Alarm as bird flu now ‘endemic in cows’ while Trump cuts staff and funding
Alarm as bird flu now ‘endemic in cows’ while Trump cuts staff and funding
Experts say current US outbreak is unlikely to end without intervention with further mutation of virus likely
Summary
A new H5N1 bird flu variant has become "endemic in cows," with cases detected in Nevada and Arizona, raising concerns about human transmission.
Experts warn that without intervention, the outbreak will continue, but Trump has cut CDC staff and halted flu vaccination campaigns.
The virus's spread coincides with a severe flu season, increasing the risk of mutation.
The administration has also stopped sharing flu data with the WHO and shifted its containment strategy away from culling infected poultry, raising fears of inadequate response.
Aw shit, here we go again.
Calling it now: we have another pandemic during Trump's current term.
Conspiracy theorists will go "isn't it weird there's always a pandemic while trump is president, must be the Democrats/Jews/Illuminati/"The Regime" controlling everything, Plandemic am a right?"
Couldn't possibly be Trump removing all safeguards against pandemics...
Can this be passed through milk? Maybe the Fascism problem will solve itself if Bobby Brainworm convinces all the fascists to drink more raw milk ...
There are cases of a couple dairy workers getting mild cases of bird flu from getting raw milk splashed in their eye while working, so yes it's not terribly unlikely.
And cats dying of it after drinking raw milk and eating raw food products.
Dairy farmer here, who fought this crap off when we still didnt know what it was.
Bird flu contaminated raw milk in cats, yeah it will kill the shit out of them. Its what helped us figure out what it was in the first place. Nothing confirmed so far as humans being infected from consumption that i am aware of currently, but i personally wouldnt try it.
The dairy workers that got bird flu. It was pinkeye that popped positive for h5. Probably splashback from either milk or fecal. It wasnt really a big deal other than conjunctivitis sucks.
But if you drink raw milk, you are playing russian roulette as patient zero at this point. Dont do it.
It seems so. I've been buying ultra-pasteurized which may be sufficient.
Yes it can be and the problem is these idiots are also gonna give that milk to their children. Who don’t deserve to suffer for the sins of their parents.
It's all fun* and games until there's human to human transmission.
(*Darwin award "fun")
Also was just found to be infecting rats for the first time ever documented.
Meanwhile, in Michigan, there's a case of two exclusively indoor cats catching it. One prominent theory is that the humans in the household passed it to them.
RIP NYC
The price of beef is about to go the way of the price of eggs.
Down, right?
Down, right?
See, if you bury your head in the sand, the virus can't get you
Just do this:
- stop testing,
- stick a lightbulb up their rear
- put some horse paste in their feed
- disinfectant in their water
- ???
- Profit
I’m back on the carnivore diet because it’s been really the only thing to help with my long-covid that has been on my ass ever since the pandemic started.
And now this is going to make that harder.
The same guy I hold responsible for my long-covid is going to get me fucked up yet again. How’s that for irony?
Eat fish like the Japanese do. They live the longest for a reason.
The Okinawans, in particular, are known for their longevity. Their traditional diet is largely vegetarian.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/okinawa-diet#the-diet
The traditional Okinawa diet is low in calories and fat while high in carbs. It emphasizes vegetables and soy products alongside occasional — and small — amounts of noodles, rice, pork, and fish.
Bad idea. We're at a point now where an all fish diet would actually poison you. We've dumped so much shit into the water that tends to bioaccumulate, and since big fish tend to eat smaller ones...
For sure! In before the bird flu spreads to fish somehow…
I'm eating vegetarian, mostly vegan, mostly for those reasons.
Surely some rich republican ranchers can get Trump's attention...
People confusing this with COVID might be in for a surprise because if this becomes a human pandemic it will likely be much worse.
The difference being that Covid took a scientific breakthrough to make a vaccine for (as various factors about the virus were unprecedented) while flu variants are very much a known thing as far as virology goes.
The feds already have a reserve of human-safe H5N1 vaccines, the only thing preventing them from using that when SHTF is ideology. It will be both completely prepared for and completely preventable.
You think we'll have enough?
Fascists are actively slashing funding, firing experts, cutting programs. Research labs are currently in shambles. The future secretary of health is a fucking anti-vaxer.
You thought covid was bad? We're going to experience a pandemic with no government action first hand.
assuming the strain used in that reserve will be effective against whatever variant makes a breakthrough to humans. note that current H5 vaccine candidates are determined based on animal studies and a variant that jumps from an animal to a human might show substantial variation that we could need to change the strain in the vaccines. it would be faster than before thanks to mRNA vaccines but I would think that even just within the USA, a sufficient roll out with an updated vaccine would at best take a couple months assuming people would be willing to get vaccinated. Between the antivax people in US and parts of the world not receiving vaccine quickly enough, there would be ample room for such a H5 to take hold and have devastating effects. Covid could still seem like a walk in the park despite having mRNA tech ready to go now.
Agreed. Maybe if we didn't have so many goddamn Republicans, especially with power and platforms. Even under Kamala, it'd be bad, but with these chucklefucks in charge right now...
Moo Flu.
Trump flu.
