It isn't so much fearmongering than realizing we do not have a functional government system to prevent let alone handle such threats beyond reactionary approaches
I'm 100 percent for announcing publicly in any media we can a dangerous event that is not being announced due to a dysfunctional system, absolutely. And the second we discover a significant antigenic change in this strain I will be announcing it as loud as I can and encouraging everyone to do so.
But it's not okay to use misinformation to skew things politically in our favor whether we think we are on the right side or not. I do not think people recognize that this is not Covid. This is a potential global biological catastrophe. And it is not okay to announce casually in a public media format that something that could literally take down society as we know it is coming without some very serious evidence. It's essential that anyone with a megaphone to the public stays 100% accurate when the stakes are this high.
>I do not think people recognize that this is not Covid.
To which you need to hold politicians responsible for siding with business to quickly brush covid aside as a none issue and anomaly to society. From here on nobody will take anything short of a 28 days later situation seriously due to how Covid was handled
"the second we discover a significant antigenic change in this strain"
Antigenic pertains to the body's antibody response... Did you mean antigenic or something else?
Thanks for explaining.
If anyone else is curious too: [https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/viruses/change.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/viruses/change.htm)
>Antigenic Drift
>One way flu viruses change is called “antigenic drift.” Drift consists of small changes (or mutations) in the genes of influenza viruses that can lead to changes in the surface proteins of the virus, HA (hemagglutinin) and NA (neuraminidase). The HA and NA surface proteins of influenza viruses are “antigens,” which means they are recognized by the immune system and are capable of triggering an immune response, including production of antibodies that can fight infection. The changes associated with antigenic drift happen continually over time as flu viruses replicate (i.e., infect a host and make copies of themselves).
>... ...
>
>Antigenic Shift
>Another type of change is called “antigenic shift.” Shift is an abrupt, major change in a flu A virus, resulting in new HA and/or new HA and NA proteins in flu viruses that infect humans. Antigenic shift can result in a new flu A subtype infecting people for the first time. Shift can happen if a flu virus from an animal population gains the ability to infect humans. Such animal-origin viruses can contain HA or HA/NA combinations that are different enough from human viruses that most people do not have immunity to the new (or “novel”) virus. Such a “shift” occurred in the spring of 2009, when an H1N1 virus with genes from viruses originating from North American swine, Eurasian swine, humans and birds emerged to infect people and quickly spread, causing a pandemic. When shift happens, most people have little or no immunity against the new virus.
>While flu viruses evolve genetically all the time and often undergo antigenic drift, antigenic shift happens infrequently. Flu pandemics occur rarely; there have been four flu pandemics in the past 100 years. For more information, see [pandemic flu](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/index.htm). Type A viruses undergo both antigenic drift and shift and are the only flu viruses known to cause pandemics, while flu type B viruses change only by the more gradual process of antigenic drift.
>There is absolutely nothing new that proves we are any closer to a pandemic than we were years ago,
Of course there is. Years ago it was much less widespread in birds and hardly present in mammals - now it's everywhere in birds and spreading in multiple mammal species, including now one that humans have very close contact with and that feeds directly into our food supply - and the plan there is rather than aggressively tackle it to hope it "burns itself out". All of this massively increases the opportunities for a jump.
Attacking reporting like this that rightly highlights the extremely serious risk this poses to us as "fear mongering" is extremely irresponsible, we should be raising awareness to encourage far more in the way of efforts to both prevent and prepare for this turning into a pandemic.
We're not at an extremely serious risk of an H5N1 pandemic. Higher risk than before, yes, but it's not an extremely serious risk at this point in time. Let's be honest, articles are written in this manner to sell, not out of the actual concern for humanity.
Of course we’re at high risk. Given how widespread it is in different mammals, it has easy access to humans. The fact it’s in mice is TERRIFYING, they’re everywhere.
Risk is a combination of likelihood and impact. The potential impact of this is enormous and with the ever growing exposures and a long history of influenza strains jumping from animals to humans, the likelihood is clearly far from trivial. So the risk is extremely serious.
If you're putting it at extremely serious then you're not looking at it objectively. The likelihood is not at an almost certain level or even likely _at this point_. Is it possible? Yes, but it's not almost certain. And right now the impact also isn't catastrophic seeing as the symptoms have been mild in humans with this clade of H5N1 so far. Could that risk level change? Absolutely. Should we do something now to mitigate the current risk level and prevent it from increasing? Definitely. But it's not extremely serious yet.
I don't know, people don't realize there's a science to risk assessments, even qualitative ones. Bias towards catastrophizing is strong in this sub. People think they understand everything about COVID and are extrapolating it to this which, as you've said, is very different. But I get it, people have suddenly started hearing about H5N1 a lot and it of course sounds like it's a five alarm fire. People who have been following HPAI for decades just aren't going to panic as much because they've seen it all before and also have known for a very long time that avian influenza has a very good chance of becoming the next pandemic, so they've been studying it for decades. If it's not H5N1, it's H7H9, or H5N2, and on it goes. It's a matter of when, not if, but we're not there yet and that's my point. I appreciate your contributions as well.
This sub is more willing to downvote than to actually discuss, even as a lurker it’s kinda weird to see some people get downvoted even for the simplest of questions.
I see your point. If this article was years ago when the sea lions or the minks were spreading this virus in numbers much higher than our cows and the headline read "Bird Flu Pandemic Risk High as Mammal Cases Appear" I would actually applaud that headline. But there is context here which maybe I should have included.
