds and not feeding them in one place just means they’ll go somewhere else.

Trying to social distance wild animals seems to be the action of a bird brained bureaucrat feeling like they needed to do something with no evidence at all of it being effective.

It seems like a manifestation of the old adage that when you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

The densities are completely different and result in different patterns of use. Bird feeders distribute large amounts of food from a small space. Large flocks of different types of birds gather at feeders and may fight for access. There is a big difference between a feeder having plenty of seed and a tree having maybe some bugs and seeds on its many branches.

Hi fellow Victorian :)

To my knowledge, this isn't a "rule" that's "imposed" or "enforced" by the city - the SPCA (which is not a government agency, just a non-profit) has just asked people to do it voluntarily.

Another Vancouver Islander here, exactly as you say, there has been no "rules" implemented by anyone in any government position. This is the BC SPCA, a non-profit, asking people with bird feeders to take them down: https://spca.bc.ca/news/bird-salmonella-outbreak/

Not actually there myself but was speaking to family there about the issue. While it may not be a law enforced by cops, Canadians are generally pretty good about following announcements by groups like the SPCA.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.02.11.479922v2.... "Intercontinental movement of H5 2.3.4.4 Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza A(H5N1) to the United States, 2021"

Bits I found interesting:

> The initial US detection was from a sample collected on December 30, 2021 from a wigeon in Colleton County, South Carolina (A/American_wigeon/South_Carolina/AH0195145/2021(H5N1), GISAID [https://www.gisaid.org] accession no. EPI_ISL_9869760). Immediately following this initial detection, there was an additional wild bird detection in South Carolina (A/bluewinged_teal/South_Carolina/AH0195150/2021(H5N1), GISAID accession no. EPI_ISL_9876777) and detections in neighboring North Carolina (Figure 1). Within six weeks there were 137 additional detections in wild birds, indicating high susceptibility to a novel virus and continued dispersal. All birds were apparently healthy hunter harvested dabbling ducks. There was no detection of North American lineage IAV in any of these samples.

----------------------

State - Wild bird species - Number of Clade 2.3.4.4. HP IAV Detections

----------------------

South Carolina - American wigeon - 7

South Carolina - Blue-winged teal - 9

South Carolina - Gadwall - 7

South Carolina - Northern shoveler - 1

North Carolina - American green-winged teal - 9

North Carolina - Northern shoveler - 3

North Carolina - American wigeon - 51

North Carolina - Gadwall 15

North Carolina - Mallard 4

North Carolina - Northern pintail 3

North Carolina - Wood duck 1

Virginia - American green-winged teal - 2

Virginia - Mallard - 1

Florida - Blue-winged teal - 2

Delaware - American wigeon - 1

Delaware - Northern shoveler - 2

New Hampshire - Mallard - 20

----------------------

Total Detections: 138

" the virus killed roughly 10% of the breeding population of barnacle geese"

Isn't that a very good thing? !0% is not enough to seriously harm them, but it is enough to make sure that the survivors are resistant. If it stays at 10%, then after a couple years the birds should be immune to it.

When highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreaks happen, the death rate is extremely high. What's not quoted is the infection rate. Usually HPAI is extremely deadly.

So for wild geese that is a very high death count. Wild birds do not usually survive HPIA, so immunity is not achieved.

what if you have bird feeders in your garden, do you think they pose a risk? These are small birds, are they susceptible?

Maybe I should move it.

In many of the bird watching facebook groups I'm in people are saying they are taking theirs down unfortunately.

alright think I might end up doing the same, I really enjoyed seeing them feast :(

do you think its still dangerous to move the bird house to a remote corner of the garden?

ha, I honestly have no idea. I know very little about birds. I just drown my fb out with bird and mushroom groups so at least if I waste time on there I'll learn something or at least look at pictures of nature.

I always find this framing of "concerning scientists" to be really strange. Like there is some cabal of scientists who sit around keep track of what is worrying and not. And the fundamental thing that allows you to be worried is that you use the scientific method in your day job?

I think as many homesteaders, and poultry farmers, and zoo keepers are worried. Why don't we just say people are worried about this?

"People" can be wrong. Scientists cannot.

