A strain of bird flu known as H5N1 or highly pathogenic avian influenza has made a worrying leap to cattle herds across the US over the past month. This development has sparked “enormous concern” among health experts, including the World Health Organization’s (WHO) chief scientist, who warned of the virus’ “extremely high” mortality rate in humans.
“Almost all dairy nowadays is pasteurised and that will kill the virus,” Rossman explains. “So for the vast majority of people drinking milk, there’s absolutely no reason to be concerned.”
“The only potential concern at all would be people that are drinking unpasteurised milk. But of course, if you’re drinking unpasteurized milk, you also have a risk of a lot of other infections that could occur.”
The states affected so far are Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and South Dakota.
In the US, the FDA has banned sale of unpasteurized milk, but that only affects stuff that crosses state lines; they don’t have authority to ban within a state. Some states allow sale of unpasteurized milk – stuff gets produced and sold in the state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_raw_milk_debate
Idaho and New Mexico, both affected states, permit sale of unpasteurized milk directly in stores.
And this doesn’t just affect some person who is absolutely determined to disregard health advisories and drink raw milk in those states. If the virus jumps to humans there and begins human-to-human transmission off one of them, the whole world can potentially be impacted.
I mean, with COVID-19, we spent a lot of time early-on dinging China for having wet markets that helped create risk for disease jumping animal-human barriers. This is also not good.
And you know the same mouth-breathers who rejected all factually accurate information about COVID-19 and vaccines will just refer to this as the next “plandemic” and pretend viruses aren’t real. Some will go out of their way to visit farms and drink milk straight from the cow’s udder just to “prove” there’s nothing to worry about.
“Election year plandemic”
I can already hear the cries of “99.7% survival rate!” and “Give me hydroxychloroquine or (and) give me death!”
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I don’t know if it’s widespread or not, but at least in Virginia they wouldn’t stop you from drinking raw milk from “your own cow” so you could buy “shares” of a cow allowing you to have some percentage of the cows raw milk output.
Yeah, they talk about it in the WP article I linked to – that’s a “herdshare”. That’s also an issue, but at least the barrier is somewhat higher than just cruising down to the grocery store. You gotta be more of a True Believer and go out of your way to take part in one of those.
If H5N1 continues to rapidly mutate and makes the jump to human to human transmission in the same way it has with bovine hosts we are in for a rough ride. A virus with a 50% mortality rate will unquestionably collapse the global medical system, and the global economy right behind it.
Considering how many times in my life I’ve been told society is about to collapse, I think I’ll take my normal wait and see approach.
But you could freak out instead maybe it will be a fun change of pace.
Eh, I out-freak outed myself 20 years ago when Bush got into office.
50%?
That would collapse society. Power, transportation, communications, agriculture all rendered non function for years in a best case scenario. Where do you see that this has a 50% morbidity rate in human-like animals?
Here you go:
“From 2003 to 2024, 889 cases and 463 deaths caused by H5N1 have been reported worldwide from 23 countries, according to the WHO, putting the case fatality rate at 52%.”
Well I hope the vaccine we have ready to go works, because a disease with the communicability of the flu with a mortality rate of 52% is absolutely the end of human civilization in any recognizable sense.
I dunno about 50%, but Native Americans had a >90% mortality from European disease at the time of the Columbian Exchange, and it messed them up pretty badly.
The Black Death killed maybe 50% of Europe’s population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death
The Black Death was the second great natural disaster to strike Europe during the Late Middle Ages (the first one being the Great Famine of 1315–1317) and is estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of the European population, as well as approximately 33% of the population of the Middle East.
That didn’t end European civilization, but it was a cataclysmic event, left huge scars.
Though they also had shorter supply chains and such, were maybe more-resilient to disruption.
It’s a matter of being different societies, occurring over different lengths of time, and being global instead of regional.
Unfortunately there is not a prophylactic vaccine available yet. Even if there was one we are talking about potentially hundreds of millions of dead in developing countries who would not have access to it immediately. I’m not trying to be a doomer, but I think the concern is warranted.
Yeah but the strain currently infecting cows is mostly asymptomatic is it not?
OP casually stating that this disease has among the highest mortality rates
Unironically lockdowns were great.
Oh no, and the “return to office” policies?/s
Feels pretty cool to know the future before it happens, less cool to know it’ll be horrible though.
To be fair, avian flu jumping to humans happens constantly. It’s just that this strain is particularly bad.
Avian flu does regularly jump to humans yes, but usually it’s directly from the birds. The big risk this time is the fact that it’s already spreading between mammals meaning that it’s more likely for it to mutate to allow for human to human transmission.
And we’re still drinking cow juice, because who knows, maybe it goes away
It’s not going to magically go away just if people stop drinking milk. That’s not how things work.
It would take away breeding ground for human transmittable mutations. With literally billions of animals, mainly in filthy conditions, we just keep rolling the dice every day for a strain that starts a pandemic. We can either try to abolish factory farming, or just hope that the next pandemic won’t be much worse than covid.
Doing that tomorrow would not stop this virus from making the jump to humans at this point. If that was the point, it was poorly made.
This one isn’t human to human transmittable. It jumped to one human, but can’t infect other humans from there, so unless it mutates in a bad way it won’t start a pandemic. That’s very unlikely with one infection, but there will be more.
Regular carnist W
It should be rats! We know how to cure every single rat disease.
