Cows in Texas and Kansas test positive for highly pathogenic bird flu | Hacker News Reader

Cows in Texas and Kansas test positive for highly pathogenic bird flu

arstechnica.com

73 pointsrbanffy141 comments

It’s remarkable that we’ve setup a system of torture and murder to achieve: 1. Production of food that from all available evidence is worse for humans than alternatives 2. Worsening of our greenhouse gas problem 3. Massive waste of land resources because of the inefficiency in having animals predigest plants for us 4. Massively increase the risk of spread of novel pathogens 5. Devastation of our antibiotics stock where over 80% of antibiotics are used on animals rather than humans

All these downsides (and more) for little to no upsides.

>Massive waste of land resources because of the inefficiency in having animals predigest plants for us

I'm not staunchly defending the beef industry or factory farming for that matter, but I believe much of the land used for cattle grazing out west is not arable land suitable for much else. At least not without a corresponding change in agricultural habits, like massive irrigation that further impact a stressed water resource.

These aren't happy cows grazing in sunset, but from factory farms. About ~36% of crops are fed to livestock.

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m...

That's a good point, but I feel like the linked article does a disservice by treating grain and animal products as largely interchangeable from a diet perspective. They are equating in terms of calories, but that's a bit of a false equivalency, considering one is used largely as a protein source while the other is not. The article disregards that people eat those sources for very different purposes. (I say this even as someone who is an advocate for vegetarian and vegan diets).

You can use the land to grow beans and other plant protein as opposed to grain. There is another level of opportunity costs. Without the need to use land to produce animal products, we can use less land and grow a larger variety of crops.

That depends on what land you're talking about. Beans can only grow well in certain places. Ungulates such as cattle have a particular ability to convert low quality plant matter into high quality protein which almost exactly matches human needs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digestible_Indispensable_Amino...

Beans are great, but the amino acid ratios aren't ideal for humans and they are deficient in certain essential amino acids which we can't synthesize. It's certainly possible to get near optimal ratios and quantities with a mix of plants but this takes a bit of planning.

>It's certainly possible to get near optimal ratios and quantities with a mix of plants but this takes a bit of planning

This is true for any processed food. And I’m using “processed” liberally here. Meat must generally be butchered, and salted/smoked/cooked before consuming, but we’re just so used to it we don’t consider it “processing” or “planning” to do it.

I said beans and other plant proteins which includes soy, hemp, legumes, oats, nuts, amaranth, etc. which are already grown in the US regions where land is used to graze cattle. Not sure why you're singling out beans.

I'm not singling out beans, just using them as one example. All of the other plant proteins you listed have similar quality issues.

Soy is a complete protein. IF you need all the essential amino acids, you eat a variety of sources. https://www.chhs.colostate.edu/krnc/monthly-blog/plant-based...

So much planning! You have to eat beans AND rice to get all of your essential amino acids. That's two whole foods! Ah well, too complicated. Instead I'll grow alfalfa in the desert to raise and slaughter cattle. I'll eat just the meat by itself, and now I've got zero fiber but I don't have to think about all those complex amino acids with my feeble, plant-based mind.

"Can" for sure. However, I doubt the land use would change much without other systemic modifications, like changing farm subsidies (which tend to be very resistant to change).

Cattle farming is a huge contribution to deforestation though:

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/02/7-commodities-forests...

I personally don't eat meat, but I don't think it is a good-faith argument to say that rainforest deforestation in south america is a particularly good argument against cattle farming elsewhere. Those people are just unscrupulous in a different dimension.

It's not just South America. It's even in places like the UK

>Most of the UK and Ireland’s grass-fed cows and sheep are on land that might otherwise be temperate rainforest – arable crops tend to prefer drier conditions. However, even if there were no livestock grazing in the rainforest zone – and these areas were threatened by other crops instead – livestock would still pose an indirect threat due to their huge land footprint

(and those "grass-fed" cattle are also fed crops too)

>Furthermore, most British grass-fed cows are still fed crops on top of their staple grass

https://theconversation.com/livestock-grazing-is-preventing-...