Maybe it will get people to start drinking plant based milk if the price of course milk skyrockets like it has with eggs. All the IGF-1 in dairy isn't good for you and could even be part of the reason for the rise in colorectal cancer (the amount of dairy we consume nowadays in nuts).
I usually have a little milk around the house for cooking sauces and things. Something like soy or almond milk don't make good substitutes. I can't remember the last time I just drank a glass of milk.
Have you tried powdered milk? I like it because it's shelf stable. We use plant milk for most drinks and cereal, powdered milk for cooking.
They'd probably raise the price of alternative milk as well to match, just to price gauge people
The price of alternative bean juices is pre-gouged. It does not take $8/gallon to blend oats. It does not take $8/gallon to blend soybeans. It costs far far far more than $4/gallon to raise a cow, keep the female cows pregnant, destroy the male calves that result, and feed the cows sufficiently to both raise another living cow (50% of which are immediately trashed) and produce viable milk.
It only costs $4/gal right now because we are paying for you with our tax dollars.
dude, people literally ate nothing but potatoes and milk for the longest time. it's the direct reason why we had industrialization at all. because people could live off milk and potatoes without owning large plots of land. it was revolutionary. so i find it very hard to believe that we would be consuming more dairy nowadays versus our ancestors, who literally had nothing else to eat.
It's not just the milk but also other products like cheese. "In 2001, Americans consumed 30 pounds of cheese per person, 8 times more than they did in 1909 and more than twice as much as they did in 1975. "
Which since then it's continued to rise and in 2022 was like 42 pounds.
I mainly drink milk in the form of half and half for coffee. Obviously, plant milk is garbage for this purpose.
I use almond, soy, and/or oat milk for my coffee and tea and like it alright. Different strokes for different folks.
After fucking it up on a global pandemic there were people attacking the Capitol to defend him. He's just trying to repeat that achievement.
This is seriously the dumbest and probably most preventable timeline. Well, except for all the goddamn idiots and apathetic people in the country.
Sigh.
Username checks out.
Bird flu for the meats, tariffs for everything else (and probably affecting meats as well). I wonder how this will affect our food supply during Great Depression II compared to the dust bowl and tariffs in the first one.
Hopefully we don't have the dust bowl as well, but I do wonder how prices for staples like rice and beans might go up if the meat and dairy supply is tainted....
Up next repealing regulations preventing farmers from selling downer cows. Can't afford not to sell infected meat. Grocery prices are already too high. What could go wrong?
Maybe Idiocracy won't happen. The stupid ones should wipe themselves out in a pandemic. We just need to wait for the right one.
Idiocracy is trash for babies, up your socially critical media game.
The first pandemic is still killing disabled people.
How about we... i dunno... not farm animals? It's bad for health, it's bad for the animals, it's bad for the environment. Every pandemic we've ever had has been caused by animal ag. That's COVID, SARS, MERS, AIDS, etc.
I agree with your first two sentences.
But at least with COVID and AIDS, neither of those are attributed to animal agriculture. They crossed into humans through exposure to animals, but in the case of AIDS that was non-human primates most likely. And in the case of COVID it was most likely bats. But in neither of those instances were those animals part of an agricultural system. In other words they weren't being farmed
Swine flu, yes absolutely. Aids and COVID? Not so much.
Curious about your diet, and where you get your food? Also curious how that scales to 350 million people (to feed the US)?
I'm not remotely implying what we're doing, as a society, is right or sustainable but it's super easy to just say "Just stop doing bad things".
Solutions, at scale are quite complicated and nuanced. Private companies that grow our food at scale now will only participate if it's profitable.
Also, if you're not sustainably growing your own food, are you not just like the rest of us (Part of the problem)? I know I don't have the land, or time to grow my own food.
Sticking our head in the sand (current administration) is definitely not gonna turn out well, so I'm guessing there's some fun times ahead! <sigh>
You think scaling plant based food is harder than scaling a meat industry? I’m a meat eater but come on… It is not hard to get to place mentally that humans could easily live on plant based foods. People choose to eat meat because it’s what they believe to be is delicious and what their parents raised them on.
Maybe DOGE should cut all the subsidies the meat industry gets, upwards of $40 billion and we can see what the real price of meat should cost.
It scales far better than animal-agriculture. Eating plants directly is massively more efficient compared to growing crops feed where most of the energy is lost in the process
The research suggests that it’s possible to feed everyone in the world a nutritious diet on existing croplands, but only if we saw a widespread shift towards plant-based diets.
[...]
If everyone shifted to a plant-based diet we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
Transitioning to plant-based diets (PBDs) has the potential to reduce diet-related land use by 76%, diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by 49%, eutrophication by 49%, and green and blue water use by 21% and 14%, respectively, whilst garnering substantial health co-benefits
[...]
Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].
Vegan here. Sticking to the two questions you asked before you got lost in scope creep and logical fallacy: I get my food from the supermarket, mostly. And it scales way better than animal ag because farming plants requires radically less resources per calorie than farming animals.
Just like most other positive decisions in the world, it's not revolutionary on it's own. Nor is it aiming to be, nor does it need to be.
Mostly beans, wheat, and oats, in different form factors. More salads.
Your body only requires a tiny amount of protein and that's also the easiest thing to replace.
Good.
