Humans have caught bird flu from other types of critters but human to human transmission is the fear as a new pandemic could arise.

A case in the US has heightened that fear:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2024/12/27/bird-flu-mutation-united-states-louisiana/77265627007/


Quote:

First severe human case of bird flu in US shows 'concerning' mutation, CDC says

Viruses mutate. If the virus mutates into a very deadly strain it causes bulk deaths of the population the virus attacks, killing trillions of the virus. Other, milder mutations don’t increase the lethality of the virus but may require booster vaccinations, e.g. the yearly ’flu shot.


Quote:

The first severe case of bird flu in the U.S. is showing signs of mutation, stoking fears that the virus could become more transmissible among humans, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has announced. The sample taken from the patient in Louisiana showed mutations in the gene responsible with attaching to a host's cells, the CDC said Thursday. The CDC has confirmed a total of 66 human cases of bird flu across the United States as of Friday, although the number is believed to be higher. While the human cases have been mostly mild, the H5N1 bird flu outbreak has wreaked havoc in the American egg industry and heightened concerns about a new pandemic.

Good hygiene is the first line of defence—wash your hands after contact with animals even the family pet! Wash hands before preparing food, after visits to the WC etc etc. Basic stuff but crucial. I remember reading about a case in Australia where someone had worked with horses getting some horse saliva on his hands that he did not wash—one unnecessary casualty.


Quote:

Officials across the country are becoming increasingly concerned that bird flu could potentially spark another pandemic. The CDC said the patient in Louisiana was infected with a strain of the bird flu called D1.1. The patient, who hasn't been identified, is over 65 years old and has underlying health problems. "It has been determined that the patient had exposure to sick and dead birds in backyard flocks," the CDC said. A mutation has also been reported in British Columbia, Canada. The spread of bird flu among poultry flocks in the United States is causing egg prices to skyrocket, reaching near-record numbers as 2024 comes to a close. The average cost of a dozen Grade A large eggs was $3.65 in November, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's up from $3.37 in October and $2.50 at the beginning of the year. This week, Northwest Naturals recalled a line of its raw and frozen chow after health authorities linked the death of a cat to a batch of feed contaminated with bird flu. The recalled products include the company's 2-pound bags of its Feline Turkey Recipe that have a best-by date between May 21, 2026, and June 23, 2026. What are the symptoms of bird flu? Most people infected with bird flu in the U.S. have had mild symptoms. Symptoms of H5N1 birth flu infection in humans may include pink eye, fever, fatigue, cough, muscle aches, sore throat, nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, stuffy or runny nose and shortness of breath, according to the Cleveland Clinic. While data is limited, experts from the College of American Pathologists said the farmworkers might have had different symptoms than others infected either because of different strains of the virus, or because they were infected in different ways. The farmworkers, for instance, may have rubbed their eyes after touching a cow that was contaminated with the virus, and then developed red eyes ‒ the most common of their symptoms. By contrast, someone who came into contact with a backyard chicken or wild bird, might have inhaled the virus and therefore become sicker.

Something else to worry about  :D ;D

Quote:

Fearing that many countries would be ill prepared to deal with this potential threat, the World Health Organization in December urged all countries to develop or update their pandemic strategies. The UK government is currently revising its plans. To date, 12 people have died of the infection in Thailand. But two people there who died of the infection apparently had no direct exposure to birds, suggesting they got the virus from another person, say researchers in an “early release” article in the New England Journal of Medicine (www.nejm.org, 24 Jan 2005). The cluster started with an 11 year old girl who played and slept near infected chickens. Although there have been other instances in which doctors suspected that bird flu had spread between humans, it was always hard to be sure if the victims had not just been exposed to the same source of the virus. In this case, however, the evidence suggests that the 11 year old Thai girl transmitted the disease to her mother and aunt. Doctors investigating the deaths talked to the girl's surviving family and healthcare workers. They also tested samples from the aunt and the dead mother and the girl. The mother, a garment worker, had not been around poultry. She was in the girl's house for only 10 minutes. The aunt had had no exposure to poultry for 17 days before falling ill. That is longer than the typical two to 10 days before symptoms usually appear after infection with this virus. Neither the mother nor the aunt spread the disease to anyone else, an indication that the virus still cannot spread efficiently among humans, the researchers reported. Laboratory tests showed that the virus that infected the family had not mutated from its avian form, the researchers said. “There is so much transmission going on between birds and humans [in Asia] that the likelihood of a genetic reassortment that would make the virus able to be transmitted in humans grows every day,” says Dr Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC546057/

Now, I fully intend to keep a few chickens, no more than 3 or four but will take precautions:

The birds will spend most of their time in a run I will set up. This run will be netted with netting with holes a cm or two in diameter so wild/feral birds cannot get in the run possibly passing disease onto my chooks. Of course, the coop will be fully inside the run.

