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Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

Is there a significant chance of a human crossover stemming from this cow outbreak?

Are the influenza virus targets in cows similar to those of humans, that adaptations for one host would be useful for the other?

Is the large population size (millions of cows) worrisome for viral evolution, with the high cumulative volume of mutations?

Do governments not consider mass culling an option here, the way they routinely apply it to chicken farms? [0] Or is it too late already?

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/02/science/bird-flu-aid-anim...

The article debates the safety of virus particles in pasteurized milk, but what are regulators currently doing about unpasteurized milk?

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Only if a significant amount of people are being directly infected by the cows and a mutation occurs in a person to allow spread to other humans. So seems like the chance is low, but not zero.

The real worry is pigs.

If it makes its way to pigs, we are in trouble. From what I understand, pigs contain a mix of avian and human receptors that make them the ideal mixing ground for crossover. Cows do not.

It has already transferred to humans from dairy cows.

https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/news/20240408/cdc-issues-...

Yes, but that's just an opportunistic infection of cow flavored H5N1. It's not a new strain that will transmit human to human.

With pigs...the risk is a mutation occurs within a pig that then transmits to humans that allows humans can transmit to other humans.

The question is what is the probability it doesn't transfer to pigs (if it hasn't already), compounded on a daily basis and given an exponentially increasing viral load in farm environments?

Scratch that. The question is how many days or weeks until it does make that leap.

Then the two next questions are what's the likelihood of any given pig serving as an incubator for a recombinant virus that attaches to human lung epithelial cells, and how deadly is that virus. Run that experiment every day for six months at a few farms and you might get lucky. Run it everywhere in the country and we're S.O.L.

If it already crossed from birds to cows, you can imagine. Cambidia has already repoted 10 cases since 2023.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10999124/#

I think there have already been cases of human crossover this year

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