CDC Study Finds Silent Bird Flu Infections in Dairy Veterinarians | Hacker News Reader

CDC Study Finds Silent Bird Flu Infections in Dairy Veterinarians

nytimes.com

125 pointsbookofjoe60 comments

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My brother tests for it in wastewater and they told the state and the state said to keep it quiet. -.-

It's one of these green states.

https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/rv/wwd-h5.html

The map is a bit misleading since dots are drawn over each other.

Several of those "green" states have had detections over the last month (Iowa, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Main, Nevada).

Is it Iowa? They have had more affected birds than California and yet show no wastewater detections.

Does this mean there’s a lot of bird flu in the bay? The news has been saying Bay Area hospitals are full of flu patients.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/health/article/california-severe...

Or just the Bay Area tests more honestly...?

https://archive.ph/Vj5YX

No symptoms, isn't this a good thing?

Typhoid famously caused silent infections in some people, so no, not necessarily. Just because it's asymptomatic for the original infected doesn't mean it'll stay that way if they transmit it to others.

Plus one of the most common ways for a zoonotic strain of a disease to become human-transmissible is to end up mixing around in the same body as an existing human-transmissible strain of that disease.

You've never played Plague, Inc. and it shows.

One of the better strategies in that game was to spend all you points on mutations that improve contagiousness and minimizing "scary symptoms" (like haemorrhaging from the eyes) early on, and then ramping those up later on so you kill everyone before scientists can complete their research into a cure. Research only started when your plague became disruptive.

For acute yes, who knows for post-acute.

Many viruses are linked to cancers, MS, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, T1D and so on. Research is finding that some of these viruses may actually be low grade infections or left over viral proteins causing constant immune dysfunction.

People who claimed they never got SARS-CoV-2 for example were tested with a novel ultra sensitive single molecule assay and found that 99.9% of individuals samples were indeed asymptomatically infected.

Here’s an earlier version of this claim showing 95%.

https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/230/3/e601/7639429

Some of these individuals later went on to develop Long COVID. They are using this assay in an antiviral trial to see if it reduces the amount of SCV2 proteins this assay can detect.

https://youtu.be/B1sFSW94JZg?si=7mvHAJGjrJiOLaW7

The concern is how much it's spreading

Why is it a concern if there’s no symptoms?

We know diseases spread through the population constantly.

There are bird flu variants that are very deadly to humans. It's been a concern of scientists for a long time that it would evolve to spread more easily to and between humans.

if it kills birds but spreads to humans than it has two hosts it can hop between. Most outbreaks that kill their hosts are maladapted. The black plague didn't kill rats, covid didn't kill bats, HIV didn't kill chimps, etc. If you are a virus and you're killing your host at a rapid rate then you are killing yourself.

The only time it can make sense evolutionary to kill your host is when you have multiple host options. This could devastate the poultry industry for far longer than we expected

for a couple reasons:

1) because it can mutate and develop new and different symptoms (c.f., yearly flu)

2) because the lack of testing/symptoms means its more difficult to identify and track (c.f., early covid)

3) because people can be infectious without knowing and pass it along...see 1

4) because no symptoms now doesn't mean it does not cause harm (c.f., HPV and cervical cancer)

The danger with a widely spread asymptomatic infection is that it might become symptomatic, or might be for some portion of the population. Or chickens.

But we already have widespread flus every year — which aren’t asymptomatic.

How does this compare?

Worse. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mortality_from_H5N1

How is that statistic not severely flawed?

Unless they are performing large scale sampling of the general population, the denominator (cases of confirmed influenza) is potentially much larger in practice.

Moreso because it seems likely that the confirmed cases are sampled from the sickest population seeking treatment.

And this article is further evidence of exactly this, since the "silent infections" here were previously uncounted.

>.< This feels like having COVID arguments again.

We both understand that pandemics don't happen under controlled, fully observable situations, yes?

And therefore must be studied and predicted based on incomplete information?

And this has been the case since the dawn of epidemiology?

If you look up the general topic, the listed ones are endemic strains — ie, the yearly ones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_pandemic

Being surprised by asymptomatic cases suggests their IFR numbers are high on the page you linked, due to low occurrence and conflation with other colds (or asymptomatic cases).

