I'd imagine that in the event of a Bird Flu pandemic, a vaccine would be developed and dispatched quite quickly, unlike with COVID, where during the early days experts were saying it was possible we'd never get a vaccine.
The threat of bird flu is so insane to me. It exists because we farm birds to eat. We are gambling with so many people's lives just so we can continue eating birds when we could instead just eat something else. I know cultivated meat will help, but that is a ways away.
It’s like this with most animals that we have learned to live with in close proximity. Zoonotic viruses are responsible for many of our diseases today, but through natural selection we are adapted to many.
This is partly why European disease wiped out Native American populations to a large extent. Europeans carrying diseases from animals they lived closely with.
But it's not (just) about us living in close proximity to them, it's about putting them in an environment that makes it impossible for them to live healthy lives and incubates potential zoonotic diseases.
We have not been factory farming for centuries. More like a century. And it hasn't been a century with a sterling track record! I think we can all recall an event in recent memory where having a lot of animals in close proximity and unhealthy conditions went super duper wrong. And we have problems with new strains of bird flu every couple of years.
People used to literally live with the livestock attached to home or even under the same roof. This was probably the case for most of agricultural history.
Factory farming is bad, over use of antibiotics in live stock is bad. But OP's point is that this is how many of the diseases in human history and therefor unlikely we would ever be able to avoid this while raising animals for food. As they said, both are true
Living in close proximity is one thing, but growing them at the speed and scale which we do with factory farming must massively increase the rate of development of viruses. It’s almost as if we designed a special program just to develop a virus that would wipe us all out.
Yeah. It's very cheap to grow large amounts of canola seed, soybeans, potatoes, corn, and wheat to make all manner of high-salt, high-fat, high-carb junk food.
The reasoning behind this is that birds have higher body temperature in our fever range.
They put mice infected with a flu virus modified to have the bird variant of a gene in an oven and the virus indeed didn't degrade as much compared to the unmodified control.
That's a vaccine for one strain: H5N1. I'm sure birds have many more strains and variants of virus. I'm sure a proper virologist can dive in here ...
I think people assume that a fever is caused by an infection but my understanding is that a fever is a response to the infection. The body raises its temperature deliberately to destroy a viral infection, even though it is unpleasant, as well as deploying the other defenses.
It seems, according to this article, that these bird 'flu infections are resistant to being cooked by a fever and that makes them more dangerous - we've lost a defense strategy.
Even with a flawed messenger pointing the wrong tools at the wrong target, isn't "avoiding ultraprocessed foods, seed oils, pesticides, and fluoride" still fundamentally a step in the right direction, compared to previous politically-connected health campaigns, like the infamous one not so long ago to "get out and move", which placed blame on kids for being unable to out-exercise a bad diet, while doing absolutely nothing to criticize or curtail the industry that pumps carbonated water full of sugar and then deliberately markets it to impressionable, easily addicted, easily manipulated children?
All criticism levelled at the people loading obscene amounts of sugar into bread, tomato sauce, baby formula, water, and every other food under the sun is good criticism, even if it comes from a sometimes-problematic mouth.
Why we keep killing the birds that survive the infection is beyond me. It's an evolutionary pressure that we refuse to allow to work.
It's almost as if we want to give the flu as many opportunities as possible to spill over, instead of just letting the birds who have immunity survive and thus basically drive the virus to extinction.
> Why we keep killing the birds that survive the infection is beyond me
We don’t know the reservoir capabilities of novel viruses, nor can we confidently rule when a previously-sick bird is well and non-infectious at scale.
> It's an evolutionary pressure that we refuse to allow to work
We’re selecting against birds that get infected in the first place. (Probably to no tangible effect. But the goal isn’t to have birds that can survive a plague, it’s to prevent it in the first place.)
Thanks for the response! I agree that it's not obvious the reservoir possibilities.
I don't agree that we're selecting against birds that get infected in the first place, or at least I don't think that's how it works. My understanding is that if any birds on a farm get sick, the whole house is killed. Maybe the whole farm.
To me that seems like selecting for lucky birds not selecting for populations that never get sick because lots of populations never get exposed.
I could be wrong on my understanding or how I interpret the impact, though, so I'm super open to learning more.
During the 20th century the American government (as well as others) put a lot of effort into finding ways to control people. Drugs, control of the media, MK Ultra and Mockingbird are just two examples of many. Everything more or less failed. Dosing unsuspecting civilians with LSD doesn't have much useful effect.
But one thing worked, and they should have known it all along. Fear. If you can make people afraid, you can control them. They want us to fear birds. They want us to fear our neighbors. They want us to fear other governments, and faceless terror organizations that are probably hiding in your bushes outside, if you see something, say something!
They did know it all along. It's been used since time immemorial.
But mass media and social media have given it new opportunities. Ironically I think we all expected that having access to more information would have been a tool against that, but it turns out to be much less effective at explaining fear than conjuring it.
I'd imagine that in the event of a Bird Flu pandemic, a vaccine would be developed and dispatched quite quickly, unlike with COVID, where during the early days experts were saying it was possible we'd never get a vaccine.
The threat of bird flu is so insane to me. It exists because we farm birds to eat. We are gambling with so many people's lives just so we can continue eating birds when we could instead just eat something else. I know cultivated meat will help, but that is a ways away.
It’s like this with most animals that we have learned to live with in close proximity. Zoonotic viruses are responsible for many of our diseases today, but through natural selection we are adapted to many.
This is partly why European disease wiped out Native American populations to a large extent. Europeans carrying diseases from animals they lived closely with.
But it's not (just) about us living in close proximity to them, it's about putting them in an environment that makes it impossible for them to live healthy lives and incubates potential zoonotic diseases.
Which has been happening for centuries.