Worldwide, perhaps. But TFA is about Texas and Kansas. West TX where some of the largest cattle herding occurs, is largely semi-arid grassland.

In the Alpine regions of Europe, you see this a lot - areas in the valleys that can be used for crop farming, are farms (at least if they're not built up) and the cows graze in the summer on the higher-up slopes and meadows where you mostly couldn't grow wheat at all, and even if you could you wouldn't get a combine harvester up that kind of incline to harvest it efficiently.

And then emit higher methane in the process even in areas where it could theoretically work out largely due to lower slaughter weights and longer times to raise them

>If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall methane emissions.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401

Your arguments, as legitimate as they may be, lose all credibility when you refer to the killing of livestock for food as "murder."

I also think murder is too strong a word to use when it comes to livestock. Murder is really a human concept with legal implications involving premeditation (or not) and various other legal mumbo jumbo.

Killing is what some animals do to one another in the wild, maybe even their own species. Killing animals is something humans do for sport and as a food source.

Obviously they weren’t using the word “murder” in a legal sense but rather in an informal sense. The OP is conveying the idea that they find the killings to be morally wrong.

Each animal is another being. Humans taste like bacon too.

Can we prove that plants and fungi are not beings? They grow, reproduce, move, and communicate.

have you heard of neurons?

Fungi communicate using chemical and/or bioelectric signals underground, seemingly sometimes even understanding what nutritions non-fungus plants need and supplying them with those. How do you know that's so different to our neurons?

I’ll be the first to stop once we discover consciousness and self awareness in mushrooms. Until then, fucking stop with this stupid ass argument.

I was asking a question on a subject that seems interesting in response to you seeming to think neurons were relevant to the topic of fungi not having consciousness, you're the only one being argumentative. I wasn't calling you an evil mushroom murderer or anything, any negativity you read into my comment was imagined on your part. And if you can't handle someone asking a question about an opinion you have then maybe don't share your opinions on a social website?

You seem to be more offended by the words than the content. That’s the guilt making you defensive.

Can you take the snappy one liners back to Twitter? Or at least try to have them make sense.

Guilt isn't necessary to be annoyed at someone's word choice. The chosen words are presenting an implication that eating animals is morally wrong, and if someone doesn't believe that and eats animals then they are right to be annoyed by the implication that they are acting immorally. No guilt necessary.

> Can you take the snappy one liners back to Twitter? Or at least try to have them make sense.

Or make them snappier two-liners, like you?

> they are right to be annoyed

Annoyed is an emotion. Someone's words triggered that emotion. Annoyance typically comes from someone's boundaries being crossed. One person might say, "Eh, murder/kill, whatever," but for some reason it triggered a deeper response in you. What do you think is behind that? You probably won't reply, but if you're a fan of metacognition, try tracing that emotion back by asking yourself why? every time you think you're done. Annoyance isn't a primary emotion, it is a response to one ore more. You have to be conditioned to be annoyed by words, unlike, say, mosquito bites. What makes you annoyed by it?

I don't think that this is the calculation that is made at the grocery store. Immense profit for the companies that supply the meat and flavor for the purchasers of it. The only people that actively know they are getting fucked is the farmers themselves. In terms of health, I'd rather someone in the west eat steak than potato chips and candy.

Just to play devil's advocate

1. Livestock is a really good energy storage. In case of war, natural disaster crops diseases there is a backup. Most people that survived Holodomor, because the had cows.

2. No animal protein maybe bad for your health (meat is a different story)

3. Crops need a lot of herbicide

Your #1 is false.

Grain crops store really well on their own, as in decades, cows on the other hand need to eat constantly.

What they are good for is eating indigestible cellulose like corn stalks, but modern farming is largely feeding them grains specifically cultivated to feed them.

>modern farming is largely feeding them grains specifically cultivated to feed them.

In cattle at least, they spend much of their life grazing before going to feedlots.

>1 kg of meat requires *2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants* and 3.2 for monogastrics

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22119...

