Bird flu infections undetected | Hacker News Reader

Bird flu infections undetected

statnews.com

41 pointscduzz42 comments

> The agency believes the virus continues to pose a low risk to the general public.

They buried the lede. This is story about testing people who work in dairy farming, and finding out that a small number of people had inconsequential infections.

For those who will surely try, you can't just divide 8 (number of infections) by 115 (total population tested) and use that proportion for anything. The error bars are large (specifically, using Fisher's Exact, from 3% to 13%).

Edit: while the original Stat title is atrocious clickbait, a truly non-fear-mongering title would be something like "Asymptomatic bird flu infections in a small sample of farm workers"

("continues to pose a low risk to the general public")

I don't agree, and I would point out they used identical language mere weeks before covid-19 exploded [0]. Federal bureaucracies are reactive, not proactive.

[0] https://edition.cnn.com/asia/live-news/coronavirus-outbreak-... ("Coronavirus risk to American public is low, health secretary says"; February 26, 2020)

Except this flu was first identified in 1996 and there still hasn’t been any large outbreaks in humans, just small pockets of infections among farm workers and their family members. It only took months between the first suspected COVID case and massive lockdowns.

Well, the outbreak in mammalian livestock is very novel, and enormous in scale.

I'm not making any points or claims about the human pandemic risk, because I don't know. My point is a narrow one: that the CDC's current messaging language is low-signal and shouldn't be interpreted heavily.

Well fortunately for pandemic response, I’m sure that the CDC will be sure to prevent it from spreading and encourage vaccinations. What could possibly go wrong?

The problem with flu is that with reassortment, and especially with an expansion of the host species, we're basically just making a bunch of saving throws, hoping they're all okay.

> It only took months between the first suspected COVID case and massive lockdowns.

...and they made exactly the same mistakes of extrapolation from a small sample when they did that.

You cannot conclude anything meaningful to the general population from a tiny sample of farmworkers.

While wide, those are not uselessly so.

"A low number, but non-zero" isn't great information, but it's a start. Because understanding so-called "inconsequential infections" would have been very helpful at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Cases are obviously symptomatic and will seek healthcare" is a very different beast from "Some people are shedding virus but are pretty sure they can power through".

Purely statistically, sure. But you haven't included sample bias -- they did a small sample of farm workers. So at best you have a point estimate with a wide confidence interval that tells you (maybe) what rate of undiscovered infection you might expect to see if you sampled lots of farm workers.

> "Cases are obviously symptomatic and will seek healthcare" is a very different beast from "Some people are shedding virus but are pretty sure they can power through".

Thankfully, the article tells you that human-to-human transmission isn't a concern, so there's no need to speculate.

Any chance we could just stop raising so many cows and chickens?

Sure, just ctrl-z the last ~60 years of population growth around the world; should be easy to get those chicken numbers under control then.

India will be surprised to find that population growth requires beef and chicken consumption, I suspect.

> India will be surprised to find that population growth requires beef and chicken consumption

India is the sixth-largest consumer of chicken [1] and fourth-largest of beef [2] in the world.

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/chicken-c...

[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/beef-cons...

Because it's a huge country, but 40% are vegetarian. They seem to have kids and feed themselves reasonably well.

Take a look at the per-capita numbers for the real story, where they're in the bottom 20 or so out of ~190.

India has among the highest rates of child malnutrition in the world and, I recall, a majority of the world's stunted kids.

It probably should not be surprising that poverty exists in India. Vegetarian or otherwise.

Sure. The point is even with those low (but far from record low) per-capita numbers they still eat a lot of meat there.

The point is meat/chicken consumption isn't required for population growth.

73% of the Indian population is protein deficient [1].

[1] https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/indias-protein-defici...

You've argued elsewhere in the thread that "60 to 75% of the population eats meat". Now you're arguing 73% are protein deficient.

These are hard stats to combine into a "it's the not-meat-eating that's the problem"; either one stat is wrong/misleading (I suspect "meat" includes fish, for example), or there are other factors than "not enough chicken".

I can't follow what you're saying. Someone mentioned that India would be surprised that removing animal protein would undo population growth. I see these "hard stats" as being in complete opposition to that idea.

The data says that most of the population eats meat, and nearly of the population consumes animal proteins, but and in spite of that, most of the population is not eating enough protein.