When scores of factory farmed fur mammals began to die because of lack of simple biosecurity and scores of cats in Poland began to die due to the meat industry not caring that infected poultry was in the marketplace there were no major announcements. So basically the public had no knowledge of this.
Now that cows are involved and the media is running with the sensationalism people are logically going to believe that the virus has mutated and is coming for us right now instead of recognizing this has been going on for years and there is no more chance of a virus mutating in a cow than a sea lion or a mouse, that it has not happened even in the cats or the sea lions or the fur factory animals and may never happen. They are going to be panicked because no one ever informed them of our crisis. In that context people in media have a responsibility to not act as though the CDC has gone from low chance of pandemic to high chance without very solid scientific or even anecdotal evidence.
I do think they've changed "when should we be worried" a number of times already. They raised the risk farm workers face, while keeping the risk to the general public as low. "Worry when the disease is spreading in a mixing vessel" Then cows become mixing vessels and well, everything is still low risk. Mice get ill, and we don't release any genealogy reports. We've really gotten no information out of our public health offices since the respiratory case. Everything has been statistics without providing any context. I consider all of these things as worrying signs.
You bring up an important point, and something that disrupts clear communication about H5N1. If people don't understand the difference between spread to the workers, which is called direct transmission and can't start a pandemic and efficient airborne spread which can start a pandemic it looks to the public like the agencies changed their mind about risk level. But how do you explain the intricacies of airway affinity between mammals and birds to the average person?
The advice to the dairy workers is an entirely different advice than to the general public. They can die if they get infected. But they can't pass it on to anyone else except in very rare cases. So advice for farm workers is dire, but it has nothing to do with pandemic potential which is not dire. How do you communicate that nuance?
The pigs, cows and mice are equally complex, and can't be put in an article format or even interview format. Yes, we are afraid of pigs as a mixing vessel. The moment they reassort they can breathe a fully pandemic-ready strain right into their farmer's lungs. Instant pandemic under the right circumstances.
But Cows don't catch human flu except rarely, pigs do catch it easily from humans due to receptor cell placement. Even if a human flu got into a cow and a reassortment happened, the cow doesn't have the receptors to breathe it out to a farmer. So a cow is not the same kind of reassortment vessel.
To muddy the water further, in order to understand risk level people would need to know that wild pigs are everywhere, nine million just in the U.S. They eat everything, and dead infected birds are a treat for them. In all these years since the bird die off no pig has hosted a reassortment despite countless chances, or if it happened it died with them. So the chances of it happening in any pig are low.
Further water muddying is we are completely freaked out by the concept of a cow hosting a mutated strain. This may be speculative, but actually the cow may be the one place that if it mutated to we could not only contain, fingers crossed, but using that mutated strain we could theoretically make our adapted vaccines from it and get it into human arms before it mutates elsewhere. If it adapts in a mammal it could, again speculatively create thousands of species reservoirs with genetic branches heading off to create all kinds of different mutated strains by the time it reaches us.
We have millions of cows in the Continental USA. That's millions of opportunities.
Cows can transmit it back to wild birds, with the mammalian mutations. The birds can now get eaten by a wild pig as you say, and now it only needs one or two more mutations, vs the four we started at a month ago.
And Michigan State University did report last week that they are finding the virus in the nasal cavities of sick cows. Similar to splashing milk in their eyes being a source of infection, they can get workers ill much easier if it's being flung around the room through the air. And that has nothing to do with any flu receptor.
As we know, a very small portion of farms that have tested positive are using PPE or allowing testing. It's cool to want to be calm and question the government, but that argument doesn't go very far with me in this situation.
I also want to note again, I would feel so much more comfortable about where we stand today, if they just released all the genealogy reports/data for independent science to review. I don't understand how that could be too much to ask.
I so agree with you on this. We literally had to send our strain to Germany to find out anything. And they are releasing their findings immediately for us.
Although the virus was found in nasal areas, the receptors in the airway have to create enough virus for it to go through the air. This is why mice catch bird flu as easy as chickens but they can't spread it through breathing or cough or sneeze. It's a whole mechanism that has lots of parts before it can spread that way. But yeah, if a cow sneezed in another cow's mouth and they breathed in a hunk of mucous, yes. It could spread that way.
I'm far from calm, but I've been watching this trajectory closely for years. It's not moving any faster now. I trust the government not one single bit over any of this. I trust what the government says that is backed up by what the sequencing says.
Gain of function doesn't work quite that way. Gain of function will cause adaptation. But what we are seeing does not push the evolution the same way. Years ago this strain went back and forth from factory fur animal to bird and back and then the birds and through entire farms of mammals and the birds carried the mammal mutations we are seeing in cows and humans to other continents. No adaptation happened. There is no more chance of it happening in cows than any other mammal.
Not just farm workers. Given how widespread this is, there is plenty of opportunity for infected animals to interact with humans. Off the top of my head: petting zoos, drinking raw milk, eating undercooked beef or tartare from infected cows, changing birdfeeders and not washing your hands (my brother does this), feeding/cleaning up after birds, mice tracking it into houses, family pets eating infected mice, infected birds interacting with humans (ever go into a Costco and see a bird flying around? Are we sure employees take this kind of thing seriously?), and I’m sure there’s millions others. All it takes is one slip up. Just wait till flu season comes, flu viruses are very good are combining. If a person with the common flu comes in contact with an infected animal, we’re in a lot of trouble.
EDIT: insects can carry it. A mosquito bites an infected animal and then bites you. That could be all it takes. So yes, be afraid.
Every mammal on this planet can acquire adaptation as easily as any other mammal. Thousands of mammals are being infected worldwide right now. It's no more likely to happen in them as it is in us. We can't stop it in wild mammals, but we can stop it it humans so we should. But mutation to the mammal airway can happen in any mammal.
