A strain of flu infecting wild birds now seems to be pretty widespread in cows. The concern is not so much that cows will infect humans, but that this shows the virus can evolve and spread from birds to mammals, where it can evolve again. It doesn’t sound too dangerous in its current form given the vaccines available.
The version of bird flu (H5N1) devastating birds around the world has spread to the Antarctic, according to Wired, where it is affecting penguins. Nobody anywhere is against penguins, as far as I know, so maybe this will get some attention.
Intercept tries to explain the recent developments on the lab leak hypothesis, but it still leaves me a bit confused. Here are the facts as I understand them:
So, there’s a fair amount of circumstantial evidence and second- or third-hand eyewitness accounts here. And the U.S. State Department is not averse to twisting facts to fit a narrative it thinks is in the U.S. national interest. Nonetheless, there are an awful lot of coincidences here. Maybe the U.S. government would like to pin this on the Chinese government, but there is a certain irony if they managed to f— over all of humanity together. And this would be the first plague unleashed on international humanity as a result of biological engineering.
The WHO has taken upon itself development of an international agreement (hopefully, eventually, a treaty), to prepare and respond to the next pandemic. There’s nothing too surprising here, but hopefully it will help to have a playbook next time around.
Well, I’ve finally done it to myself. My posting rate has flagged because I have overshot the limits of how much one person can reasonably do between work, family, school, and life. You can overshoot the limits for awhile, even quite a while, but eventually you pay that debt in the form of burnout at a minimum, and mental and physical and social difficulties if you wait too long to address it. Not to worry, in the medium term this problem is solvable and I will solve it. Because reading, thinking, writing, and then more thinking (mostly in that order) or very important to me. Anyway, here are some picks from the posts I did manage to make in February.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: The Covid-19 “lab leak hypothesis” is still out there. Is this even news? I’m not sure. But what is frightening to me is that deadly natural and engineered pathogens are being worked with in labs, and they almost inevitably will escape or be released intentionally to threaten us all at some point. It’s like nuclear proliferation, accidents, and terrorism – we have had a lot of near misses and a lot of luck over the last 70 years or so. Can we afford the same with biological threats (not to mention nuclear threats) – I think no. Are we doing enough as a civilization to mitigate this civilization-ending threat? I think almost certainly, obviously not. What are we doing? What are we thinking?
Most hopeful story: Just stop your motor vehicle and let elephants cross the road when and where they want to. Seriously, don’t mess with elephants.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Chickie Nobs have arrived!
Sorry to all my faithful readers worldwide (who I could undoubtedly count with the fingers of one hand with some left over) for my lengthy posting gap. Anyway, let’s have a look at what I was thinking about in February.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: Pfizer says they are not doing gain of function research on potential extinction viruses. But they totally could if they wanted to. And this at a time when the “lab leak hypothesis” is peeking out from the headlines again. I also became concerned about bird flu, then managed to convince myself that maybe it is not a huge risk at the moment, but definitely a significant risk over time.
Most hopeful story: Jimmy Carter is still alive as I write this. The vision for peace he laid out in his 2002 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech is well worth a read today. “To suggest that war can prevent war is a base play on words and a despicable form of warmongering. The objective of any who sincerely believe in peace clearly must be to exhaust every honorable recourse in the effort to save the peace. The world has had ample evidence that war begets only conditions that beget further war.”
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: It was slim pickings this month, but Jupiter affects the Sun’s orbit, just a little bit.
A particularly concerning form of bird flu has now decimated poultry and spread to wild birds in many different parts of the world.
The current clade of H5N1 virus, called clade 2.3.4.4b, appears well-adapted to spread efficiently among wild birds and poultry in many regions of the world and was first identified in wild birds in the United States in January 2022. Since then, this current clade 2.3.4.4b HPAI A(H5N1) virus has been detected in wild birds in all 50 states and has caused bird outbreaks in 47 states affecting more than 58 million commercial poultry and backyard flocks.
CDC
The current strain is contagious to humans only when they have very close contact with live birds, according to CDC. However, there is concern now that it may have mutated and developed an ability to spread in mammals, including farmed mink in Spain and possibly wild sea otters in Peru.
The CDC says the mink are particularly susceptible and the spread of the virus in mink does not indicate an increased likelihood of spread among humans. They say a candidate vaccine has already been developed and could be produced quickly if needed.
