Hacker News Reader

Comment by COGlory | Hacker News Reader

The virologists I know are much more concerned about this than they were about covid. I guess it's presenting neurological symptoms in bears/small mammals. Last fall there was a rash of small mammals showing rabies signs, that were euthenised that wound up negative for rabies, so they're now retesting them for this influenza.

View on HN

Covid was fully airborne and spread very rapidly between people.

This is not airborne, nor have we seen it spreading between people. All the cases we've seen so far in the States have been from people who were known to be in contact with infected animals.

It certainly warrants further investigation and precautions for those working with livestock, but panic seems like an overreach.

For what it’s worth, it took us like two years into the pandemic to recognize Covid was airborne, after years of claiming it wasn’t. I’m not sure if that was denial, suppression, mutations, or it’s legitimately difficult to determine. I would have a hard time putting much stock in any definitive statements on the mechanism of transmission.

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.

Airborne spread is currently nonexistent in humans, because the H5N1 virus circulating in other mammals right now still lacks the exact right protein to bind to human lung cells. However, all this news about cows is a bit of a distraction. They're being infected in their udders, not their lungs, and that's why they're not dying en masse. Yet.

Sea lions are dying en masse. That's the big news. Because they are spreading it to each other's lungs through the air.

If it adapts to human lung cells it isn't going to be deniable that it's airborne and extremely deadly in that case.

The relevant authorities are currently waiting for that strain to emerge -it's called the pandemic strain- before declaring states of emergency and authorizing vaccines. The reason is that it is (A) unknown if or when that will happen, and (B) unknown whether a vaccine against the current strain which doesn't infect human lungs would be effective against the theoretical future mutant strain that does. Therefore from a public health perspective it's better in large bore to save the resources and not start producing a possibly useless vaccine now.

> 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.

COVID wasn't airborne in humans either until Dec 2019, then very suddenly it was. The virus didn't come out of thin air, it mutated and gained the ability to spread in humans. One morning the world woke up and there was a new virus with human-to-human transmission.

There was already evidence of airborne spread during the original short lived 2002 outbreak of Covid.

Entirely different virus and I don't understand the point you're getting at.

Probably your confusion stems from ignorance.

> Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is a viral respiratory disease of zoonotic origin caused by the virus SARS-CoV-1, the first identified strain of the SARS-related coronavirus.

In December 2019, a second strain of SARS-CoV was identified: SARS-CoV-2. This strain causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the disease behind the COVID-19 pandemic.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS

The two strains are closely genetically related.

There was already evidence of airborne spread back during the 2002 SARS-CoV-1 outbreak.

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.

Which areas? Did they contact news agencies yet?

EDIT this is the only thing I've been able to find

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2024/02/17/coyote-captured-a...

https://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2019/02/05/colorado-ru...

This was in Montana. Local FWP. No idea about news agencies. Here's the bit about bears:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/three-grizzly-bear...

Maybe this is what you're referring to?

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/29/12/23-0464_article

Also shows neurological symptoms in cats (and high mortality),

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/30/7/24-0508_article

I don't think I've ever seen a "wwwnc" TLD prefix before.

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)

What does the n, nc, and 2c mean?

Probably just gov nonsense someone decided to slip in there because it seemed like a good idea at the time/the person in charge of making technical decisions was out of their depth, as often is the case in the government web space.

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

Why? On the list of things to worry about, it would seem to me that there are things far more likely to kill you than a disease that a sum total of 3 people have contracted, all with mild symptoms.

Likely because it’s very deadly, spreads rapidly, and now that the virus has transferred from birds -> cows -> humans, it could start to mutate into something that spreads human to human.

> Human infections with HPAI A(H5N1) virus have been reported in 23 countries since 1997, resulting in severe pneumonia and death in about 50% of cases.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/avianflu/influenza-a-virus-subtypes....

> 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.

Just like taking medical advice from a janitor because they work in a hospital, eh?

The US are not the world.

Over 1000 people got infected worldwide. Mortality rate >50%

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22401-bird-fl...

I took it to mean they're not worried about themselves catching it, but more about the implications if this disease were to spread more. How bad could it be if it started infecting more than just the eyes? How fast could it spread between people before we have a vaccine ready?

Tweet/article from a month ago:

> So far, there is only one confirmed human case. Rick Bright, an expert on the H5N1 virus who served on President Biden’s coronavirus advisory board, told me this is the crucial moment. “There’s a fine line between one person and 10 people with H5N1,” he said. “By the time we’ve detected 10, it’s probably too late” to contain.

https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1783222233717932397

Because it’s a disease of unknown severity, and possibly highly contagious.

You need to start worrying about it when 3 people have caught it, because if you wait until a “significant “ number of people have caught it, it’s too late to stop another pandemic.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com