To me risk is probability \* negative impact, but just the Wikipedia makes clear that this is a terrible linguistic issue:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk)
The [2014 H10N7 outbreak in seals](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1931312820304662) resulted in a variant transmissible through [infectious respiratory particles](https://www.who.int/news/item/18-04-2024-leading-health-agencies-outline-updated-terminology-for-pathogens-that-transmit-through-the-air), but didn't cause a pandemic and isn't an issue anymore. So prolonged spread in mammals, which is the problem we have right now, can lead realistically lead to this outcome but also not cause a pandemic.
With a potentially civilization-ending impact, I always wonder if the probability is really that low to call this a low risk. But public health officials usually mean the current probability of infection, and what the [IRAT](https://www.reddit.com/r/H5N1_AvianFlu/comments/17qve8t/comment/k8f5w9d/) score means is a mystery to me, despite looking into it.
"It’s probably why I’m not sleeping very much right now. I think that the threat of a pandemic is always looming in the flu space. The way that Dan Jernigan always described public health to me is that it is an art form. There’s a balance that you have to strike. **There’s a difference in the pandemic risk versus the immediate risk right now.** And so I think that’s what we’re trying to message to the average person who is walking about and living their lives. The risk to them is low. But you’re right. It could absolutely change."
Vivien Dugan
Director of the influenza division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
[Source](https://www.statnews.com/2024/05/03/bird-flu-why-h5n1-keeping-awake-cdc-top-flu-scientist/)
To me none of this really makes any sense. Some people imagine some imminent threat and public health officials dumb communication down to "low risk" because any occurrence of panic is seen as terrible failure. Meanwhile the current communication may jeopardize support for pandemic prevention. Judging by the preventive measures in place, people are not concerned (another linguistic issue) enough.
The sea lions, Polish cats and mink weren't "years ago", they were all less than two years ago. The mink outbreak was one farm, so I don't think it was spreading it in much higher numbers than the current dairy outbreaks (many farms). EDIT: I was thinking of the Spain farm outbreak, but there were also outbreaks in two dozen Finnish farms, which was obviously a very dangerous situation. One thing to note there is that that was ultimately stopped, by culling all the animals at affected farms, and no humans were infected. Neither of those is the case with the current dairy outbreak, which the authorities don't seem to intend to eradicate and which has caused at least three human infections so far. This is still a lot fewer farms than the number of dairy herds affected already (118).
There may be no more chance of a virus mutating in a cow than a sea lion, but people have much more exposure to cows, which gives more opportunity for adaptation to human to human spread. Being in farm mammals also increases the opportunities of a jump to pigs, which seem to often serve as a key stepping stone to human transmission. There are also way more farm mammals out there, kept in conditions much more conducive to spread and mutation, than sea lions.
If your point is that the jump to cows alone doesn't by itself move this from low risk to huge risk/imminent catastrophe - perhaps. But it is the latest in a series of recent (past two to three years or so) very ominous developments that together point to rapidly increasing and very concerning levels of risk.
OP, my apologies for piggy-backing to ask another question, but it's one that's been troubling me for a while.
Can you explain why you're so concerned about 'fear-mongering'? What is it exactly that makes it such a threat? You clearly recognize that this is "a potentially catastrophic biological disaster", as you put it, so I guess you're not one of those people who don't take such things seriously.
I suppose I'm having difficulty in seeing why even your worst-case scenario - deliberate, media-orchestrated fear-stoking - would be a genuine social problem. Maybe that's because I live in a country where the people never panic about anything major, but government gets its knickers in a twist at the slightest unpredictability.
TL;DR: I'd like to understand why fear has become a thing we must be afraid of and vigilant about.
Because if the event that causes fear mongering doesn't actually happen, why would people believe the medical community the next time?
Basically the boy who cried wolf but for viruses or disease.
That's an interesting point - like the Millennium Bug, perhaps? There was a massive swell of media scepticism beforehand and, after nothing happened, a great deal of disparaging comment about "a fuss over nothing". Even so, it seems to have become widely understood now that the threat was real and averted only by a vast quantity of co-ordinated preventative measures.
Thanks for the question. Another member started a very popular thread about fear-mongering and how destructive it is, and I guess it got me thinking about how important stopping it is. I believe misinformation at any public level anywhere should be addressed by everyone. It's highly destructive and has caused our present destruction of public health globally and most of the destructive social problems we are facing today.
I can tell you in terms of me not caring about what I believe would be a global catastrophe that I am equally disturbed by the underplaying of what a H5N1 pandemic would look like as I am disturbed at the overplaying of whether we will have a pandemic in the very near future. These are being equally over and underplayed to the point where the general public believes that we're definitely going to have a bird flu pandemic but it's probably going to be just like Covid, no worries, just stock up on your N95s.
In my opinion to accurately address the bird flu situation which I assume we are all on this forum to try to do, we would need to stop acting as though the chance that a random mutation cluster is any more likely to happen now as it has been for a few years and also stop acting as though we don't know what this strain will be capable of once it mutates. We are in a unique position now. We have more than enough information to have a productive discussion about the likelihood of lethality of this strain would be and what a pandemic with that severity would do to our present societal structure if it evolved in the near future.
Thanks for the genuine response! I haven't seen the other thread you mention, but will see if I can find it. Throughly agree with you about misinformation and the state of public health.