I don’t trust the CDC as much as I did before Covid-19. However, this flu virus seems to be exactly what they were preparing for when they got blind-sided by Covid, so hopefully they would be better prepared for this.
This editorial in Science also takes aim at USDA and the Fish and Wildlife Service.
More zoonotic diseases originated in the United States than in any other country during the second half of the 20th century… The ongoing H5N1 avian influenza outbreak has left 58 million animals dead in backyard chicken coops and industrial farms. It has infected animals in one of the dozens of live poultry markets in New York City (elsewhere called “wet markets”)…
Since 2011, the US has recorded more swine-origin influenza infections than any other country. Most occurred at state and county fairs, where an estimated 18% of swine have tested positive. These fairs attract 150 million visitors each year. In 2012, H3N2v influenza jumped from pigs to humans at livestock exhibitions and infected 306 people across 10 states, with suspected human-to-human transmission…
Each year, the US consumes an estimated 1 billion pounds of “game” (elsewhere called “bushmeat”). Yet, most hunter-harvested meat is not inspected, and no sanitary measures are required. Avian influenza has spread from wild birds to hunters and also appeared in captive game farms, where 40 million birds are raised annually. Three million mink live on US fur farms in long rows of wire cages where their waste falls onto the floor or onto other animals below…
The US is the largest importer of wildlife in the world. More than 200 million live wild animals enter the US each year, most undergoing no health and safety checks when they arrive.
Science
These facts and figures surprised me. Routine contact between people and domestic and wild animals is not just something that happens outside the U.S., it is happening here every day.
A strain of bird flu has spread from “intensive poultry farms in Asia” to wild birds in Britain. This is unquestionably bad for birds, and…
At present, it is thought H5N1 only rarely infects people and few cases have been recorded of it being passed from one human to another. However, scientists warn there is a possibility that bird flu viruses could change and gain the ability to spread easily between people. Monitoring for human infection is extremely important, they warn.
Guardian
Was Covid-19 a dress rehearsal for the day a really dangerous flu gets out of hand? I think we learned some things, but did we learn enough?
This article in France24 draws a link between habitat loss, climate change, and zoonotic diseases.
“Deforestation reduces biodiversity: we lose animals that naturally regulate viruses, which allows them to spread more easily,” he told AFP…
As animals flee their warming natural habitats they will meet other species for the first time — potentially infecting them with some of the 10,000 zoonotic viruses believed to be “circulating silently” among wild mammals, mostly in tropical forests, the study said.
Greg Albery, a disease ecologist at Georgetown University who co-authored the study, told AFP that “the host-pathogen network is about to change substantially”.
France24
I don’t quite get the logic of the first sentence – how do animals “naturally regulate viruses”? I can see the logic that some animals would limit the spread of viruses they are infected with based on their behavior. If they start moving around more, whether because their habitats are becoming smaller and more fragmented, because their ranges are shifting as the climate changes (although this seems like a much slower process to me), they will potentially interact more with other wild animals, with domestic animals, and with humans.
So solutions could be to protect natural habitats and keep cities from sprawling into them, shift more to vegetarian diets for people and/or keep livestock indoors (maybe not so great for the livestock).
Deconstructed podcast says the idea that Covid-19 may have originated in an unintentional leak from a Wuhan virology lab is looking “stronger by the day”. There is no smoking gun proving it, but nor is this a conspiracy theory. The facts appear to be that the science and technology to modify a natural coronavirus into something more transmissable and deadly exists, and that this type of research was being carried out at the Wuhan lab in question.
To me, the fact that there was a lab conducting this type of research near where the novel virus was first detected does not prove that it was the source. I would want to know how many labs around the world are conducting this type of research. In other words, do many cities around the world have labs conducting this type of research? If so, the fact that there was a lab in the city where Covid-19 was first detected would be expected and likely, and not evidence that it was the source. But if there are labs all over the place doing this type of research, would that be comforting in any way? Certainly no!
I am a little surprised there are not more conspiracy theories suggesting any of the variants could be genetically modified. It seems like the technology would exist for some sociopathic scientist to take a sample of the virus and mess with it. Let’s hope that is not happening. But even if there is no suggestion it is happening now, this sort of thing is going to happen. It seems like a big risk to me – how do we deal with it?