That's true for many, yes, but it's only true in terms of time, not number of calories needed.

Yes. If the argument is about energy efficiency, I agree. Any system that is less than 100% efficient at turning calories into calories will result in, well, fewer calories.

However, we shouldn't assume health and diet are simply a matter of calories as input. Even conceding that beef isn't a particularly good choice for human health given it's saturated fat content, I don't know that replacing beef in the diet with corn would necessarily result in better health outcomes.

You don't need to 1:1 plant corn for human consumption on that farmland due to increased efficiency.

Options range from other crops, parks, leaving it fallow, solar, growing bio fuels, etc.

Realistically we aren't going to replace beef any time soon, but who knows what happens in the future.

I was referring to 1:1 calorie replacement, not land use.

Ahh ok, but even then I doubt we would stick with corn.

The energy conversion ratio gives it in calories. About 1.9% for beef.

https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production#efficiency-of-mea...

This assumes humans could turn 100% of the feed into usable calories. Considering 1) the link defines feed to include grazing and 2) humans are 0% efficient at turning cellulose into calories, the quoted number probably doesn't mean what you think it means.

We have many ways of turning cellulose into useful calories. Fire being perhaps the oldest.

If we could eat fire to sustain ourselves, then that would be a cogent point.

Even if you’re just talking about biological calories rather than as a unit of energy, fire reduces energy expenditure to stay warm. Thus acting as a significant food supplement both historically and currently.

This is still a bit of a stretch to make a relevant point given the context of the discussion. I don’t think many are promoting getting rid of cattle to make room for biomass fuel.

I've seen that argument made several times. EV's are great on land, boats have several options, but for mid to long range air travel biofules have a lot going for them. Unfortunately they need a lot of land.

The underlying numbers seem reasonable with US airlines use ~10 billion gallons of fuel per year while the US produces ~15 billion gallons of ethanol being freed up by the rise in EV's.

Globally things aren't as rosy, but freeing even 1/5 of the land devoted to grazing, alfalfa, and feed corn would go a long way. Reducing US beef consumption would have positive health impacts. So from a policy standpoint shifting the specific subsides seems like a good idea.

Even if we can't get net zero the more we can cut quickly the longer we have to finish the job.

I don’t think that premise holds. With the exception of sugar beets, crops are largely net negative in terms of energy production. You don’t create a more efficient system by adding layers of inefficiency.

> You don’t create a more efficient system by adding layers of inefficiency.

We care quite a lot about the form energy takes not just absolute quantities. $4 gets you ~200/kWh from solar enough to drive ~800 miles, or enough premium gas that to send an equivalent car less than 1/10th as far. Similarly, people happily pay 30c/kWh for 300kW fast charging because waiting around is it's own cost.

In comparison with bio fuels, green hydrogen is wildly energy negative wasting ~80% of input energy and you need to completely redesign all passenger aircraft.

>We care quite a lot about the form energy takes not just absolute quantities.

Yes, I've already mentioned this:

>However, we shouldn't assume health and diet are simply a matter of calories as input.

In the context of the discussion, it's an error IMO to compare energy as if they are interchangable. People aren't just consuming beef just for it's caloric value. The "form" of energy (protein & fat) is an important consideration too.

>In comparison with bio fuels, green hydrogen

The constant digression of a topic focused on nutrition into one merely about energy makes for a tiresome conversation and largely misses the point. Just because you can make a loose connection with the topic at hand doesn't mean that discussion is relevant.

I'm not seeing 1.9% and that sounds way off.

US produces about 27 billion pounds of beef, roughly half of that weight comes from feedlots where they eat ~80% of feedlot calories comes from grains.

There's a bunch of numbers tossed around but it's something like 60-70 billion pounds of grain to get those 27 billion pounds of beef.

I should rephrase that. Beef is bad in terms of efficiency - about %2. But cows are magic devices that can turn grass into milk and beef.