Because the ones surveying the situation and the ones with the most knowledge are scientists. They're also the ones who sound the alarm first.

Weird comment. I mean did you see it as Nature article?

This wasn't the first virus spawned by animal agriculture, and it won't be the last. I'm sure that people are genuinely concerned, but their concern rarely leads them to question their participation in the systems that cause these problems.

You're mistaken. These are wild viruses circulating among wild avian populations. When wild birds come into contact with domesticated animals, avian influenza can infect them causing disease and death in the farm animals.

But farmed animals can be a factor in zoonic infection of avian influenza into humans.

They're wild viruses, but we've given them the perfect environment to mutate: massive populations of animals packed as closely together as possible.

It's no coincidence this is happening now. We've tripled poultry production over the last 30 years and intensified its production. This allows viruses to evolve in ways that would be incredibly difficult in wild populations.

It was only a matter of time until something like this happened.

Again you are mistaken and wrong. The viruses in domesticated birds aren't somehow different from wild populations. This isn't a breeding ground or the perfect environment for evolution. That's just nonsensical ideas borne of ignorance.

Influenza virus can undergo reassortment where the different gene segments from different su types can combine to form a new virus. Eg H5N1 reassorting with H2N8 to result in H5N8. This is one of the possible cases that can result in HPAI. Such situations happen more in the wild.

The flow of virus diversity is from wild to domestic bird populations.

The article is also about wild birds.

Please stop posting nonsense.

Then perhaps you should help me to understand.

>The flow of virus diversity is from wild to domestic bird populations.

Why? If viruses can get in, they can get out. The CDC even warns about the possibility [1]. Livestock birds outweigh wild birds by nearly 20 to 1 [2,3]. You're arguing that 95% of the world's bird population is irrelevant to the evolution of avian influenza. It wouldn't take much transmission from livestock back to wild birds to significantly increase the population of potential hosts.

>This isn't a breeding ground or the perfect environment for evolution.

This is a novel environment that didn't exist 80 years ago. A virus in the wild can't spread effectively if it kills its host too quickly, and it needs to transmit in an environment bathed in UV light with constant air circulation. These aren't limitations in a tightly-packed indoor environment. We wouldn't be culling entire flocks if viral transmission weren't so rampant in these environments, and you can't have viral replication without mutation.

>The article is also about wild birds.

The article also talks about poultry, which, again, make up 95% of all avian biomass and are therefore relevant to ANY conversation on avian influenza.

[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/ehs/Docs/Understanding_CAFOs_NALBOH..., page 16 [2] - https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production#meat-production-b... [3] - https://ourworldindata.org/life-on-earth

In some gov circles, the scenario often postulated is that a bird flu variant would be globally spread by Hajj pilgrims leaving Mecca to return to their various homes. The average yearly Hajj partipation is about 2.5 million people. It's estimated by some that 500 million migratory birds pass through Saudi Arabia.

Couldn't the same be said for any major area that attracts millions of visitors each year? Before covid ~30 million people were visiting Paris each year from all over the world.

I think the concern is how packed people are during the pilgrimage making it a perfect caldron of potential infection. Like a packed concert but with millions.

I would guess that the combination of migratory birds and temporary visitors is what's important. Paris doesn't have much in the way of migratory birds.

The temporal distribution matters. Hajj is 2-3 million people over something like 5 days. The next largest global event I can imagine is the World Cup, which is estimated to be 1.5 million people distributed across several venues later this year.

World Cup has copious amount of hookup culture (just look through Tinder when the season plays in your city), Grindr and general clubbing in these areas.

I've been a visitor during a World Cup and its not just the football people go for.

There's even a term for it: World Cup fever, not just isolated to world cups, many other sporting events have the same problem of being super spreading events for STIs https://sexualhealthbucks.nhs.uk/latest/world-cup-fever/

I'd also say prolonged contact and mingling is worse then a short one like above, plenty of time to pub and club crawl, sleep with multiple partners, allowing disease to expell after its normal 5-6day incubation period.

No because the Hajj is time-specific. It also brings together many people who might not otherwise travel.

Chinese New Year celebrations and US Thanksgiving holidays are similar potentially large superspreading events, though they're decentralised. Airports themselves may serve as hubs.