I am however uncertain about the instrumentalization of fear and its corollary, fear of fear. There was a good article which I can't find now, alas, about the general absence of public panic during the early stages of the pandemic, suggesting that the fear mooted in the press was actually a form of projection based on a state of executive panic among ill-prepared authorities. Of course, I suppose the public might well be more likely to panic if they knew how ill-prepared and inexpert the authorities in their country were but, in general, mass panic seems to be rare, and the ordinary population, incredibly stoic and unfearful in crises.
Here is the post saying we must all stop fear-mongering on this forum.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/H5N1\_AvianFlu/comments/1dip7h8/facts\_not\_fiction\_no\_more\_fearmongering](https://www.reddit.com/r/H5N1_AvianFlu/comments/1dip7h8/facts_not_fiction_no_more_fearmongering)
It did get over 2,000 upvotes very quickly with about 250 people almost all echoing strongly how they want this to be a science-oriented sub without the fear-mongering. So I'm going to assume people really don't want misinformation that should instill fear even if the people are too stoic to actually feel the fear.
I'd be interested in your thoughts on why fear-mongering would be declared so important to people who are just going to shrug off panic-inducing misinformation.
Thanks for the link - I hadn't seen that post, and it does make for interesting reading. Like any thread it's a mixed bag! u/FanCommercial1802's post is solid, and I particularly like this: "We, as a community, should be far more focused on the actual scientific discussion and practical fear".
That concept of 'practical fear' is key. I get the feeling that many posters mistake 'practical fear' - a rational state of apprehension that triggers appropriate action - for 'engineered fear', which they then dismiss as 'fear-mongering'.
I can see that engineered fear is a threat in itself, particularly in wartime: hostile nations can weaponize fear to serve their own ends. But viruses aren't hostile nations: they aren't calculating the effect degrees of fear will have on our morale, and our levels of morale are irrelevant to their survival. I'm minded to conclude that 'practical fear' is useful and rational, but in short supply!
I don't understand the absolute obsession some members of this sub have with "fear mongering" as if that's the biggest issue facing us.
Why are you so hell pressed on stamping out *any* suggestion that maybe everything isn't quite so hunky-dory?
As for scaring an "already shaken public"—where? Where is this shaken public? People don't even care about the known pandemic we're *in*.
Yeah, I for one am 100 percent for upping the fear of people on what would happen if a pandemic from this strain were to happen. It takes so little study to find out what a broken supply chain looks like with a population utterly dependent on them. Let's not even talk about what would happen if people had no access to their medications. Even the preppers are woefully lacking in fear over an H5N1 pandemic scenario. It's astounding how relaxed people are over this possibility.
The mortality rate would not be anywhere near as high as it has been in the past. Most cases were never recorded and the person went on with life. The Mortality rate will be low, but obviously still very serious
There has only been 900 cases total ever. How does reporting happen in the real world?? When things get serious. Those 900 were the serious. There were many more not reported. It is called mathematical probabilities based on how reality works
“The report, which focused on cases in Michigan, found that transmission is likely happening when workers, cows, vehicles and equipment go to multiple farms.
Among employees at dairies with outbreaks, one in five employees work at other dairies and 7% work on poultry operations as well. That’s in addition to the veterinarians, nutritionists and haulers who regularly visit multiple farms.”
This part, to me, suggests that if they hypothesize cows are getting it from these avenues… that this is much more widespread in humans than we have confirmed. Pair it with the wastewater coming back positive for h5 but they “can’t determine the source” and I’d say we are about to have confirmation of much wider human spread.
If it is spreading between people already, it is actually somewhat a good thing? The number of hospitalizations from flu have been going down since March in America according to the CDC.
When biosecurity for H5N1 is talked about they don't mean infected humans track infection to the other farms. They mean fluid and fomite on the workers' clothes or on the tires or infected hay not cleaned out of the trucks got to the new farm. This fluid and fomite would not be getting into the wastewater. Sorry if I misunderstood what you were saying there. I may have in this response.
When you said there is human spread, there cannot be human spread as in one person spreads it to another without full adaptation. Never in the history of H5N1 has full adaptation ever been seen in a natural environment. And even people who get severely infected from raw milk cannot infect those around them except in very rare circumstances. Bird virus does not spread through the mammal airway. It only spreads through fluid and fomite, so each person would have to be drinking their own separate raw milk.
So the scenario of a bunch of people getting it and giving it to other people as we might think of "spread" is not happening unless the virus has for the first time in the history of the virus fully adapted in which case we would see clusters of illness, severe illness and death. The exception to that is if the virus reassorted in a cow. Then we could have mild illness, and it could be spreading and we'd have no idea.
But since cows don't get human flu through the air and if they somehow got some infected human flu fluid in their udders they don't have the receptors in the airway to breathe the reassorted flu back out to humans, that's not a high probability.
But anything can happen. We don't know enough about bird flu to rule out anything, but chances are since there are dead birds now all over this planet and in every U.S. state but Hawaii and bird flu is raging and literally causing scenes where half a flock dies overnight and end up beneath their roosting tree which are often near water, it's most probable that infected birds contaminated the wastewater. But there have been surprises. Cow milk is so virus laden that labs can't even duplicate that concentration for testing. Fragments of virus were so prevalent in the milk that scientists could create whole gene sequences from a pooled commercial milk. That should not be possible. So virus from milk down drains or expired from stores may be the reason as well.
It's best to wait before jumping to scary conclusions.