1. The Holodomor wasn't a natural famine. People starved because the food was physically taken away from them and distributed elsewhere (like cities), starting with the grain. Once they ran out of grain and couldn't fill the (unreasonable from the start) quotas, they started taking away livestock also.

Yep, I'd fall under war against Ukrainians. Cows can turn grass into milk and beef. Most families that had livestock survived. Those that lost it died. Source: Standford lecture on Youtube about Holodomor

One of the main reasons why Mongols were so effective was use of livestock en mass. It gives you food, cavalry, transportation and clothes from grass. You get the shortest logistical supply chains in northern Eurasian plane.

But if we wouldn't feed those crops to animals first to convert them to protein, but instead consumed them directly, we would need just a fraction of them and the herbicides required by them.

We can’t eat grass and hay. Cows do. They have multiple stomachs just to digest it.

The majority of cattle feed isn't hay or grass, but instead crops like Alfalfa or Soy. And in the end, it doesn't really matter, it's the underlying land use and it's impact that's relevant.

The feed conversion ratio for beef has the worst efficiency of all kinds of meat of 1:25.

This dataset by OWI is very enlightening when it comes to the types of our food and what kinds of different impact (landuse, animal feed, transport, ...) they have:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-emissions-supply-cha...

Your point by itself is valid. But in a practical sense, that is not the diet of the cattle that comprise most of the American beef supply. https://www.worldanimalprotection.us/latest/blogs/what-do-co... has data and citations. To summarize, 70% of dairy cattle feed is not hay or grass (soy, corn, distilling industry byproduct). That figure is 80% for beef cattle.

That's because the US government heavily subsidizes corn and soy production for...reasons, not because it's even the most efficient way to go beef in an undistorted market.

2) Not true.

3) More livestock => more crops => more herbicide

i was a vegitarian for 16 years

The diet is more carb rich and less nutrious than if meat was included.

If meat was never sold that would be the best option. And that is Buddhist Pali Cannon advice on Right Livlihood btw.

My gums receeded and my teeth were in the worse shape of my life. Although i was able to perform strong physical acts i got tired faster, had more emotional issues and sex/fight drive was diminished slightly.

"We" didnt set the system up so stop blaming me and others whoo didnt you hatefull person. "Greenhouse gases" are recycled by plants and nature. We have Climate instability and the planets tempature changes over the years. Instead of spewing that to people you shold say, "We have a polution problem" or "We have an industrial chemical problem" both which cause more death of the planet largely. You have been scammed. Global Warming has been an alarm bell since long before 2000. I was told as a child i would see the consequences and i really havent. Ive seen climate changes.

you cant raise a baby into a man without meat. It has been tried by vegans and what we see is that you need doctors and blood tests and a rich pleathora of bacterial-processed foods and fats and prteins. And all these things are alive too.

A cow can live a long happy life and then its body not 'fed right back to the ground' but instead feed us.

also the phytoestrogens in plants like almonds, soy, pistacios are not good, the lectins in beans Limit the absorpsion of food, grains have gluten which binds the gut..

Phytoestrogens have little or no effect in the human body. Animal hormones and antibiotics however do have adverse affects. Vegans tend to have a bigger issue with the larger organizations of the animal agriculture industry, not the whole - mechanizing the production of meat means that animals are treated with cruelty for profit. Slaughterhouse workers are also affected physically and mentally. Factory farming is the largest contributor to greenhouse gases and climate change. It is a pollution problem and industrial chemical problem and we can make those changes on an individual level by making choices on what we put on our plates. We all eat after all. I have to say, your view of advocates for vegetarianism and veganism is very misguided, your experiences on the other hand I can not comment on, but personally I have been vegan for over 8 years now and I've never felt better - I've completed many marathons ever since I started eating plant-based foods. At the beginning of my journey, I was obese/overweight.

Thanks for sharing your experience. There’s a huge narrative bias because most people giving up vegetarian/vegan diets don’t talk about it (but it does happen).

The other items can be debated (although I don't agree with some of them) but this point "Production of food that from all available evidence is worse for humans than alternatives" is just flat out wrong.