Is there anything to suggest that the asymptomatic strain detected here is worse?

No symptoms doesn't imply no side effects.

Furthermore the more viruses you're exposed to, the more likely you'll get one mutated to really hurt you. The best way to deal with viruses is to avoid them to the extent possible.

Sure — but life is a risk tradeoff, ie cost versus benefit. So we should focus our attention on the most dangerous things, not panic over everything.

There’s also contrary examples to your general rule, eg, catching cowpox protected you from smallpox — so you were better off being exposed to the relatively weaker cowpox, even if it wasn’t risk free.

What would you characterize as more dangerous than a threat like this? What are you seeing that you'd characterize as panic?

Enemy tanks rolling along your street. A mandate to stay indoors with food delivery organized by the army and finding out your family is not on the list to get any.

There are a lot of more dangerous threats than another flu virus.

Sure but i'm many orders of magnitude times more likely to die from a virus than "enemy tanks".

Id say collapse of societal functions in general is what you should worry about (be it pandemics, climate change or rampant egomaniac billionares). Giving it a "government bad" spin at least still implies some form of order, thus is not the worst case and so imo misses your point of "more dangerous things than the flu".

Btw, that erosion of trust in societies, combined with cluelessness and learned helplessness facing known, serious yet solvable issues (like pandemics) esp. in democracies worries me the most.

A threat like what?

This particular virus is asymptomatic without known fatalities.

See Typhoid Mary

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon?wprov=sfti1

Apparently it kills cats.

Also expected. I've said for a while the mortality of this virus is inflated because we're not mass testing for it and weren't detecting the asymptomatic cases. Or even the symptomatic-but-not-serious ones that people get over on their own.

No way to know how much it's been inflated until we find more of these, though.

Sounds like more extremely wasteful government employees we can "delete".

The poultry industry has an enlightened self interest that will ensure they keep their birds healthy. No need for tedious public reports!

Entrenched deep state making silly things up out of thin air again, to harm the smartest most effective president in the whole youniverse.

Also if this really is my dog and if he really did bite you, it's only because you asked him to.

I've been feeding my cat only seafood flavored cat food ever since the cat food contamination from a couple weeks ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42512754

I'm not too concerned, as it doesn't spread very well from human-to-human (R0 << 1).

The flu is fun because if you are infected with 2 strains at the same time, the virus genomes mix every which way to see which combination works the best against you. So any level of infection in a species that easily transmits to humans is risky.

> The flu is fun because if you are infected with 2 strains at the same time, the virus genomes mix every which way to see which combination works the best against you.

Ugh, that's not good. Especially as someone who recently had both Flu A then Flu B a few days later. :( :( :(

Is there more info about that mixing of strains anywhere, as when I was searching for stuff online about that ~2 weeks ago nothing showed up.

You could start from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reassortment

Well that's cool. Now I'm going down a rabbit hole of learning the differences between recombination and reassortment.

Thanks, that looks like the right kind of thing. :)

>. Especially as someone who recently had both Flu A then Flu B.

I had flu A one month ago and my daughter had flu B recently (she's had the nose vaccine and had a very mild symptoms). My daughter infected my wife, who also got flu B but I did not get it at all.

It's the same with almost every kind of infection so far (except covid, but even with covid we all got very different symptoms) -- and I'm grateful for it, because all of us being sick at the same time would make it much worse overall.

I read that we are attracted to people who have different imune systems than our own.

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing" is an apt quote here. You understand R values but don't seem to be factoring in mutation rates once a virus jumps species.

There are 8+ billion humans on the planet, and you're not worried about a virus evolving to spread between them?

Is it sarcasm? There were always viruses evolving to spread between humans.

Ones that have been watched closely because of high mortality in birds? Spread globally? And jumped species to different mammals?

Dismissing H5N1 out of hand is like saying we shouldn't be concerned if Ebola Reston showed up worldwide, in multiple species, because it's not known to infect humans.

H5N1 already has a lot of characteristics that would make it very concerning if it also became human to human transmissible. Ergo, we should take it seriously.

I'm not arguing about the properties of the virus. I'm arguing against the need to worry.

The properties of the virus (current strain) are the defining difference between need-to-worry and not-worry.