Since they're not eating enough protein, as is, removing animal protein seems like a bad idea. Suggesting that they would be ok even if animal protein were removed, when all evidence says they're having trouble even with animal protein, doesn't seem realistic.

The more realistic approach would be to add more protein to India. One way to do this would be more animals (I don't know how this maths would work).

There are clearly overlaps in those cohorts.

Doubtless plenty of the 60-75% demographic that eats some amount of meat, are getting insufficient protein.

I speculate that's because meat is not readily available to them - though it's likely also true that the non-meat foods they're eating are not filling the protein gap either.

Isn’t required but in practice occurs. With both population and wealth. We aren’t getting rid of chicken or beef any time soon.

> We aren’t getting rid of chicken or beef any time soon.

This is a very different argument.

We won't be. We could, in short order, if we all wanted to, without having to "ctrl-z the last ~60 years of population growth around the world" as asserted upthread.

> We could, in short order, if we all wanted to, without having to "ctrl-z the last ~60 years of population growth around the world" as asserted upthread

This is akin to we could wish war away. Like sure. We could.

If you want to reduce chicken consumption, the practical route is reducing population or wealth.

You could also promote nature-friendly lifestyle and support vegetarians somehow.

They will not be surprised.

* 60 to 75% of the population eats meat [1][2].

* Only 9% is vegan, so the remaining vegetarians still consumes dairy (Paneer, etc), and in some regions, the vegetarians eat eggs and fish.

* 73% of the population has a protein deficiency [3].

91% of the population consumes animal proteins, and they generally aren't getting enough.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/07/08/eight-in-...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1272322/india-typical-ea...

[3] https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/indias-protein-defici...

> * 60 to 75% of the population eats meat [1][2].

Your link agrees with me; "39% of Indian adults describe themselves as 'vegetarian'".

> 73% of the population has a protein deficiency...

Is the population growing?

first world countries will be surprised to find that india is used as a positive example of anything

People are more than welcome to voluntarily stop eating meat! I'm curious, do you eat meat?

I was vegetarian for a while and didn't mind it.

If it's for flu risk, you need to add pigs to that list.

Curious how this is going to play out over the next 18 months.

Very, very poorly based on the likely direction of the CDC and general ID apparatus.

Man, I do not want to pick up immediately where we left off last time.

At a minimum, we already have a viable vaccine for this, and last I heard the US was building up an initial stockpile, while one of the Nordic countries was preemptively vaccinating dairy workers.

That would be Finland,

https://yle.fi/a/74-20093967

If it helps, we won't.

Everyone who works in public health is already exhausted. Many of the things put in place during the last pandemic are either already dismantled when COVID money got clawed back in reconciliation a year or so back, or is zeroed out in the next Republican budget. Any public willingness to engage in widespread nonpharmaceutical interventions is effectively gone. Anti-vaccine sentiment is quite high right now.

We'll pick up in a worse place.

Does the US have masks in storage? Because I know my country has more respirators now, but I have no idea about masks.

And gloves! Talk about gloves... they only became available for sale again close to 2021. Around here they are already hard to find (no idea why).

Some places do, some don't. One of the other aftermaths of COVID-19 is that the assumption that there will be a timely federal response to a major public health emergency isn't one to be relied on.

History will rhyme, but not repeat. For all we know, we might end up with RFK Jr. mandating flu shots among meat workers to keep the burgers flowing. (Just kidding. It would be a bloodbath. But then again : Vox Pensylvani, Vox Dei...)

There's slight solace in that bird flus are much worse as pandemic viruses compared to coronaviruses -- but then again, unmonitored, uncontrolled spillovers are an excellent way to build a highly virulent strain. Also, there's one dipshit who's likely to be involved and is advocating for more raw milk and less regulation around pasteurization and you'll never guess where you might find an excellent vector for bird flu transmission to humans from dairy cow populations..

The current H5N1 outbreak has been going on for a few years, and the US already has a pretty good system for (slowly) vaccinating around half the population against the flu. And the US just switched from a quadravalent to a trivalent seasonal flu vaccine because one of the Influenza B strains seems to have disappeared. Would it have made sense to instead keep it quadravalent and add H5N1 to the mix?

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