How could a species that evolved as omnivores suddenly find meat unhealthy?

Not all meat even, it's mostly red meats (and generally ruminants) that are found to be generally unhealthy. And one of the large reasons is that over time, we have started breeding these meats to be extremely fatty, because it tastes better. No cows 200 years ago would have the same fat -> protein profiles as what we see today, and all of those fats are saturated fats, which tend to have large negative health effects. All of the leaner meats and some fish (ones without pollution issues, harder to come by as time goes on) are generally measured with improved health effects when consumed in moderate quantities in diets like the Mediterranean diet or Okinawan diet.

For a long time the excuse (in the European context) was that animals weren't christians.

To clarify: "a long time" means from roughly 500 to roughly 1800.

(You all may not like it, but people really did distinguish between "beasts" and "christians" in this time period. Animal Farm is a much more thorough allegory than it appears to people with no farm experience, as all the animals behave much as their real life counterparts do [I understand that in the US the police even identify themselves as "sheepdogs"; compare the Animal Farm use], and on a farm the farmers do take care to act for the immediate benefit of all the stock, just as long as they're the ultimate beneficiaries: a farm being an economic unit composed of multiple living beings but organised for the benefit of a few)

H5N1 is contagious for bird to bird transmission as they have the sialic acid receptors for infection in many places, Humans only have these receptors deep in the lungs, hence low human to human transmission. But H5N1 has like 50%+ mortality rate for humans if caught. So chicken farmers would be at super high risk. Now if it mutates to be more human to human transmissible we're in trouble.

> So chicken farmers would be at super high risk.

They're ostensibly "at risk" but it's not "super high", not even close. There has only been one confirmed human cases of H5N1 in the US [1], which has the fifth most chickens of any country in the world. That one case was a poultry worker who was culling sick birds.

Chicken farmers have to go out of their way to get infected.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/avianflu/chart-epi-curve-ah5n1.html

Only if it mutates to be more human to human transmissible without losing virulence. Which is definitely possible but not guaranteed. And there are so many other potentially deadly viruses out there that are only a few steps away from causing a new pandemic.

Why is this flagged? H5N1 is incredibly dangerous, with 60% human mortality, and could represent the next big threat to humanity. Let's hope the WHO and CEPI can get a head start on this one.

I have the impression almost nobody could buy meat if animals were raised healthy.

That's a wrong impression because raising healthy animals is doable and is still done quite a bit these days.

Most suppliers who sell meat branded as things like "from small family farms" or "biodynamic" generally adhere to practices that raise healthy animals. There also exists stubborn old farmers who don't bother with any of this marketing and branding foofoo who still raise animals that are just as healthy as the foofoo marketers.

There's unfortunately still no good certification or verification for sourcing meat from these good places. You basically have to either do the research yourself or rely on trustworthy suppliers to do the research and curating for you, like hippie-type food co-ops.

Of course, you'll definitely pay more. I'm personally very low income but still manage to afford it. Plenty of people are like me. But most people simply don't want to pay extra, even if they can.

This is exactly the case - at least if you're in a rural or rural-adjacent area.

And you don't even really have to "change much", just vary the percentages in the meals you do make, e.g., add a side dish or two.

If you're deep into the metro area, it may be more costly, but I assume it can be done.

Not at the rate that we consume it. But having beef, chicken and pork once per week? Definitely something that is healthier for our bodies, the planet and the livelihoods of these animals.

I reakon this is the way to go. Some meat, better quality, better lives for the livestock. A steak once a week sounds ok to me.

Post physique.

More seriously, though, a steak once per week as your only meat isn't sufficient protein. Unless you want to faff about with vegetable combining.

You don't have to do any kind of "vegetable combining" concoctions to get sufficient protein from plants, that is a (false) urban legend.

Got a source? I can't Google anything that agrees with you.

> All plant foods contain all 20 essential amino acids including the 9 essential amino acids in varying amounts.

