Bird flu kills more than half the big cats at a Washington sanctuary
cnn.com
cnn.com
HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42496619 (no discussion though)
https://www.axios.com/2024/12/25/bird-flu-pet-food-recall-no...
What’s scary though is how it spread. They had less than 40 animals spread out over 5 acres. It’s odd that it affected most of their cats.
1 square mile is 640 acres.
5 acres is 460 feet per side.
5 acres is about the indoor size of a typical Walmart or Costco.
But it doesn't sound like it was spread cat to cat if they think it was the food - seems like it wouldn't have mattered how much space they had if they were all fed contaminated feed.
It's the US government who's ignoring it. They're acting as if they have inverted priorities—putting agricultural industry interests first, as well as short-term politics and optics.
The federal vaccine effort seems to at the token-effort level, on track to repeat 2020 all over again. I'm inferring this from looking at budget figures: Warp Speed spent (I think) $18 billion in 2020, while the current efforts total just 1-2% of that [0] (mostly one single grant to Moderna). That looks to me on track to repeat 2020: a year or more without a (fully deployed and mass-produced) vaccine—tens of trillions in losses in the future, because government leaders aren't proactive-thinking enough to invest a few billion today.
(Here's a remarkable figure from [0]: the federal government is currently spending 7x more subsidizing livestock farms for their economic hardship from HPAI than on developing vaccines for it).
Another major failing is the lack of effort (again mirroring 2020) on monitoring early outbreaks. The pandemic strain of HPAI doesn't yet exist. It's likely to come into existence, if there's large numbers of HPAI human infections, simultaneous with infections with human-adpated influenza strains—that's where you'd get the highly transmissible pandemic strain, from genetic crossover with ordinary flu.
But: most farm worker HPAI outbreaks are going unnoticed [1,2]. There's very little concerted effort to monitor and prevent crossover infections in the high-risk sectors, on livestock farms. (Again, I feel we're repeating 2020: prioritizing short-term industry considerations over public welfare—as if it's more important to minimize hardship to the dairy industry, than to prevent a pandemic). Sure; there's token government efforts that look like they're helping keep farm workers safe—but empirically they're simply not working. A complication is that this industry hires large numbers of undocumented/illegal farm labor: people who deliberately avoid interactions with government officials; as well as people who avoid or are priced out of healthcare access.
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/24/health/america-bird-flu-n...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/09/health/bird-flu-diaries-f...
[2] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-11-26/bird-fl...
https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/vaccines/influe...
And, more importantly, there is already a seasonal flu campaign every year. Interestingly, it was quadravalent until this year, when B/Yamagata was removed:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/season/2024-2025.html
And, unlike COVID, we already know how to make influenza vaccines. I haven’t seen any explanation for why the CDC did not add A5N1 to the seasonal flu. Doing so seems likely to massively reduce the severity of a potential outbreak of human-transmissible A5N1 and maybe even decrease the probability of an outbreak at all, and it would get about 50% coverage of the US population with no special effort at all beyond the effort of specifying it for the seasonal vaccine.
I remember that! It's not often we celebrate the extinction of a species :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28723310 ("This influenza lineage may have become extinct (nature.com)", 47 comments)
* Mandatory N95 (or better) PPE for farm workers in high-risk large facilities.
* Mandatory testing for bulk milk tanks.
We're living in a crazy surrealist theatrical performance when we charge animal activists with bioterrorism charges (despite wearing head-to-toe PPE[2]), but meanwhile farm worker in these high-risk facilities (who are around sick poultry constantly) aren't required to have any sort of protections.[3]
Unfortunately half of American are currently anti-science enough to oppose these sensible, minimal measures tooth and nail. If this really is an adversary nation bot psyop to divide Americans[4] and get us act against our own self-interest... well played, adversary nation!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42248570
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42292384
[3] https://www.statnews.com/2024/05/10/bird-flu-virus-dairy-far...
[4] https://old.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1gouvit/youre_being_t...
I hated going to the grocery store in a facemask, much less working a 12h shift at a poultry farm. That sounds awful to me.
Still, I personally think facemasks at a poultry farm are impractical. But I don't really know, I've never worked at one and have never met anyone that has.
If this reaches a pandemic level we're going to witness a massive catastrophe because the Public Health as an institution was completely obliterated at a global level for political gain.
Robert Kenedy Junior, the guy who said COVID-19 was designed to not affect Jews[0], will be in charge of the HHS.
[0]https://www.timesofisrael.com/rfk-jr-who-mused-covid-was-des...
Cheap political quips aside, it makes me uneasy and frustrated that vaccination is currently very popular but is being turned into a political issue just for a big grift.
The overwhelming majority of research shows vaccines are safe and effective. While I personally think it’s worth verifying research to the contrary, too many people make contrarianism with cherry-picking against science-backed norms their entire personality.
Cherry-picked Contrarianism as a personality is tolerable in limited doses, like from a certain batch of folks on HN, but not something I’d want from policymakers.
> "COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” he added. “We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted at that or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential of impact for that."
The article notes he claims that this quote "twisted" his words.
https://apnews.com/article/robert-f-kennedy-jr-covid-comment...
The article mentions that large cats were kept separate in 30'x40' (around 10m by 12m) enclosures. They eat whatever the zoo provides, meaning the animals don't have free choice as they would in the wild.
Everyone I've met over the years who work at zoos absolutely love the animals and care deeply about the job. They would notice any visible or behavioral indicators of stress.
That said, though, those conditions aren't natural. It could simply be that germ theory is correct and the animals were perfectly healthy until the pathogen was introduced. Its also possible, though, that keeping wild animals isolated in confined pens isn't a good situation regardless of husbandry practices.
Regarding your fear, is it because the farmers you know lives close to your own poultry ?
We had an informational picket at UC Davis two weeks ago, 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
There are both state and federal agencies with responsibilities, including the California Department of Food and Agriculture, the US Department of Agriculture, and the US Food and Drug Administration.
It’s the greatest source and risk for pandemics. The horrible conditions in which the animals are raised means they’re far bigger consumers of antibiotics than humans, greatly reducing the efficacy of antibiotics for humans. It’s one of the larger direct sources of greenhouse gas emissions. It’s one of the greatest sources of water and land pollution. It’s one of the largest reasons for deforestation. And it’s one of the largest sources of land use and clearing while providing only a tiny fraction of the world’s calories (and protein, for that matter).
You don’t need to be an ethical vegan to recognize there’s something horribly wrong here.
The problem now is the scale and methods of farming that meat.
Reducing meat consumption is a worthwhile pursuit, but it's not meaningfully going to change any time soon, so it's better to target the farming practices.
It's literally one of the main reasons you exist. Without humans eating animals we'd have gone extinct ages ago. It's as much a part of humanity as breathing oxygen.