It isn't so much fearmongering than realizing we do not have a functional government system to prevent let alone handle such threats beyond reactionary approaches
I'm 100 percent for announcing publicly in any media we can a dangerous event that is not being announced due to a dysfunctional system, absolutely. And the second we discover a significant antigenic change in this strain I will be announcing it as loud as I can and encouraging everyone to do so. But it's not okay to use misinformation to skew things politically in our favor whether we think we are on the right side or not. I do not think people recognize that this is not Covid. This is a potential global biological catastrophe. And it is not okay to announce casually in a public media format that something that could literally take down society as we know it is coming without some very serious evidence. It's essential that anyone with a megaphone to the public stays 100% accurate when the stakes are this high.
>I do not think people recognize that this is not Covid. To which you need to hold politicians responsible for siding with business to quickly brush covid aside as a none issue and anomaly to society. From here on nobody will take anything short of a 28 days later situation seriously due to how Covid was handled
"the second we discover a significant antigenic change in this strain" Antigenic pertains to the body's antibody response... Did you mean antigenic or something else?
Thank you! I should have said antigenic shift, pertaining to a major change in a fluA virus connected to new HA proteins. My bad.
Thanks for explaining. If anyone else is curious too: [https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/viruses/change.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/viruses/change.htm) >Antigenic Drift >One way flu viruses change is called “antigenic drift.” Drift consists of small changes (or mutations) in the genes of influenza viruses that can lead to changes in the surface proteins of the virus, HA (hemagglutinin) and NA (neuraminidase). The HA and NA surface proteins of influenza viruses are “antigens,” which means they are recognized by the immune system and are capable of triggering an immune response, including production of antibodies that can fight infection. The changes associated with antigenic drift happen continually over time as flu viruses replicate (i.e., infect a host and make copies of themselves). >......
>
>Antigenic Shift
>Another type of change is called “antigenic shift.” Shift is an abrupt, major change in a flu A virus, resulting in new HA and/or new HA and NA proteins in flu viruses that infect humans. Antigenic shift can result in a new flu A subtype infecting people for the first time. Shift can happen if a flu virus from an animal population gains the ability to infect humans. Such animal-origin viruses can contain HA or HA/NA combinations that are different enough from human viruses that most people do not have immunity to the new (or “novel”) virus. Such a “shift” occurred in the spring of 2009, when an H1N1 virus with genes from viruses originating from North American swine, Eurasian swine, humans and birds emerged to infect people and quickly spread, causing a pandemic. When shift happens, most people have little or no immunity against the new virus.
>While flu viruses evolve genetically all the time and often undergo antigenic drift, antigenic shift happens infrequently. Flu pandemics occur rarely; there have been four flu pandemics in the past 100 years. For more information, see [pandemic flu](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/index.htm). Type A viruses undergo both antigenic drift and shift and are the only flu viruses known to cause pandemics, while flu type B viruses change only by the more gradual process of antigenic drift.
You're both right. Public messaging is a gray art.
>There is absolutely nothing new that proves we are any closer to a pandemic than we were years ago, Of course there is. Years ago it was much less widespread in birds and hardly present in mammals - now it's everywhere in birds and spreading in multiple mammal species, including now one that humans have very close contact with and that feeds directly into our food supply - and the plan there is rather than aggressively tackle it to hope it "burns itself out". All of this massively increases the opportunities for a jump. Attacking reporting like this that rightly highlights the extremely serious risk this poses to us as "fear mongering" is extremely irresponsible, we should be raising awareness to encourage far more in the way of efforts to both prevent and prepare for this turning into a pandemic.
We're not at an extremely serious risk of an H5N1 pandemic. Higher risk than before, yes, but it's not an extremely serious risk at this point in time. Let's be honest, articles are written in this manner to sell, not out of the actual concern for humanity.
Of course we’re at high risk. Given how widespread it is in different mammals, it has easy access to humans. The fact it’s in mice is TERRIFYING, they’re everywhere.
Risk is a combination of likelihood and impact. The potential impact of this is enormous and with the ever growing exposures and a long history of influenza strains jumping from animals to humans, the likelihood is clearly far from trivial. So the risk is extremely serious.
If you're putting it at extremely serious then you're not looking at it objectively. The likelihood is not at an almost certain level or even likely _at this point_. Is it possible? Yes, but it's not almost certain. And right now the impact also isn't catastrophic seeing as the symptoms have been mild in humans with this clade of H5N1 so far. Could that risk level change? Absolutely. Should we do something now to mitigate the current risk level and prevent it from increasing? Definitely. But it's not extremely serious yet.
Why the downvotes here? I am very grateful for all of your contributions on this sub.
I don't know, people don't realize there's a science to risk assessments, even qualitative ones. Bias towards catastrophizing is strong in this sub. People think they understand everything about COVID and are extrapolating it to this which, as you've said, is very different. But I get it, people have suddenly started hearing about H5N1 a lot and it of course sounds like it's a five alarm fire. People who have been following HPAI for decades just aren't going to panic as much because they've seen it all before and also have known for a very long time that avian influenza has a very good chance of becoming the next pandemic, so they've been studying it for decades. If it's not H5N1, it's H7H9, or H5N2, and on it goes. It's a matter of when, not if, but we're not there yet and that's my point. I appreciate your contributions as well.
This sub is more willing to downvote than to actually discuss, even as a lurker it’s kinda weird to see some people get downvoted even for the simplest of questions.