> Though historically, protein combining was promoted as a method of compensating for supposed deficiencies in vegetables as foods, studies on essential amino acid contents in plant proteins have shown that vegetarians and vegans typically do not need to complement plant proteins in each meal to reach the desired level of essential amino acids as long as their diets are varied and caloric requirements are met. The position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics is that protein from a variety of plant foods eaten during the course of a day supplies enough of all essential amino acids when caloric requirements are met.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_combining

Definitely? The reality is that there is no high-quality research which establishes the healthiest weekly frequency of meat consumption. We can't say whether it's 0, 1, or some higher number. The studies so far have generally been too short, relied on subject reported data (i.e. junk), used proxy metrics only loosely correlated with overall health, had small effect sizes, and failed to control for confounding variables (i.e. healthy subject effect).

Let's have some humility in this area. There is very little in human nutrition that we know for sure.

If you buy a 1/4 or 1/2 cow around here (MI) that is anywhere between $400-$1200 which should feed a family of 4 for about a year. That's getting you a humanely-raised cow that is significantly higher quality than what you would get at a grocery story. It works out to be slightly more expensive or on-par with the grocery store price but you do need a chest freezer.

We have much more stringent standards for cattle (and other animals), and yes, meat is more expensive here ($24/kg vs $11/kg for ground beef); on the other hand median salaries are also much higher ($90k/y vs $50k/y), so?

Where is here?

Small insular European country known for it's banking with a population less than New Jersey.

New Jersey is an excellent example of the difference between population and surface area. Despite being divided between two MSAs centred on neighbouring states, it's still worth 14 electoral votes on its own, and there are 78 senators representing populations smaller than NJ's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware_Valley

(anyone know how well economic activity correlates with population or surface area in general? For prosperity you want the former, not necessarily either of the latter)

And Switzerland is a great example of a state with a huge disparity between population and GDP.

And for its cows and cheese, I take it?

Salaries in most of the EU are decidedly NOT higher than USA.

Did I say EU? https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/de/home/aktuell/neue-veroeffent...

It might be interesting for someone (else!) to do a comparison of western european median salaries vs individual US state median salaries?

That little nation is not in the EU for many reasons, but higher average salaries than surrounding countries is arguably one of them. Zurich regularly features at the top of lists of the most expensive places in the world to live.

Only if we also insist on wasting as much as we do. You'd just not always be able to purchase any cut of any animal any time of the year. You'd be limited to cuts and species available with seasonable components. Wasteful excess is what the current modus operandi supports, not availability full stop. There is plenty of evidence that suggests this would offer health benefits as well, since if we cannot always eat our favorite cut, we eat more diverse portions of animals, which in turn means more diverse nutrition intake, as nature intended I guess.

The EU disagrees. There are vastly more regulations here and coupled with traditions, results in more healthy animal raising. Meat consumption is lower in all EU countries compared to the US, but that's also a good think because meat overconsumption is not good for people.

As for what I mean by tradition - for some brands of cheese it's mandatory that the cows/sheep/goats have grazed on specific types of vegetation in specific geographic areas for them to be eligible to be called that brand. Many popular brands of meat refer to specific races and specific types of raising (grazing in Normandy fields), and even butchers and supermarkets with a butchers' section list stuff like "grass fed" or "chickens that lived out in the open".

> Meat consumption is lower in all EU countries compared to the US.

Wut!?

Here are the European countries ahead of the US in 2020 numbers on pork consumption per capita in kg:

    Poland 54.95
    Spain 52.56
    Lithuania 50.69
    Croatia 49.63
    Hungary 48.30
    Austria 45.03
    Czech Republic 44.54
    Germany 44.01
    Montenegro 43.24
    Belarus 39.18
    Slovakia 38.82
    Latvia 38.44
    Portugal 38.09
    Estonia 37.73
    Serbia 37.33
    Cyprus 36.78
    Romania 34.50
    Luxembourg 33.14
    Italy 32.88
    Belgium 32.80
    Ireland 31.11
    France 30.97
    Finland 30.80
    United States 30.64

Just pork.

Exactly - but what about total per capita meat consumption?

