Embracing Viruses
This week, American dairy farms have thrust the new endemic Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza into the main view. One gets to observe evolution in realtime. Not only evolution of the virus, but also evolution of societal responses.
“But let’s be clear,” wrote a prominent Right-wing podcast host.
“I will not mask… I will not social distance… I will not vaxx.”
https://twitter.com/Liz_Wheeler/status/1776289478526537763
“They want bird flu to be the new Covid.”
“To your point, this new “deadly” H1N1 report of a farmer catching it from a cow caused conjunctivitis (pink eye.)”
https://twitter.com/MdBreathe/status/1775574070521721020
People have taken their appreciation of risk from SARS Cov 2 and directly transferred them over to bird flu. This is disappointing, because I would have hoped we would unite over bird flu as an intolerable and dangerous pathogen for our current way of life. However, this is not the case. It seems people are truly stratified by the way they would handle plagues.
Let me make my position clear: I think the cow farming industry should adopt new safety measures to curb bird flu introduction into dairy cows and cattle. I think this should also be done for pig farming as an anticipatory measure. While we enjoy low cost dairy and pork, times have changed; we have a newly endemic, highly pathogenic avian influenza knocking on our door. Costs should be handled by the consumer and the federal government in order to keep the work viable for farmers.
Additionally, this virus is not a walk in the park. “Since 2003, there have been 868 cases of human infection with H5N1 reported, of which 457 were fatal—a 53 percent case fatality rate.”
We don’t know how that figure will change as the virus gets better at infecting human tissues from training on other mammals.
I sought to draw from the wisdom of the crowd to see when people expected H5N1 to be able to infect between humans.
Time will tell.
In the meantime, stay safe, and consider getting a summer piece of land out in the countryside.
Best,
AJ
Well, you've been spot on so far, so ... best my family can do at this point is keep our supply of masks, which we still wear most of the time, replenished. Right now good masks (N95 and KN95) are cheap and plentiful. Hope people take advantage of this very effective virus-evading tool if H5N1 does make the human-to-human jump.