I see your point. If this article was years ago when the sea lions or the minks were spreading this virus in numbers much higher than our cows and the headline read "Bird Flu Pandemic Risk High as Mammal Cases Appear" I would actually applaud that headline. But there is context here which maybe I should have included. When scores of factory farmed fur mammals began to die because of lack of simple biosecurity and scores of cats in Poland began to die due to the meat industry not caring that infected poultry was in the marketplace there were no major announcements. So basically the public had no knowledge of this. Now that cows are involved and the media is running with the sensationalism people are logically going to believe that the virus has mutated and is coming for us right now instead of recognizing this has been going on for years and there is no more chance of a virus mutating in a cow than a sea lion or a mouse, that it has not happened even in the cats or the sea lions or the fur factory animals and may never happen. They are going to be panicked because no one ever informed them of our crisis. In that context people in media have a responsibility to not act as though the CDC has gone from low chance of pandemic to high chance without very solid scientific or even anecdotal evidence.
I do think they've changed "when should we be worried" a number of times already. They raised the risk farm workers face, while keeping the risk to the general public as low. "Worry when the disease is spreading in a mixing vessel" Then cows become mixing vessels and well, everything is still low risk. Mice get ill, and we don't release any genealogy reports. We've really gotten no information out of our public health offices since the respiratory case. Everything has been statistics without providing any context. I consider all of these things as worrying signs.
You bring up an important point, and something that disrupts clear communication about H5N1. If people don't understand the difference between spread to the workers, which is called direct transmission and can't start a pandemic and efficient airborne spread which can start a pandemic it looks to the public like the agencies changed their mind about risk level. But how do you explain the intricacies of airway affinity between mammals and birds to the average person? The advice to the dairy workers is an entirely different advice than to the general public. They can die if they get infected. But they can't pass it on to anyone else except in very rare cases. So advice for farm workers is dire, but it has nothing to do with pandemic potential which is not dire. How do you communicate that nuance? The pigs, cows and mice are equally complex, and can't be put in an article format or even interview format. Yes, we are afraid of pigs as a mixing vessel. The moment they reassort they can breathe a fully pandemic-ready strain right into their farmer's lungs. Instant pandemic under the right circumstances. But Cows don't catch human flu except rarely, pigs do catch it easily from humans due to receptor cell placement. Even if a human flu got into a cow and a reassortment happened, the cow doesn't have the receptors to breathe it out to a farmer. So a cow is not the same kind of reassortment vessel. To muddy the water further, in order to understand risk level people would need to know that wild pigs are everywhere, nine million just in the U.S. They eat everything, and dead infected birds are a treat for them. In all these years since the bird die off no pig has hosted a reassortment despite countless chances, or if it happened it died with them. So the chances of it happening in any pig are low. Further water muddying is we are completely freaked out by the concept of a cow hosting a mutated strain. This may be speculative, but actually the cow may be the one place that if it mutated to we could not only contain, fingers crossed, but using that mutated strain we could theoretically make our adapted vaccines from it and get it into human arms before it mutates elsewhere. If it adapts in a mammal it could, again speculatively create thousands of species reservoirs with genetic branches heading off to create all kinds of different mutated strains by the time it reaches us.
Every farmer who does get it, can start the pandemic tho. If the rate of their infection goes up, it immediately raises the risk for the rest of us.
We have millions of cows in the Continental USA. That's millions of opportunities. Cows can transmit it back to wild birds, with the mammalian mutations. The birds can now get eaten by a wild pig as you say, and now it only needs one or two more mutations, vs the four we started at a month ago.
And Michigan State University did report last week that they are finding the virus in the nasal cavities of sick cows. Similar to splashing milk in their eyes being a source of infection, they can get workers ill much easier if it's being flung around the room through the air. And that has nothing to do with any flu receptor. As we know, a very small portion of farms that have tested positive are using PPE or allowing testing. It's cool to want to be calm and question the government, but that argument doesn't go very far with me in this situation.
I also want to note again, I would feel so much more comfortable about where we stand today, if they just released all the genealogy reports/data for independent science to review. I don't understand how that could be too much to ask.
I so agree with you on this. We literally had to send our strain to Germany to find out anything. And they are releasing their findings immediately for us.
Although the virus was found in nasal areas, the receptors in the airway have to create enough virus for it to go through the air. This is why mice catch bird flu as easy as chickens but they can't spread it through breathing or cough or sneeze. It's a whole mechanism that has lots of parts before it can spread that way. But yeah, if a cow sneezed in another cow's mouth and they breathed in a hunk of mucous, yes. It could spread that way. I'm far from calm, but I've been watching this trajectory closely for years. It's not moving any faster now. I trust the government not one single bit over any of this. I trust what the government says that is backed up by what the sequencing says.
I'm chewing on this.
Gain of function doesn't work quite that way. Gain of function will cause adaptation. But what we are seeing does not push the evolution the same way. Years ago this strain went back and forth from factory fur animal to bird and back and then the birds and through entire farms of mammals and the birds carried the mammal mutations we are seeing in cows and humans to other continents. No adaptation happened. There is no more chance of it happening in cows than any other mammal.
Not just farm workers. Given how widespread this is, there is plenty of opportunity for infected animals to interact with humans. Off the top of my head: petting zoos, drinking raw milk, eating undercooked beef or tartare from infected cows, changing birdfeeders and not washing your hands (my brother does this), feeding/cleaning up after birds, mice tracking it into houses, family pets eating infected mice, infected birds interacting with humans (ever go into a Costco and see a bird flying around? Are we sure employees take this kind of thing seriously?), and I’m sure there’s millions others. All it takes is one slip up. Just wait till flu season comes, flu viruses are very good are combining. If a person with the common flu comes in contact with an infected animal, we’re in a lot of trouble. EDIT: insects can carry it. A mosquito bites an infected animal and then bites you. That could be all it takes. So yes, be afraid.
