Hacker News Reader

Comment by cheese_van | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com