A Michigan farmworker is diagnosed with bird flu in case tied to dairy cows

The CDC uses:

    -  www.cdc.gov/ (domain)
    -  cdc.gov (domain)
    -  wwwn.cdc.gov/ (domain)
    -  wwwnc.cdc.gov/ (domain)
    -  www2c.cdc.gov/ (domain)
    -  blogs.cdc.gov/ (domain)
    -  emergency.cdc.gov/ (domain)

It’s not a TLD. It’s a subdomain and can be anything the domain owner wants. The TLD is .gov.

> it could start to mutate into something that spreads human to human.

The number of things that could mutate into a human pandemic is quite large. I'm still not worried. The current hype is over dairy farm workers being exposed to it, but as someone who used to work in a large poultry operation (100K birds at a time), I can assure you that the viral load (and thus mutation possibilities) of bird flu is far higher in an infected poultry operation than any dairy farmer will ever experience.

If COVID taught us anything (spoiler: it didn't) you need to start worrying about it even before people catch it. Have a pandemic playbook and follow it, for one.

It's like 2020 is on replay, with the exact same downplaying, nearly word for word.

If airborne spread between people were a big threat, you would expect to see some infections in people who did not have known contact with infected animals.

However, I would agree that dismissing the domain experts who asserted that there was good evidence that Covid was airborne right from the early days of the pandemic was problematic in the extreme.

In hindsight, it should have been obvious that airborne spread was a strong possibility as soon as a cruise ship saw Covid continue to spread from cabin to cabin even after locking the passengers down in their cabins.

The categorical denial that airborne spread was even possible was the single biggest failure in public health leadership in decades.

I spent a long time tracking specific airborne/non-airborne statements by various governments during the first month of covid. It quickly became clear that it boiled down to a semantic argument about what droplet size constituted "airborne-ness". This in turn determined the "safe social distance". I remember hearing ridiculous things about how only viruses like measles are really airborne.

That entire discussion was an absurd comedy, of a piece with the CDC initially saying masks were useless (in an attempt to save the national supply of masks).

In this case, it isn't really questionable that H5N1 is extremely infectious and airborne between and within any species that have epithelial lung cells it has adapted to. So far, that doesn't include humans. The only serious question is how many mutations until it does, and what's the mutation rate in that direction. Additionally, what are the odds that the virus would need to make some trade-off in virulence to mutate to infect human lungs.

From that we can extrapolate an approximate date range in which it will go human to human, globally. Cross that with the readiness and effectiveness of existent vaccine stockpiles and extant solutions for traditional vaccine growth, moderated by limitations on adjuvants, plus possible mRNA vaccines. Take into account that in some species of mammals so far it has a neglibile mortality rate, and in other species it approaches 90% in local populations.

Do that math and it's obvious that governments need to be accelerating pre-pandemic H5N1 vaccines right now, not waiting for the pandemic strain to authorize them.

It isn’t disappointing at all. The US government was intentionally designed to prevent fast, large decisions especially if they affect individual rights. Otherwise would-be tyrants and control freaks would try to control other people on everything.

If anything we need a return to more celebration and protection of the individual.

You can have 0.2 lbs of red meat or 3 lbs of lentils for the same amount of protein. It’s not easy to consume that amount of lentils per day.

> Aside from the fact that red meat is not particularly nutritious in terms of calories or nutrient variety

Animal proteins are generally more complete, containing all essential amino acids, which is more difficult to find with plant protein.

> and has well established health hazards for us,

Mostly correlative studies, I wouldn't call them well established.

> The amount of water, land, and feed that goes toward growing cattle until they're old enough to go to the slaughterhouse is enormous

These stats are fairly deceitful. Cattle are raised on low quality "marginal land" that would otherwise not be able grow proper crops. Cows with their four stomachs can digest rough grasses that grow there, making the otherwise useless land useful. Generally when you hear the "amount of water" required to raise a cow, this is simply rainwater. These headlines that get thrown around imply a massive amount of resources being diverted away from growing crops to raise cattle instead, but that is completely false.

Yes, but you have to eat more plants and the amino acid spectrum is not always complete. An equivalent amount of red meat has 40% more protein than chickpeas, 400% more than green peas and 300% more than lentils.

Then leave it to the market to decide. If people need to be coerced into it or forced, they don’t want what you are selling.

But then you have plants like alfalfa which require no fertilizer, no pesticides, create extra fertilizer in the soil, and can easily be grown in excess on the massive amounts of farmland that require zero irrigation.

31% are vegetarian. An additional 9% consume only eggs. 30% of those who consume meat do so very infrequently.

Bugs don't come without the problems of bacteria, viruses or parasites.

"Microplastics found in protein bugs"

Cow (field) corn is nasty shit, but CAFOs still feed it to cows and use antibiotics to keep them from dying from it. Google Image Search "muddy feedlot".

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

We eat the seeds, not the blade. I would assume by "eating grass" op meant eating the grass blades. Maybe in the future vegans will genetically engineer themselves to chew their cud. That actually sounds like a cool scifi backstory.

We don't eat or are able to digest the majority of even those crops. Cows can eat alfalfa which is nearly free to grow and provides free fertilizer for the soil for future rotated crops. Not growing alfalfa would mean relying more on fossil fuel derived fertilizer and increase carbon emmissions from farming.

Commonly anemia for her. Very likely nothing that will kill either of you.

Perhaps the middle ground could be the health certificates or vaccine passports? More mRNA concoctions with a side dish of myocarditis or pericarditis? What do you prefer?

Thank you, kind overlord, for replacing the bad things with good things! Please monitor our behavior and communications to ensure all lives are compliant!!!

We're not giving up meat.

And even after lab grown meat becomes the norm there will still be cows raised for food to satisfy high end markets.

You list factory farming and climate change, and say they're bad. I agree. You say data and science support your statements. You don't list the data or science. But moreover, you don't even mention the virus which is the topic of this thread or attempt to tie it through any data to the things you list in your post. In fact, the spread is H5N1 to mammals is largely unrelated to any human activity. So it's hard to know to which data or science you're referring, and I suppose people are supposed to come to their own conclusions. But as I said, I find that these types of posts detract from and derail useful conversations on this topic.

Yes factory farms are basically a training ground for viruses to learn how to spread.

Bird flu makes itself most prominently known in chicken farms, yes, but they are brought there by wild birds.

You could have the cleanest, ethicalest, modernest chicken farm known to man, but there's only so much you can do until a wild disease sees a high population density and says "I'mma infect that".

> Banning is impossible in democracies

> lab-grown meat, which unfortunately is now banned in FL

Unless Florida is no longer a democracy, I don't see how these two statement square. It's clearly possible to ban things with enough political will, no matter how smart or stupid the ban is.

I know just what you’re saying, agree, and think you accidentally overlooked one other proven alternative: centuries of lentils and grains complete essential amino wisdom used in parts of India and likely elsewhere.

Anecdotally,