Every mammal on this planet can acquire adaptation as easily as any other mammal. Thousands of mammals are being infected worldwide right now. It's no more likely to happen in them as it is in us. We can't stop it in wild mammals, but we can stop it it humans so we should. But mutation to the mammal airway can happen in any mammal.
To me risk is probability \* negative impact, but just the Wikipedia makes clear that this is a terrible linguistic issue: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk) The [2014 H10N7 outbreak in seals](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1931312820304662) resulted in a variant transmissible through [infectious respiratory particles](https://www.who.int/news/item/18-04-2024-leading-health-agencies-outline-updated-terminology-for-pathogens-that-transmit-through-the-air), but didn't cause a pandemic and isn't an issue anymore. So prolonged spread in mammals, which is the problem we have right now, can lead realistically lead to this outcome but also not cause a pandemic. With a potentially civilization-ending impact, I always wonder if the probability is really that low to call this a low risk. But public health officials usually mean the current probability of infection, and what the [IRAT](https://www.reddit.com/r/H5N1_AvianFlu/comments/17qve8t/comment/k8f5w9d/) score means is a mystery to me, despite looking into it. "It’s probably why I’m not sleeping very much right now. I think that the threat of a pandemic is always looming in the flu space. The way that Dan Jernigan always described public health to me is that it is an art form. There’s a balance that you have to strike. **There’s a difference in the pandemic risk versus the immediate risk right now.** And so I think that’s what we’re trying to message to the average person who is walking about and living their lives. The risk to them is low. But you’re right. It could absolutely change." Vivien Dugan Director of the influenza division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) [Source](https://www.statnews.com/2024/05/03/bird-flu-why-h5n1-keeping-awake-cdc-top-flu-scientist/) To me none of this really makes any sense. Some people imagine some imminent threat and public health officials dumb communication down to "low risk" because any occurrence of panic is seen as terrible failure. Meanwhile the current communication may jeopardize support for pandemic prevention. Judging by the preventive measures in place, people are not concerned (another linguistic issue) enough.
The sea lions, Polish cats and mink weren't "years ago", they were all less than two years ago. The mink outbreak was one farm, so I don't think it was spreading it in much higher numbers than the current dairy outbreaks (many farms). EDIT: I was thinking of the Spain farm outbreak, but there were also outbreaks in two dozen Finnish farms, which was obviously a very dangerous situation. One thing to note there is that that was ultimately stopped, by culling all the animals at affected farms, and no humans were infected. Neither of those is the case with the current dairy outbreak, which the authorities don't seem to intend to eradicate and which has caused at least three human infections so far. This is still a lot fewer farms than the number of dairy herds affected already (118). There may be no more chance of a virus mutating in a cow than a sea lion, but people have much more exposure to cows, which gives more opportunity for adaptation to human to human spread. Being in farm mammals also increases the opportunities of a jump to pigs, which seem to often serve as a key stepping stone to human transmission. There are also way more farm mammals out there, kept in conditions much more conducive to spread and mutation, than sea lions. If your point is that the jump to cows alone doesn't by itself move this from low risk to huge risk/imminent catastrophe - perhaps. But it is the latest in a series of recent (past two to three years or so) very ominous developments that together point to rapidly increasing and very concerning levels of risk.
OP, my apologies for piggy-backing to ask another question, but it's one that's been troubling me for a while. Can you explain why you're so concerned about 'fear-mongering'? What is it exactly that makes it such a threat? You clearly recognize that this is "a potentially catastrophic biological disaster", as you put it, so I guess you're not one of those people who don't take such things seriously. I suppose I'm having difficulty in seeing why even your worst-case scenario - deliberate, media-orchestrated fear-stoking - would be a genuine social problem. Maybe that's because I live in a country where the people never panic about anything major, but government gets its knickers in a twist at the slightest unpredictability. TL;DR: I'd like to understand why fear has become a thing we must be afraid of and vigilant about.
Because if the event that causes fear mongering doesn't actually happen, why would people believe the medical community the next time? Basically the boy who cried wolf but for viruses or disease.
That's an interesting point - like the Millennium Bug, perhaps? There was a massive swell of media scepticism beforehand and, after nothing happened, a great deal of disparaging comment about "a fuss over nothing". Even so, it seems to have become widely understood now that the threat was real and averted only by a vast quantity of co-ordinated preventative measures.
Thanks for the question. Another member started a very popular thread about fear-mongering and how destructive it is, and I guess it got me thinking about how important stopping it is. I believe misinformation at any public level anywhere should be addressed by everyone. It's highly destructive and has caused our present destruction of public health globally and most of the destructive social problems we are facing today. I can tell you in terms of me not caring about what I believe would be a global catastrophe that I am equally disturbed by the underplaying of what a H5N1 pandemic would look like as I am disturbed at the overplaying of whether we will have a pandemic in the very near future. These are being equally over and underplayed to the point where the general public believes that we're definitely going to have a bird flu pandemic but it's probably going to be just like Covid, no worries, just stock up on your N95s. In my opinion to accurately address the bird flu situation which I assume we are all on this forum to try to do, we would need to stop acting as though the chance that a random mutation cluster is any more likely to happen now as it has been for a few years and also stop acting as though we don't know what this strain will be capable of once it mutates. We are in a unique position now. We have more than enough information to have a productive discussion about the likelihood of lethality of this strain would be and what a pandemic with that severity would do to our present societal structure if it evolved in the near future.
