CDC confirms first severe human case of bird flu in U.S.
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Even if that scenario is very rare, it's interesting to think of how dramatically these discussions would change if we had perfect forensic knowledge for tracing the complex blame/liability.
Clearly the solution is to exterminate all other species.
Round 2 versus insects or viruses?
https://www.dw.com/en/munich-study-confirms-severe-decline-i...
We had an informational picket at UC Davis last week, and you can find more details at our website at https://upte.org/news/upte-members-at-uc-davis-blow-the-whis...
The University of California system has failed to keep the health and safety of our food supply in safe and working order, with lab testing sometimes waiting weeks for turn around, causing avian bird flu to spread and causing mass culling of chickens, and tainting diary, and increasing the likelihood of animal to human spread.
UPTE members at CAHFS are raising concerns about severe understaffing and unsafe working conditions that jeopardize their critical role in testing for diseases like Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (H5N1).
After five out of seven lab workers quit since January due to inadequate compensation and a lack of support, the timely and accurate monitoring of our nation's food supply is at risk, potentially leading to catastrophic outbreaks affecting poultry and human health. Your can support us by urging CAHFS management to address these issues and protect the health and safety of our communities.
You can help by emailing the Dean of Veterinary Medicine, Dean Dr. Mark Stetter to support staffing and safety at CAHFS using the following link: https://upte.org/cahfs
Edit: Read the article, this headline is semi-clickbait.
Article indicates this is the first severe case related to a 'backyard' (i.e. smaller farm or self-farmer range of size) farm.
Sooooo nothing that new aside from the bit that bird flu is still around TBH.
It's not surprising in it's own way, we are somewhere in a migratory season so these things will move around a bit more.
Not saying Bird flu doesn't concern me a lot, I'm just frustrated by the 'oh this isn't new except the person got it from their backyard coop rather than some more industrial-ish farm'.
Edit to Edit:
Ok, I guess this is the first 'technically' severe case. Not sure what the details are but at TBH I'm not a doctor so...
† I'm not saying that's what happened to him, just that it's not some freaky rare "crying blood" thing.
That terrible flu you had that one time where you could barely function and were puking multiple times would be mild in medicine.
Severe means “i’m going to die unless i get medical attention very soon”.
See, for instance, https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/situation-summary/mammals.html
> But the virus is changing, said John Connor, an associate professor of microbiology at Boston University. “It is essentially going to the gym all the time and training to be better,” Connor said at a webinar on H5N1 this week hosted by hosted by Boston University’s Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases. “The virus is not just getting into birds, now it’s getting into cows. There’s evidence that it’s getting into other animals, cats, dogs, mink,” he said. “Now what we are seeing is that this is a virus that used to be only good at breaking and entering into bird cells and causing disease there and transmitting there, now its getting better at breaking and entering into a bunch of other cells.”
Seems more…efficient?
Pretty much always. And a lot of the time, the reason (if not the implementation) was pretty good. But these things almost always grow, and interact, and are very hard to update with changing times. SO you get a mess, and you get friction, but mostly as you note, the friction is viewed as a brake on other undesirable outcomes. So people learn to work with it. I guess there aren't enough incentives for people to clean up/optimize it until well past when it becomes an obvious problem.,,
Cooperation also means devoting money to a project. People already have work; there aren't bodies waiting around to be assigned. Usually that means getting a contractor, which takes time.
It would be a lot more efficient if people trusted the government to make decisions. But we just elected people with the express goal of hating government, and that will as usual result on more red tape and more costs.
But generally, each state already has bodies that are inspecting cows and chickens daily, with FDA representatives present. They’re experts at testing regularly to catch normal flu etc, and the data is shared. This happens and they’re still doing the same exact same thing - which we want.
In these cases, there’s tons and tons of cooperation. Some folks are investigating cows independently. Some birds. All this research is shared federally and with all states.
Then, CDC, department of agriculture, etc, all are activating their protocols to deal with their various parts of this.
We actually have plans for this and haven been executing decently well.
It’s called a Swiss cheese filter. If you cut one slice of cheese, there’s holes for things to slip through. Stack a bunch of slices on top, less chance of something to get through a hole.
You want redundancy.
Source: I worked on all sorts of COVID related data, and danced around CDC federal systems and state/ other partner integration API’s.
In regards to testing and investigation, we want multiple layers
This is probably because H5N1 was detected in dairy cows in Southern California.