As health authorities have suspected for some time now, bird flu is consistently being spread between mammals, increasing the risk of sustained outbreaks emerging among humans in the future.
I’m nearly as far from an expert on infectious diseases as it gets, but - and if anyone who knows about influenza reproduction can chime in - I remember reading that influenza has incredible abilities to mutate wildly and recombine. The analogy was like, if human reproduction is like taking two decks of cards and randomly shuffling half of each deck together, then influenza is like taking any number of decks, randomly chopping up and re-splicing portions of random individual cards together, as well as resorting all of them back together without any regard for whether the results are going to even produce anything that can live or not. But the reproductions and randomizations are so voluminous that it doesn’t matter - at least some of it will stick.
In other words, in addition to the wildly rapid mutation capabilities these viruses have - if you have animals that are carrying more than one strain of influenza simultaneously, those two or more strains can produce hybrids.
I’ll honestly trust the CDC’s opinion that is currently low risk, since they know all about viruses and their mutation rates and chances of jumping from other mammals to humans
In western civilization everything is low risk until we’ve come too far to avert calamity. Before the 2008 financial crisis, every institution that played a role would have you believe everything was great, right up until everything was falling apart.
With global warming we always had, and still struggle against entirely too many people, and lying institutional vested interests, downplaying or disbelieving how serious of a global catastrophe climate change is forming into.
The only reason h5n1 is “low risk” at the current time is because it’s not yet a human-to-human calamity that is already too far underway to put a stop to. We all saw how badly we all collectively handled covid.
We are now at mammal to mammal transmission, and humans are also mammals. The only actual difference between low risk, and full on pandemic, at this point, is patient zero.
You should really go back to the article and read the whole thing, as well as others that are linked to in it. Because in this one the WHO describes it as an enormous concern, because it is.
I’m nearly as far from an expert on infectious diseases as it gets, but - and if anyone who knows about influenza reproduction can chime in - I remember reading that influenza has incredible abilities to mutate wildly and recombine. The analogy was like, if human reproduction is like taking two decks of cards and randomly shuffling half of each deck together, then influenza is like taking any number of decks, randomly chopping up and re-splicing portions of random individual cards together, as well as resorting all of them back together without any regard for whether the results are going to even produce anything that can live or not. But the reproductions and randomizations are so voluminous that it doesn’t matter - at least some of it will stick.
In other words, in addition to the wildly rapid mutation capabilities these viruses have - if you have animals that are carrying more than one strain of influenza simultaneously, those two or more strains can produce hybrids.
But again: citation needed.
I’ll honestly trust the CDC’s opinion that is currently low risk, since they know all about viruses and their mutation rates and chances of jumping from other mammals to humans
In western civilization everything is low risk until we’ve come too far to avert calamity. Before the 2008 financial crisis, every institution that played a role would have you believe everything was great, right up until everything was falling apart.
With global warming we always had, and still struggle against entirely too many people, and lying institutional vested interests, downplaying or disbelieving how serious of a global catastrophe climate change is forming into.
The only reason h5n1 is “low risk” at the current time is because it’s not yet a human-to-human calamity that is already too far underway to put a stop to. We all saw how badly we all collectively handled covid.
We are now at mammal to mammal transmission, and humans are also mammals. The only actual difference between low risk, and full on pandemic, at this point, is patient zero.
You should really go back to the article and read the whole thing, as well as others that are linked to in it. Because in this one the WHO describes it as an enormous concern, because it is.
https://www.sciencealert.com/who-warns-growing-spread-of-bird-flu-to-humans-is-enormous-concern