I’m actually not arguing against this being a bad idea though lol, just giving some historic trivia.
We have not been factory farming for centuries. More like a century. And it hasn't been a century with a sterling track record! I think we can all recall an event in recent memory where having a lot of animals in close proximity and unhealthy conditions went super duper wrong. And we have problems with new strains of bird flu every couple of years.
People used to literally live with the livestock attached to home or even under the same roof. This was probably the case for most of agricultural history.
Factory farming is bad, over use of antibiotics in live stock is bad. But OP's point is that this is how many of the diseases in human history and therefor unlikely we would ever be able to avoid this while raising animals for food. As they said, both are true
Living in close proximity is one thing, but growing them at the speed and scale which we do with factory farming must massively increase the rate of development of viruses. It’s almost as if we designed a special program just to develop a virus that would wipe us all out.
But hey, cheap food!
Not even cheap food, just cheap meat. We could still have plenty of cheap, salty, fatty food without the livestock.
Yeah. It's very cheap to grow large amounts of canola seed, soybeans, potatoes, corn, and wheat to make all manner of high-salt, high-fat, high-carb junk food.
The reasoning behind this is that birds have higher body temperature in our fever range.
They put mice infected with a flu virus modified to have the bird variant of a gene in an oven and the virus indeed didn't degrade as much compared to the unmodified control.
There is a vaccine though.
https://news.sky.com/story/uk-prepares-five-million-vaccine-...
That's a vaccine for one strain: H5N1. I'm sure birds have many more strains and variants of virus. I'm sure a proper virologist can dive in here ...
I think people assume that a fever is caused by an infection but my understanding is that a fever is a response to the infection. The body raises its temperature deliberately to destroy a viral infection, even though it is unpleasant, as well as deploying the other defenses.
It seems, according to this article, that these bird 'flu infections are resistant to being cooked by a fever and that makes them more dangerous - we've lost a defense strategy.
Kurzgesagt's fever video:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cRZOUcpiOxY
Edit: This video asserts that the heat shock protein excess is what reveals an infected cell to the immune system.
Everyone pops a Tylenol/advil when they get a fever. Can’t be that bad.
[dead]
So much for the MAHA natural immunity line. No doubt avoiding ultraprocessed foods, seed oils, pesticides, and fluoride will keep bird flu at bay /s.
Even with a flawed messenger pointing the wrong tools at the wrong target, isn't "avoiding ultraprocessed foods, seed oils, pesticides, and fluoride" still fundamentally a step in the right direction, compared to previous politically-connected health campaigns, like the infamous one not so long ago to "get out and move", which placed blame on kids for being unable to out-exercise a bad diet, while doing absolutely nothing to criticize or curtail the industry that pumps carbonated water full of sugar and then deliberately markets it to impressionable, easily addicted, easily manipulated children?
All criticism levelled at the people loading obscene amounts of sugar into bread, tomato sauce, baby formula, water, and every other food under the sun is good criticism, even if it comes from a sometimes-problematic mouth.
Why we keep killing the birds that survive the infection is beyond me. It's an evolutionary pressure that we refuse to allow to work.
It's almost as if we want to give the flu as many opportunities as possible to spill over, instead of just letting the birds who have immunity survive and thus basically drive the virus to extinction.
> Why we keep killing the birds that survive the infection is beyond me
We don’t know the reservoir capabilities of novel viruses, nor can we confidently rule when a previously-sick bird is well and non-infectious at scale.
> It's an evolutionary pressure that we refuse to allow to work
We’re selecting against birds that get infected in the first place. (Probably to no tangible effect. But the goal isn’t to have birds that can survive a plague, it’s to prevent it in the first place.)
Thanks for the response! I agree that it's not obvious the reservoir possibilities.
I don't agree that we're selecting against birds that get infected in the first place, or at least I don't think that's how it works. My understanding is that if any birds on a farm get sick, the whole house is killed. Maybe the whole farm.
To me that seems like selecting for lucky birds not selecting for populations that never get sick because lots of populations never get exposed.
I could be wrong on my understanding or how I interpret the impact, though, so I'm super open to learning more.
Because it's cheaper to fill the whole farm with foam and suffocate all the birds to death, then shovel them out.
> It's an evolutionary pressure that we refuse to allow to work.
We also refuse to allow it to fail....
During the 20th century the American government (as well as others) put a lot of effort into finding ways to control people. Drugs, control of the media, MK Ultra and Mockingbird are just two examples of many. Everything more or less failed. Dosing unsuspecting civilians with LSD doesn't have much useful effect.
But one thing worked, and they should have known it all along. Fear. If you can make people afraid, you can control them. They want us to fear birds. They want us to fear our neighbors. They want us to fear other governments, and faceless terror organizations that are probably hiding in your bushes outside, if you see something, say something!
They did know it all along. It's been used since time immemorial.
But mass media and social media have given it new opportunities. Ironically I think we all expected that having access to more information would have been a tool against that, but it turns out to be much less effective at explaining fear than conjuring it.
“They want us to fear birds” is wild man
Good thing birds aren’t real.
Just don't make comments like this here. Easy political snark doesn't add to the conversation.
We've let too many bad ideas leak into the Overton window. Not every idea deserves the participation trophy of being taken seriously.
> Not every idea deserves the participation trophy of being taken seriously
They are literally the ones bringing it up.
Can we simply remove fever and coughing somehow… super annoying and more dangerous than the virus themselves sometimes.
> Can we simply remove fever and coughing somehow… super annoying and more dangerous than the virus themselves sometimes.
You're basically asking to become a bat
So we can also fly? Sign me up!
And echolocation! Time to form a queue.
> Teach Yourself to Echolocate A beginner’s guide to navigating with sound.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-to-echolocate#