We've been expecting bird flu to lunge at us for 2-5 years—it's already been wreaking havoc on marine mammals and other host species and then got into the US cattle herd due to factory farms feeding diseased chicken corpses to cattle—but it's a big leap from "a few poultry farm workers got sick" to "government forming emergency response team, setting up emergency clinic for infected doctors/nurses" (which seems to imply human-to-human transmission is now happening).
@cstross It's not as if we haven't known “grinding up dead animals and feeding them to other animals” is a bad idea for, oh, four decades at least. I still can't give blood in the US because I lived in the UK during the Mad Cow years. But, naturally, agribusiness never wanted to learn that lesson because, hey, what else are we going to do with all these dead chickens?
New industry rule: before you can feed it to the livestock, you have to feed it to the CEO. That should take care of the issue.
@angusm@cstross That article also shows in rather careful undertones that nobody in charge wants to mass-test the herds. Better not upset the agribusiness donors. What a giant shitshow only four years after Covid. We’ve learned nothing.
@tsturm@angusm@cstross we do compulsorily mass test the herds, in the UK anyway. I have a set of BVD test samples I have to send to the lab tomorrow, from testing of this year's calves.
Whether we test for the right things is not a question I'm qualified to answer, but all cattle are compulsorily tested. I believe sheep and pigs are, too, but as I don't keep them I'm not certain.
@simon_brooke@angusm@cstross The lets-not-test issue is - predictably - happening with the giant agro-businesses in the US. Pretty sure that farmers in the UK and the EU are testing, at least for the basics.
@angusm I think we should have fed ground-up John Selwyn Gummer to the cattle after that force-his-daughters-to-eat-a-mad-cow-burger-on-TV stunt he pulled.
@owenblacker That's an unforgiveably short-sighted US-centric view of the problem. This latest outbreak is in India; meanwhile poultry workers have been dying in Vietnam and China and seal populations have been massacred.
Add that this follows COVID19, which is notorious for resetting or suppressing your immune system. And also that we're not in flu season right now (which usually peaks in winter).
@quinn Nope, COVID19 is immunosuppressant too. (Not as serious as measles for wiping vaccination memory, nor as serious as HIV for wiping out T cells, but it is problematic that way.)
@cstross I worked this potential threat for about 12+ years in the IC. We don't know when or if easy spread between humans will occur. The couple mutations necessary have been studied. These personnel were with sick poultry. There are some cases of patients only close to sick people, not birds, yet pandemic hasn't happened. Let's wait for genetic analysis before going all apocalypse. Be prepared for any type of disaster is always good advice. Be calm is too.
@cstross (And you can search my toots for #H5N1 and you'll see I'm no H5N1 pandemic "denier" just in case it sounds that way. I've been watching and waiting for many years on this particular strain of flu. I don't see any reason in the article to think "this is it.")
"As soon as bird flu was confirmed, a series of actions took place under the guidelines mentioned in the Ministry of Animal Husbandry. The first action is a total ban on the sale and purchase of all birds in one kilometre radius of the epicentre."
This is India. Compare this to the US response so far with the outbreak in cattle.
@FredKiesche@cstross That is shocking. The outbreak happens once every year in parts of India and don't last that long. I just read a BBC article and it has been an eye opener.
@zdl We got very lucky with COVID19 insofar as it came along late enough that mRNA vaccines were available for widespread roll-out within 9 months. And it's STILL killing people.
We have flu vaccines, and a process for pushing out flu shots for new strains: let's hope it's ready in time for the new bird flu, it looks horrendously lethal by flu standards.
@cstross You got luckier that it dropped in Wuhan. Aside from the initial month, the response to COVID-19 was very professional and very competent here. (Wuhan being a huge university city helped, likely.) Things would have been far, far worse if SARS-CoV-2 had dropped in a place as incompetent and corrupt as, say, Shanghai.
@cstross A friend of mine in Canada just pointed something out.
I'll quote him directly: "Last time there was a major H1N1 scare there were mass vaccinations and people just got themselves vaccinated. This would not be the case now."
I think this, more than anything, scares me about this upcoming flu. H5N1 likely already has a vaccine that can be easily tweaked to fit ... but how many people will actually take it? (And will the US be idiotic and charge for it?)
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