Bird flu in Canada may have mutated to become more transmissible to humans | Hacker News Reader

Bird flu in Canada may have mutated to become more transmissible to humans

theguardian.com

107 pointsamichail66 comments

It’s easy to subscribe to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency[0] and receive updates on cases of AI in livestock across the country. I was a subscriber for a year or so and thought it was fun but ultimately received too many emails — sometimes multiple cases a month. Not once did any of those get blown up to a media-worthy case, which I always found interesting: relatively high frequency but low severity.

I suppose the “severity” is low only because the rate of transmission to humans is low. The article mentions how we come into contact with wild animals especially birds more often than we might think. I wish they expanded on that — from touching things in public? from unwashed food? These aren’t wild populations of birds right?

Also gotta love the “we’re hoping no more transmissions occur and the mutation dies out” statement. I mean I don’t have a better plan.

[0] - https://notification.inspection.canada.ca/

> The article mentions how we come into contact with wild animals especially birds more often than we might think. I wish they expanded on that

On a large enough scale, it might be a different type of contact most people haven't thought of, maybe there's a good reason not to expand on that ;)

Reports like this remind me of very early COVID days. And USA just elected a POTUS that did a shit job of getting us through that same pandemic. With the cabinet that he has (rfk jr, oz…), let’s just hope these are truly fringe cases and doesn’t lead to an outbreak

Don't worry, we're unlikely to know whether that's the case anyway. All we'll have is word of mouth to augment suppressed (or never collected) data, which is just the same as the problem not existing!

https://youtu.be/Ti4sSRonNwY?t=27

One lone case doesn't remind me of early covid. Many cases reminds me of early covid.

Though this case is concerning.

Cases were happening in China around Dec ‘19 and I was worried. Then a case in the US followed by “no reason to worry”. Then it spiraled.

Ya know, I could have sworn I remember reading a little bit about COVID in Nov of 2019, but my recollection doesn’t line up with the Wikipedia timeline. I remember being nervous around campus at the time… although there were some other pretty bad colds going around that year, so maybe I just got mixed up.

I think I recall a little bit on Reddit in Dec 2019 and Jan 2020, is that plausible?

Anyway, “early COVID” had a feeling to it—stuff was going on in China but news was taking a long time to trickle out, probably just because of the language barrier, and also because nobody (general public-wise) was paying attention to that sort of thing. The bird flu stuff seems quite different, it’s been reported on quite a bit, people are hyper-vigilant about this kind of stuff now, and it has been bouncing around quite visibly in non-human animals for ages. Plus it is in the US, so we hear about it immediately.

Not saying it isn’t anything to be worried about, but we’re getting updates in realtime.

First case in December 2019. February 2, 2020 fogging machines on city streets in China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLdwCdyiDCw

We were definitely reading about the lockdowns in Wuhan in January 2020.

January 19, 2020, the first case in Washington state was detected in a man who had recently traveled from Wuhan.

Surveillance blood samples from Dec 13, 2019 to January 17, 2020 from several nine US states were tested for COVID-19 antibodies: "Of the 7389 samples, 106 were reactive by pan-Ig. Of these 106 specimens, 90 were available for further testing. Eighty-four of 90 had neutralizing activity, 1 had S1 binding activity, and 1 had receptor-binding domain/ACE2 blocking activity >50%, suggesting the presence of anti–SARS-CoV-2–reactive antibodies. Donations with reactivity occurred in all 9 states"

https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/72/12/e1004/6012472

2019-2020 was also a big H1N1 (Spanish/Swine Flu) year, as were 2017-2018 and 2018-2019. Entirely possible that's what you remember reading about or getting. If COVID hadn't happened Spanish Flu would've been a big headline anyways; as it is, a lot of the people who think they got COVID before March 2020 probably actually had H1N1. Before then the case numbers are orders of magnitude higher for flu, but COVID was more transmissible and almost 10x more lethal, and so post-lockdown it dominated.

I remember going in for a physical Jan 2020 and my doctor talking about lot about the flu. He gave me the pneumonia vaccine and then was like oh there is this other thing but probably nothing to worry about…

My daughter’s birthday party in January 2020 was canceled last minute due to her getting the flu. No idea of the type, but remember we were unable to reschedule due to Covid lockdowns occurring before getting rescheduled at the venue.

Nov sounds early but I was in China in oct-dec '19 and jan '20 and then it was definitely talked about a lot going to feb when I left (luckily and completely coincidental). I had to go on another business trip right after and returned, again completely coincidental (I was an idiot in hindsight), just 2 days before my country fully locked down. On that last trip I contracted covid which gave me an annoying couch.

