26 January 2023

Just Fucking Marvelous

With all of the disruption caused by Covid-19 (3.4% mortality rate), we should recall that there are worse diseases, like the original SARS (9.4% mortality rate), and Avian Flu (56% [not a typo] mortality rate). 

Thankfully, the latter two were far less contagious, particularly Avian Flu (H1N1) which is not human to human transmissible, and for which there fewer than 300 cases world wide.

With only 300 cases worldwide, and those requiring extensive contact with birds, it begs the question as to why experts are so concerned.

The answer is that the disease might make the jump to a HTH transmissible form, through some sort of intermediate species closer to us than birds are.

This happened with Covid, where it is believed that the transmission went from bats to pangolin to humans at the Huanan Wuhan Seafood market (武汉华南海鲜批发市场).

So the possibility of the virus becoming more effective through an intermediate species is a real concern.

So, if there were an H5N1 outbreak among another animal, particularly at a location where this intermediate is cultivated in high density by humans, for example a mink farm in Spain, there might be some cause for alarm.

It hit a mink farm in Spain, and 10s of thousands of the weasels are being culled as a result:

It’s like a script for a disaster movie that everyone has already seen. Europe is going through the most devastating bird flu epidemic in its history, with more than 50 million poultry slaughtered in one year. At the beginning of autumn, seagulls and gannets killed by this virus appeared on the beaches of Spain’s northwestern Galicia region. Days later, in early October, American mink began to die of hemorrhagic pneumonia on a fur farm in Carral, a few minutes’ drive from the city of A Coruña. Mortality in this outbreak exceeded 4% in a single week.

A scientific study now suggests that the avian flu virus jumped from wild birds to mink and mutated on the farm, beginning to spread from mammal to mammal but failing to infect mask-wearing farm workers. This outbreak has set off alarm bells across the planet. The Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans, who traced the origin of the Covid pandemic for the World Health Organization (WHO), has issued a warning on her social media accounts: “We are playing with fire.”

The British doctor Jeremy Farrar, an expert in emerging diseases who was recently appointed chief scientist at the WHO, has also alerted about the recent outbreak in Spain on his social media. “The greatest risk of a devastating flu pandemic is avian or animal flu that infects intermediate mammals, and evolves to mammal-to-mammal and human-to-human transmission with little or no human immunity,” he said on Twitter. Farrar, who correctly alerted the world to a strange pneumonia in the Chinese city of Wuhan on December 31, 2019, is now urging authorities to prepare vaccines and treatments for each type of animal flu. 

It should be noted here that preparing vaccine stocks for H5N1 might bey problematic, since the most common vaccine technology involves inoculating chicken eggs, and many H5N1 variants kill chicken eggs, just as it kills chickens.

………

The culprit in the Galician outbreak is a highly pathogenic avian influenza A (H5N1) virus, with an unusual mutation called T271A, a disturbing characteristic that was already present in the swine flu virus that caused a pandemic in humans in 2009. Regional health authorities decided on October 18 to immediately cull the 52,000 mink on the farm, located outdoors and with easy access to wild animals.

Who had war in Europe and a killer flu outbreak on their bingo card?

History is rhyming like a son of a bitch right now, ain't it?

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