For the US that runs at ~ 100 kilograms per person per year.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-meat-usa

https://sentientmedia.org/meat-consumption-in-the-us

Is this number exceeded by many EU countries?

Americans eat a lot of beef and chicken compared to Europeans who eat way more pork than either of those. And there's good reason for this:

`The best beef in the world comes from places with large open areas. USA/Canada, Australia, Argentina, Brazil. Having large and flat areas with varied vegetation allows the cows to develop properly. As well as providing the land to grow feed. By contrast, the smaller and often hillier farms in Europe produce a leaner and more muscular cow. Which influences what breeds are raised and used for meat or milk, as well as being subject to each country’s agricultural laws.`

And the US eats about as much chicken as Spain eats pork, but for beef they're more like in Serbia's position.

If Europe had as much flat, fertile land as the US, or were geographically closer to the above-mentioned places, Europeans would certainly be eating more beef and chicken.

Spain, Portugal, Iceland and Poland really aren't that far off from the US in consumption.

USA has "free range" chicken and "grass fed" beef. There are a few brands that are also particular about where and how their stock is raised.

I'm from the EU and had the impression that there is more talk about those regulations than actually enforcing them.

Buying from a niche, hipster-y local family farm (that shipped across the US through an online web store), it was about double what you pay in your local grocers, and that meat was so legit and delicious and high quality. I absolutely overcooked the T-bone steak and it still melted in my mouth.

One thing to keep in mind is that real beef, grass fed and grazing etc, has a much more gamey taste than Americans like. America really likes it's homogenized "meat" flavor

[dupe] help ppl out OP

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39822476

Little to no mortality. Little impact on milk production. A nothing burger.

It’s extremely bad for humans in known infections.

> around 60% of humans known to have been infected with the Asian strain of HPAI A(H5N1) have died from it

It’s not just about the cows.

https://www.science.org/content/article/bird-flu-discovered-...

Sounds like there is some concern.

A bird flu has jumped to mammals.

This strain has a 60-70% mortality rate in humans in known cases. Spread in mammals would be a bit concerning.

> Due to the high lethality and virulence of HPAI A(H5N1), its endemic presence, its increasingly large host reservoir, and its significant ongoing mutations, in 2006, the H5N1 virus has been regarded to be the world's largest pandemic threat, and billions of dollars are being spent researching H5N1 and preparing for a potential influenza pandemic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H5N1

(Complicated a bit by unknown prevalence of mild cases, but it’s not a nothing burger.)

You can count the total number of confirmed human cases of H5N1 in the US, Canada, and the EU combined on one hand. That mortality rate is so skewed as to be useless.

“When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.” (Trump, Feb 2020)

As I said, it’s certainly complicated by not knowing how many mild cases are out there undetected, but that doesn’t make it unconcerning.

Nearly everyone who died from COVID had multiple comorbidities. Biggest nothingburger of this century.

Yes the millions of deaths were a nothingburger. You showed them!

Still behind cancer and heart disease.

More people are cheeseburgering themselves to death in this country.

I've had multiple friends and family die from this so-called nothing burger. My mother's heath will never be the same, she is now consigned to a wheelchair. Your statement is inflammatory and unhelpful, it does not advance the conversation, and is a provable falsehood.

Tell me about your mom's PD/CVD/Diabetes pre-COVID.

Tell me about your family's history with the above.

I'm sure that I lost more friends due to lockdown-induced depression, drug/alcohol relapse and suicide than you lost family to COVID.

If we should have learned anything it's that modern medicine has spoiled our species in that you can now live an excessively long time with extremely unhealthy lifestyles.

Barely two generations ago dying from common colds, flus and even minor cut and scrape injuries was just everyday life. Maybe half of the children in a family might die before reaching adulthood. One particularly strong (lab-engineered) cold made the rounds and people want to bury their heads in the sand and pretend the sky is on fire.

In the context of human history and coronaviruses, COVID-19 is absolutely a nothingburger.