Coming out of covid, suddenly it appears we can work with slack, zoom, etc and I have not been on a business trip since.

It is funny, I guess it is it uncommon at all given the nature of a, well, pandemic. But you got it so early. I dodged the thing for like two and a half years I think. Our experiences were so different, haha.

Did you get out much, being immune and all?

I guess it’s somehow just occurring to me that, despite this giant shared experience that we all had as a society, a lot of us had it in totally different ways.

My big mistake was ignoring all the (growing) news that this was bad; my last business meetings where in very busy spaces and so where my wife's meetings. So we both had it early.

We weren't allowed to go out very far, it was a weird time, but luckily we live in the countryside and not in a city so not too much change besides police blockades to stop you from venturing too far.

I started masking on my public transit commute in Jan 2020 by pure coincidence at the time - I remember news of "stuff" coming out of China in December. My friend returned from visiting family in Wuhan in late January and said there were some things that were odd there (relating to flu/illness), and she started masking on our commute, I frequently think about how the first confirmed US death (at the time) was in Santa Clara – literally where we commuted from (Caltrain to SF)

The first ive heard of it was a wave of sickleave traversing through the machine integrator community ,many of them travelling back from the coast. Oh and then adv china.

Dec 2019 is when I first read something on reddit about it, I remember thinking "oh, SARS is coming back".

I remember commenting about it during Christmas dinner that year, spending whole January reading the news dripping from China, and then it hit us hard in Sweden in February, my friends and I were a little more prepared than others (had a month's worth of food stocked, didn't need to leave the house until late March for groceries).

I quietly and slowly bought extra stuff—canned food, etc, in the weeks leading up. Didn’t want my m significant other to think I was paranoid, if nothing happened, haha.

You probably did, but it wasn't called CoVID back then. I remember I had Chinese coworkers who were already forced to quaranteen when they went home around late Dec 2019.

In the beginning nobody knew what it was and it went through some name changes over the first few months. It the beginning (from what I remember) it was nCov19 (as in Novel Coronavirus). Eventually people figured out it was an off-shoot of SARS-Cov (from 2004) so it settled as SARS-CoV-2 and the respective cluster of symptoms/disease as CoVID-19 (CoronaVirus Infectious Disease).

yeah the time line was never quite right for me either. I had a coworker get a "corona virus" in dec / jan and it was the first time I had ever heard of such a thing. It was just like "Did you hear about xyz hes in the hospital with a corona virus." This was in the US for context.

They’re just going to deny anything is wrong, sweep deaths under the rug and carry on with absolutely nonsensical “gut feel” reactions to real problems. Hell, didn’t Hegseth say he doesn’t even believe in germs and so he doesn’t wash his hands.

This is pretty clearly a joke: "Really, I don't really wash my hands ever. Germs are not a real thing. I can't see them, therefore they not real. I can't get sick."

https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1856494554624442433

And the Fox news hosts laughed at him! That's a good thing I suppose!

But seriously: God am I glad I don't watch all these kinds of shows. I'd be much more sad than I already am about the state of America.

> laughed at him

While you may be unfamiliar, the typical response when one finds a joke humorous is to laugh with someone, as seen here.

That would presume that I would even entertain the idea that he was making a joke and not being dead serious. Like Trump suggesting internal application of chlorine bleach should maybe somehow work against Covid-19.

That said I don't know the entire scene and what came before nor after nor do I follow what this person does and thinks usually.

Interesting, I didn’t know the context. They’re not blameless though, with all the conspiracies they’re in bed with it’s hard to tell what’s a joke anymore.

It's really concerning how the next 4 years in America will turn out; during his 1st term, along with some clowns, Trump at least picked some people who were pretty competent. This time, the competent people want nothing to do with him (and vice versa) and he's surrounded himself entirely with incompetent clowns.

So far, there's always a global pandemic whenever Trump is president.

And through the 2000s every Democratic president has brought economic collapses.

The only democratic president in the 2000s was Obama, and by the time he came into office the shit was already in the air heading towards the fan.

Yes, and as we all know Trump definitely caused COVID and the bird flu.

I think that was probably the point of the comment.

I know of collapses in 2001, 2007, and 2020. No Democratic president present for any of them. Which collapses are you referring to?

Will there even be a flu shot next year with rfk jr. in charge of HHS? NIH formulates what goes into to the next year's flu vaccine in the spring and HHS is over the NIH.