College Spring Break, with congregations in Florida, Las Vegas, and Mexican resorts are also as concern. Florida spring-breakers featured early in the US Covid outbreak. US spring-break revelers vacationing in Mexico were an early phase of the 2009 swine flu outbreak.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_pandemic_in_Mex...

This just reads like straight racism against Middle Easterners & Islam. There are billions of migratory birds in the USA and much greater freedom of travel in the USA than Saudi Arabia. Millions of tourists, business persons, and visitors come to the US every day. And the US also has much higher numbers and density of factory poultry farms.

There is no reason to make a complicated argument that the Bird Flu will start in Saudi Arabia due to Islam. It will probably start in the good ol' USA.

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2018/09/more-4-billion-bird...

I agree and disagree in some sense. We've seen countless superspreader events in the US, and animal husbandry in the US entails concentration camp-like conditions, which are the perfect storm for disease development, rapid spread and zoonosis. Our agricultural practices end up getting spread to other markets so that they can remain competitive, which means those perfect storms are spread all over the planet.

However, there's no reason to pick on the Middle East in particular. Pilgrimages tend to get a lot of people from disparate areas to convene in a small centralized area at the same time. Research has shown pilgrimages in Europe were responsible for spreading leprosy in the Middle Ages, for example. Research has also shown that pilgrimages in modernity act also as disease vectors, although not with leprosy, with research studying the Hajj in particular, showing a 78x increase in the spread of meningitis[1]. Similarly, there's been research on COVID cases stemming from the Sturgis Rally in the US, suggesting that it was responsible for hundreds of thousands of cases of the disease[2].

[1] https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s128...

[2] https://docs.iza.org/dp13670.pdf

It's one of the largest annual gatherings around with the kind of reach and population cross-section many large gatherings don't have. The infectious disease risks are both known and actively managed, you couldn't reasonably host the thing without that, eg:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24857703/

It's not just speculation, Saudis are also concerned https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1693627/

A novel human influenza would be way more devastating than covid was. Sure, we know how to make influenza vaccines, but millions could die before vaccines rolled out.

And influenza kills healthy young adults in addition to the very young and very old. That is devastating from a demographic standpoint. Covid’s preying on the sick and elderly was tragic, but not a threat that could destabilize countries from a population standpoint.

>millions could die before vaccines rolled out

Millions died from covid before vaccines rolled out

But not millions of children and healthy young adults. Those are very different outcomes from a public health standpoint

On the other hand, long-covid is estimated to be at ~7% of all infections, with 5.8% of infected being out of work for longer than 4 weeks [1]. That is a pretty massive amount, given how many people have been infected with covid in total. I personally know two people who have been impacted to the point they can't work even half a year post infection - this virus is nothing to sneeze at.

[1] https://www.rki.de/SharedDocs/FAQ/NCOV2019/FAQ_Liste_Gesundh...

I’m not trying to imply COVID (literally SARS2) isn’t serious. I’m saying it could have been worse.

The hardest hit demographic in Toronto during the Spanish flu was men in their 20s. People died the same day they became symptomatic. That would completely overwhelm our health infrastructure. We don’t have the infrastructure for a pandemic that causes respiratory arrest within hours of symptom onset (the dreaded rapid onset of influenza). Covid gave people days to prepare…and still caught some by surprise.

Exactly. Deaths and years unlived aren't necessarily correlated.

For the people who thought what we did this time was "lockdowns" or "shutdowns" and that many folks' reactions were "hysterical", the day when we have a pandemic that hits young kids half as hard as Covid hit the elderly is gonna be quite a surprise to them.

We probably would have went to war with China if our children were dying

>millions of children and healthy young adults

i didnt realize they were considered to be more of a person than my parents :) that's cool

That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying the impact on society is more severe. When children and young adults die, you lose the ability to sustain your population in the next generation. The worst case outcome is societal collapse. You basically can’t fill your infrastructure with new bodies as the old generation finds itself on the wrong side of goodbye.

Losing your parents would be tragic, but not particularly troubling to the State.

The same logic is behind only drafting men unless your situation is really desperate. Your new citizens come from young fertile women.

That's absolutely what you're saying. And then you just went ahead and clarified it. :)

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