Victim-blaming is unhelpful and not productive, nor does it move the conversation forward in a meaningful way. My mother was, while in her 70s, perfectly healthy prior to Covid. No diabetes, walking and exercising regularly. I only wish I ate as healthy as my mother. It attacked her heart. Now she has no energy, cannot stand up, is on many heart medications, because Covid-19 destroyed parts of her heart. My neighbor, who died, was in his early 40s, a violinist in a major orchestra. My best friend's mother, in her 60s, was healthy and vibrant. Died months after infection with low energy, brain fog, trouble breathing. I'm sure there are 1000s of examples like these from others. They say 2MM died of Covid-19, but the true cost was likely 5x that number when the dust is settled. You need to re-think your value system, it lacks humanity.

What a sad little world view you have. Of course it doesn't matter in the long run. But it matters to people alive right now. Which is why we do anything even though its all pointless. I guess you wouldn't care about your life or a family members life being taken by covid since its a nothingburger though huh?

My whole entire family works in medicine and isn't killing themselves with junk food and bad lifestyles, so even though most of us got COVID-19, none of us had the comorbidities that made it serious. Even among our overweight and elderly.

If somebody's so fat and unhealthy that that they're gassed out from walking off the front porch, I'm not alarmed that a cold virus finished them off. I'm also not out here screaming about COVID, I'm screaming about the importance of diet, exercise and self-control instead.

If they're of advanced age, it's (just) slightly more sad but none of us gets to live forever. Everyone will get cancer too if they live long enough. If you want to radically alter how the rest of us live our lives because you or a family member can't stop shoving McDonalds and cake into your face, I'm not fucking having it.

What I AM sympathetic to are people who have to sequester themselves from society (and did so already in the absence of COVID-19) because they have very serious and usually rare disorders. But then maybe these gain of function labs should think twice before they play with fire and break containment.

As with most things in life, garbage in, garbage out.

Also I'll say this right here as a former fatty and current fat-shamer and fat-nonacceptant.

The absolute worst thing about ACA is that it made it illegal to charge obese people higher insurance rates. It's basically stealing money out of the rest of our pockets who have to work with you -- and thank God being an unhealthy mess isn't a protected class because I would never hire somebody to work with me who has a terrible lifestyle.

Japan does this right. Your workplace and the public health service makes you get a check up every year and will follow up with you to make sure you're on a plan to get healthier. And they will both encourage you and also nag the shit out of you until you do it. The fact that we don't follow such a practice here I find almost barbaric.

Please seek help sad little man.

We had 16% of all the world's COVID-19 deaths in the US despite only 4% of the world's population.

Even our own CDC said we had that the reason we had the worst impact from the disease because we have the sickest (read: fattest) people.

We have more old people with existing problems (eg obesity), COVID ripped through them like crazy. The biggest indicator was age, and our life expectancy was falling behind the rest of the developed world before the pandemic.

That doesn't make sense. You're saying more people died because of age but we have less old people than the rest of the world and 4x the deaths.

I'm literally talking about obesity being the main problem. We have more old AND obese people, for sure.

The part to focus on is obese, not old.

No, I said we had more old people with comorbidities and our life expectancy has been falling behind (not rising) compared to other western developed countries.

If you look at the COVID death rates, age was by far the dominating factor of death, not obesity. But obesity was probably significant in those who died at younger and older ages (though pronounced in older people, since an order of magnitude more died due to COVID than young people). I doubt we are really disagreeing much here, but obesity was a drag on mortality before the pandemic, and will continue to be a problem after.

I wouldn’t take too much stock in comparing USA COVID deaths to the rest of the world, we are really liberal in flagging COVID deaths (eg a 90 year old dies of a heart attack while having COVID is counted as a COVID death), other countries had different standards, especially developing ones without access to as much testing. What we should really focus on is excess deaths overall, and how a life expectancy changed during the pandemic.

Sounds like we need an Operation Warp Speed 2, this time before things get out of hand.

It’s my laypersons understanding that one of the big benefits of the mRNA vaccines is that all that production capacity can be rapidly switched to a new vaccine.

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