The rest of the World won't have it skipped and I expect that US entities will not be banned outright from importing vaccines, though maybe with cost penalties added. So even in a bad case scenario you shouldn't be cut off completely, right?

It's important to realize that H5N1 "bird" influenza is very different from anything that typically goes into the annual vaccines. Typical seasonal influenzas can have case fatality ratios up to about 1% for bad years if memory serves. Strains close to what's discussed in the article have had CFR into many tens of percent in spillover events. Metaphorically speaking, this one has potential to turn into a blazing inferno that makes the coronavirus spillover in 2019 look like an ambitious fire drill.

What would have a democrat president done different during the first year of the pandemic?

Probably not block CDC scientists of speaking about it[0]. Also not interfere with data collection by the CDC[1].

They probably wouldn't have dismantled the global health security branch of the National Security Council either[2][3][4], 2 years prior to the pandemic.

There's a timeline outlining the disastrous bullshit[5].

[0] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/attacks-on-science/trump-ad...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/us/politics/trump-cdc-cor...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0...

[3] https://csis-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/publication/1...

[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-homeland...

[5] https://doggett.house.gov/media/blog-post/timeline-trumps-co...

Let’s be real - the CDC are the important ones in that situation, not the restructuring of the National Security Council.

And preventing panic in the beginning isn’t a terrible idea, as we say from the toilet paper debacle. Whether or not it was warranted in retrospect it’s hard to say, but it’s not like the CDC’s messaging was clear or accurate for quite a while.

When Trump tried to lock down travel from China the democrats called him racist. The Obama administration depleted the national stockpile of PPE and didn’t restock. I’m sure there are a bunch of stupid little fingers to point here and there but the fact of the matter is the US had about as many deaths as you’d expect with our demographics that ran in line with other similar countries. The Trump administration also was responsible for Operation Warpspeed, without which we would have almost certainly gotten vaccines later.

The only way it could have been stopped was in China, early. Whether that would be preventing a leak, if that’s how it originated, or from an immediate local lockdown. Certainly keeping international organizations from investigating didn’t help.

The premise here is that there would've been one. It is vaguely possible that since a Democrat wouldn't have defunded the US presence in the region, that it could've been contained. Not plausible really, but possible. That scenario would not have been (and was not) possible with the decisions that Republicans took in the lead up to the pandemic.

Then the premise is lackluster. If the Chinese government couldn’t contain the US-paid coronavirus, then how could (or more accurately, why would) the US if they were in the region?

Do tell - what is the US-paid coronavirus?

Up until and just before lockdowns started the US was funding a lab in Wuhan, the WIV, which specializes in bat coronaviruses and has had a long history of failure to meet safety standards. We only stopped funding them in July 2020, meaning US money funded the very virus that killed ~0.0875% of the world population.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/us-halts-funding-access-wuhan-...

I guess this is a causation directionality error in your thinking? We were there because nasty viruses spread near there.

We were there before nasty viruses spread. We stopped funding them in July 2020, meaning we were funding it before lockdowns started and just as China was being affected. You truly need to work on your reading comprehension skills before attempting to suggest anyone has errors in anything.

I'm sorry which part of that article says that? That funding contributed to the outbreak somehow?

It sounded like the same in the beginning with monkey pox, but that did not take of in the same way covid did.

We shall see.

If we were all gay men with many sexual partners though, boy would we have been in trouble!

I remember my mother in law was seriously concerned about monkeypox. The media was practically salivating at the attention a new viral outbreak was getting them, not letting those pesky details of how it was mostly transmitted get out.

I wonder if we'll be firing any more pandemic surveillance staffers like we did last time[1].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/world/exclusive-us-slashed-c...

As the article goes into, China was exactly cooperative during the outbreak so those 30 people almost certainly wouldn’t have made a difference.

winter is coming and birds migrate, south so ,ya, great ,blame us for the "candemic" but we didnt do it, the rusianees emporer beamed the virus into our geese from the 5g towers and its bad, them geeses are flying in circles gathering up for a strafing run all across the fields and parks everywhere. The only way to be safe is to move north for the winter, get your visa now.

Bird flu has the opportunity to do the funniest thing possible to the second Trump term...

Let this post make you notice they have been working on an mRNA payload that supposedly provides immunity against this already, however they were working on a self-replication feature but they merged that branch beforehand so this new version will have multiple new features.

Who is they?

Finland started vaccinating people in its fur farms and bird rescue centres in June 2024. https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

"Gee all of the minks died. Maybe we should protect the humans?"

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