Health regulations state chickens must be kept a minimum of 4.5m from human dwellings. My birds will be kept 6m from the house. Runoff out of the run will be channeled by raised beds to the storm drain.

Chicken dung—chickens poo mostly in their sleep—will be covered by thick straw—composting it right in the coop. High compost temps should kill off any virus.

Eggs that have some dung or other dirt on the shell—don’t wash it off, this removes the protective “bloom” preventing diseases entering the egg—just rub it off with a light sanding with fine sandpaper. Write the date each egg was laid—eggs are best 3 days after lay. Also allows removal and safe destruction of eggs after infection if the worst was to happen.

Allow me to predict how this is going to turn out.

And, it's not hard to do because all the same mistakes that were made with Covid will be made with H5N1 (in fact, the "mistakes" have started already).

"It only affects birds"
"There's no risk to the general (human) population"
"It only affects birds, cattle and a few other animals"
"A few people with no contact with birds or other animals have been infected but there's no evidence of direct human to human transmission"
"The risk to the general population is low"
"More cases are being detected from unknown sources but there's still nothing to be concerned about"
"Even more cases of unknown origin have been detected but there's still no need to be alarmed"

And, finally (after the sh!t hits the fan):

"No one could have foreseen this"

What an awful time for Donald Trump to be President of the United States again... with RFK Jr. in charge of "Health".

I wonder if Trump is going to try and blame the Chinese for H5N1 like he did with Covid? Good luck with that. No siree! This one will be a good old "Made in the USA" pandemic.

And, when it does go full human to human (i.e. airborne) at what point do governments stop blaming migratory birds and start blaming airlines for the worldwide spread?

Oh, wait... seeing as the airlines have never been held accountable and made to pay for the deaths and sickness caused by them spreading Covid and the flu, etc. all over the world all the time then it's highly unlikely they will be held accountable for spreading human to human H5N1 flu.

In fact, someone was asking on X last week about border closures, testing, quarantine and masks, etc. if H5N1 goes on a worldwide killing spree and someone replied "Not going to happen, the airline industry won't allow it".

Yep, I agree. Definitely won't happen here in Australia because our pollies will be worried about losing their Chairmans Lounge memberships and other travel 'perks' for starters.

Quote:

What an awful time for Donald Trump to be President of the United States again... with RFK Jr. in charge of "Health".

Oh, sheeit, hadn’t even thought of those two idiots “managing” the response to the coming pandemic! We are stuffed!

Quote:

Bird poop may be the key to stopping the next flu pandemic. Here’s why.] Hundreds of thousands of squawking, migrating shorebirds descend on these beaches to gorge themselves on the protein- and fat-rich eggs. Over the course of a week, some of the birds will double their weight as they prepare to resume their journeys between South America and their summer breeding grounds in the Arctic. Up to 25 different species of birds stop here each spring. It’s an ecological wonder not seen anywhere else in the world, and a bonanza for scientists who are looking to stop the next pandemic. This year, their work has taken on new urgency as a dangerous flu virus, H5N1, tears through dairy cattle and poultry flocks in the United States. The world is watching to see if the threat will escalate.

There has been some cattle to human transfer of the H5N1 virus. The danger will come when and if (more a case of “when” it seems) human to human transmission happens.


Quote:

McKenzie and Seiler are part of a National Institutes of Health-funded team at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital that’s been coming to the beaches near here for almost 40 years to collect bird poop. The project is the brainchild of Dr. Robert Webster, a New Zealand virologist who was the first to understand that flu viruses come from the guts of birds.

Wow—flu viruses come from the gut with a parcel of poop!


Quote:

. . .“We were most amazed. Instead of in the respiratory tract, where we thought it was, it was replicating in the intestinal tract and they were pooping it out in the water and spreading it,” said Webster, who is now 92 and retired but still joins the collection trip when he can. The poop, or guano, of infected birds is teeming with viruses. Out of all known influenza subtypes, all but two have been found in birds. The other two subtypes have only been found in bats. On his first trip to the Delaware Bay in 1985, Webster and his team found that 20 percent of the bird poop samples they brought back with them contained influenza viruses. . .