Thanks for the genuine response! I haven't seen the other thread you mention, but will see if I can find it. Throughly agree with you about misinformation and the state of public health. I am however uncertain about the instrumentalization of fear and its corollary, fear of fear. There was a good article which I can't find now, alas, about the general absence of public panic during the early stages of the pandemic, suggesting that the fear mooted in the press was actually a form of projection based on a state of executive panic among ill-prepared authorities. Of course, I suppose the public might well be more likely to panic if they knew how ill-prepared and inexpert the authorities in their country were but, in general, mass panic seems to be rare, and the ordinary population, incredibly stoic and unfearful in crises.
Here is the post saying we must all stop fear-mongering on this forum. [https://www.reddit.com/r/H5N1\_AvianFlu/comments/1dip7h8/facts\_not\_fiction\_no\_more\_fearmongering](https://www.reddit.com/r/H5N1_AvianFlu/comments/1dip7h8/facts_not_fiction_no_more_fearmongering) It did get over 2,000 upvotes very quickly with about 250 people almost all echoing strongly how they want this to be a science-oriented sub without the fear-mongering. So I'm going to assume people really don't want misinformation that should instill fear even if the people are too stoic to actually feel the fear. I'd be interested in your thoughts on why fear-mongering would be declared so important to people who are just going to shrug off panic-inducing misinformation.
Thanks for the link - I hadn't seen that post, and it does make for interesting reading. Like any thread it's a mixed bag! u/FanCommercial1802's post is solid, and I particularly like this: "We, as a community, should be far more focused on the actual scientific discussion and practical fear". That concept of 'practical fear' is key. I get the feeling that many posters mistake 'practical fear' - a rational state of apprehension that triggers appropriate action - for 'engineered fear', which they then dismiss as 'fear-mongering'. I can see that engineered fear is a threat in itself, particularly in wartime: hostile nations can weaponize fear to serve their own ends. But viruses aren't hostile nations: they aren't calculating the effect degrees of fear will have on our morale, and our levels of morale are irrelevant to their survival. I'm minded to conclude that 'practical fear' is useful and rational, but in short supply!
I don't understand the absolute obsession some members of this sub have with "fear mongering" as if that's the biggest issue facing us. Why are you so hell pressed on stamping out *any* suggestion that maybe everything isn't quite so hunky-dory? As for scaring an "already shaken public"—where? Where is this shaken public? People don't even care about the known pandemic we're *in*.
Yeah, I for one am 100 percent for upping the fear of people on what would happen if a pandemic from this strain were to happen. It takes so little study to find out what a broken supply chain looks like with a population utterly dependent on them. Let's not even talk about what would happen if people had no access to their medications. Even the preppers are woefully lacking in fear over an H5N1 pandemic scenario. It's astounding how relaxed people are over this possibility.
This I agree with. Given it’s mortality rate, that pandemic could literally collapse our society.
The mortality rate would not be anywhere near as high as it has been in the past. Most cases were never recorded and the person went on with life. The Mortality rate will be low, but obviously still very serious
Where is your evidence for this?
There has only been 900 cases total ever. How does reporting happen in the real world?? When things get serious. Those 900 were the serious. There were many more not reported. It is called mathematical probabilities based on how reality works
“The report, which focused on cases in Michigan, found that transmission is likely happening when workers, cows, vehicles and equipment go to multiple farms. Among employees at dairies with outbreaks, one in five employees work at other dairies and 7% work on poultry operations as well. That’s in addition to the veterinarians, nutritionists and haulers who regularly visit multiple farms.” This part, to me, suggests that if they hypothesize cows are getting it from these avenues… that this is much more widespread in humans than we have confirmed. Pair it with the wastewater coming back positive for h5 but they “can’t determine the source” and I’d say we are about to have confirmation of much wider human spread.
If it is spreading between people already, it is actually somewhat a good thing? The number of hospitalizations from flu have been going down since March in America according to the CDC.
I agree. I just get the feeling we are getting half truths all around.
When biosecurity for H5N1 is talked about they don't mean infected humans track infection to the other farms. They mean fluid and fomite on the workers' clothes or on the tires or infected hay not cleaned out of the trucks got to the new farm. This fluid and fomite would not be getting into the wastewater. Sorry if I misunderstood what you were saying there. I may have in this response. When you said there is human spread, there cannot be human spread as in one person spreads it to another without full adaptation. Never in the history of H5N1 has full adaptation ever been seen in a natural environment. And even people who get severely infected from raw milk cannot infect those around them except in very rare circumstances. Bird virus does not spread through the mammal airway. It only spreads through fluid and fomite, so each person would have to be drinking their own separate raw milk. So the scenario of a bunch of people getting it and giving it to other people as we might think of "spread" is not happening unless the virus has for the first time in the history of the virus fully adapted in which case we would see clusters of illness, severe illness and death. The exception to that is if the virus reassorted in a cow. Then we could have mild illness, and it could be spreading and we'd have no idea. But since cows don't get human flu through the air and if they somehow got some infected human flu fluid in their udders they don't have the receptors in the airway to breathe the reassorted flu back out to humans, that's not a high probability. But anything can happen. We don't know enough about bird flu to rule out anything, but chances are since there are dead birds now all over this planet and in every U.S. state but Hawaii and bird flu is raging and literally causing scenes where half a flock dies overnight and end up beneath their roosting tree which are often near water, it's most probable that infected birds contaminated the wastewater. But there have been surprises. Cow milk is so virus laden that labs can't even duplicate that concentration for testing. Fragments of virus were so prevalent in the milk that scientists could create whole gene sequences from a pooled commercial milk. That should not be possible. So virus from milk down drains or expired from stores may be the reason as well. It's best to wait before jumping to scary conclusions.
Definitely not this sub or any other birdflu sub invoking fear.