> silent bird flu infections

This is getting ridiculous. We have all manner of silent infections all the time. This does not seem like news.

I think you are not understanding how difficult it is for people with types of phobias about germs and illness.

Imagine being obsessive compulsive about cleanliness and germs, then the pandemic comes along. You would never recover from that experience psychologically.

It would be worse than if someone with ophidiophobia woke up one day and snakes were randomly falling from the sky.

The worst of all though is an infection with no symptoms. Like an invisible prison the germ freak can never escape from.

What is bizarre is we pretend there aren't at least hundreds of thousands of people in the country with these type of phobias.

Uh oh. Bird flu wiping out chickens. Bird flu wiping out dairy cows. Citrus greening disease wiping out oranges. This isn't looking good.

Yea. Why would they be sick? We only discovered _antibodies_ in their blood.

This ceaseless hyperventilation over the flu is unwarranted. There are vulnerable populations that would benefit from additional care under _any_ conditions. Let's just always be prepared to have to give them the necessary care and stop with this trumped up nonsense.

I assume you're referring to old people when you say 'vulnerable populations', but the problem is that old people are not always the only ones that get affected during flu pandemics. During the Spanish flu pandemic, for example, half the deaths were in people 20 to 40 years old.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Patterns_of_fatali...

Yea. Why would they be sick? We only discovered _antibodies_ in their blood.

This ceaseless hyperventilation over covid-19 is unwarranted. There are vulnerable populations that would benefit from additional care under _any_ conditions. Let's just always be prepared to have to give them the necessary care and stop with this trumped up nonsense.

Non-sarcastic agreement here. It was way overblown because were were restricting the tests to people we were already pretty sure had it through contact, massively inflating the mortality rate those first few months.

It's not clear what you're saying. That COVID was overblown because of how we tested for it?

Let's pretend COVID didn't exist. Yet, let's also look at all-cause mortality (CDC data). Death rates approached twice normal. Certainly looks like "something" was happening!

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/figures/mm7150a3-F2.g...

Those elevated death rates were only for about two months. Also the better metric would be years-of-life-lost from a societal perspective. It'd be unfortunate but much less impactful on society if the excess deaths were 76 year olds with only a year or two of life left than if 20 year olds were dying at that rate.

Also there were a few surveys by the BBC and other news organizations during that time which showed that a majority of people thought the death rates were 1/10.

The age adjusted death rates show the 2021 rates were about the same as the year 2006 [1].

1: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/mm7326a3.htm

"didn't"? "was"?

For our biologists tracking evolution:

* https://nextstrain.org/ncov/gisaid/global/6m

For our data scientists, wastewater data (note: often backfills the last 2 weeks):

* https://data.wastewaterscan.org/tracker?charts=Cp4MEAA4AUgAU...

For our "trust the science" folks, daily info about covid research:

* https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/search?keywords=covid

For the capitalists, from the Society of Actuaries:

* https://www.soa.org/4af998/globalassets/assets/files/resourc...

Can anyone offer me a evidenced based reason to be past-tense about this? Because it is not looking good.

At the start the media flat out lied about covid mortality rates to scare people into compliance, using the case fatality rate instead of the infection fatality rate (the former is much higher because only more serious cases end up in hospital, so there's a selection bias, especially when many cases are asymptomatic). It also ignored the age-stratified nature of risk, which the data showed really early on, quoting the mortality rate for 80 year olds as if it applied to everyone, when in fact the mortality rate decreased roughly 10x for every 10 years of age below 80.

The global IFR is around 0.6%. And a complex mix of persistent COVID sequelae - including cognitive decline, heart disease, severe chronic fatigue, and reduced immunity - are happening in around 10% of those infected, at all ages.

The big problem with bird flu - actually any flu - is that even if people don't die they can be off sick for a couple of weeks.

And if you have tens of millions off sick for a couple of weeks at the same time, everything stops working.

The global IFR was claimed to be around 3% and CFR around 10% in early 2020 because of how the tests were restricted, artificially reducing the denominator. I think serious side-effects were claimed around 40-50% as well, but not sure I'm remembering that one right. It was never actually that high, but most people had no idea what was actually going on and it caused all sorts of panic which led to the lockdowns.

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