20%, that is a lot!


Quote:

The US is in the midst of one of those transitions now. A few months before the St. Jude team arrived in Cape May this year, H5N1 had turned up for the first time in dairy cattle in Texas. The finding that H5N1 could infect cows put flu experts, including Webby, on alert. Type A influenza viruses like H5N1 had never before spread in cows. Scientists have followed H5N1 for more than two decades. Some flu viruses cause no symptoms or only mild symptoms when they infect birds. These viruses are called low pathogenic avian influenzas, or LPAI. H5N1, which makes birds very ill, is called an HPAI, for highly pathogenic avian influenza. It devastates flocks of farmed birds like chickens and turkeys. In the US, infected flocks are euthanized, or culled, as soon as the virus is identified, both to prevent the spread of the infection and to mitigate the birds’ suffering.

Massive cost and lost income to poultry farmers!


Quote:

It’s not the first time US farmers have had to contend with a highly pathogenic bird flu. In 2014, birds migrating from Europe brought H5N8 viruses to North America. Aggressive culling, resulting in the deaths of more than 50 million birds, stopped that outbreak and the US remained free of highly pathogenic bird flu viruses for years. The same strategy hasn’t stopped H5N1, however. H5N1 arrived in the US in late 2021, and despite aggressive depopulation of infected poultry flocks, has continued to spread. In the last two years, H5N1 viruses have also developed the ability to infect a growing variety of mammals such as cats, foxes, otters, and sea lions, bringing them a step closer to spreading easily in humans. H5N1 viruses can infect humans, but these infections don’t travel from person to person so far because the cells in our nose, throat and lungs have slightly different receptors than the cells that line the lungs of birds. It wouldn’t take much for that to change, however. A recent study in the journal Science found that a single key change to virus’ DNA would allow it to dock onto cells in the human lungs.

One single change, oh dear!


Quote:

In the meantime, the virus was swirling all around them, popping up in herd after herd of cows in the Midwest and then California. Dozens of human infections in farmworkers had been reported, but the ones connected to dairy cattle had mostly been mild. No human-to-human transmission had been reported. The cattle outbreaks seemed to slow briefly toward the end of the summer. Then came the serious human infections. First, there was the teenager in Vancouver, Canada, hospitalized with respiratory distress. Then, more recently, a person in Louisiana became seriously ill with H5N1 after exposure to a backyard flock. In both instances, the virus was a slightly different type than the one circulating in cows. The virus identified in cows is from the B3.13 genotype, whereas the one found in both serious human infections is the D1.1 genotype, which has been circulating in wild birds and poultry, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There have been other cases of D1.1 infections in humans, too, in Washington state, in people who were assisting with a bird culling. Those cases were not as severe.

Cont’d

Quote:

The surveillance data that the team collected recently contributed to a new preprint study, which was posted last week ahead of peer review. The study was led by Dr. Louise Moncla, a scientist who studies the evolution of viruses at the University of Pennsylvania. By analyzing surveillance data like the kind collected by Webby and his team, the Penn team found that the H5N1 outbreak that began in 2021 in North America was driven by eight separate introductions of the virus by wild, migrating waterfowl and shorebirds along the Atlantic and Pacific flyways. Moncla and her team believe that the current outbreak hasn’t been stopped by aggressive culling, as it was in 2014, because wild birds continue to introduce it into populations of farmed and backyard flocks. Laughing gulls on Cape May, New Jersey CNN They conclude that wild birds are an emerging reservoir for the virus in North America, and that surveillance of migrating birds is critical to stopping future outbreaks. Webby and his team say they plan to continue their lookout. Come May, when the first full moon rises over the Delaware Bay, they’ll be back to do it all over again. Kercher said what they found this year in the Delaware Bay was about what they’ve seen for the last 40 years: Shore birds are moving viruses around long distances. “They stop in Delaware Bay to refuel, and then the viruses get moved around while they’re stopped over and then they carry it off again,” Kercher said. There’s no way to know what lies ahead or whether the H5N1 virus will finally shape shift enough to become a danger to people. If it does, she said, they’ll be watching.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/27/health/bird-poop-stopping-the-next-flu-pandemic/index.html

Paper by the above scientists:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.16.628739v1.full

The original article contains some links.


Not looking good.

This could have been posted in Environment I suppose but the complete idiot ruining that board has me permanently banned on a lie about abuse. Still, it is VERY much about critters so is fine here.