On her usual walk Tuesday - Janice , with her friend Maria - observed countless dead geese near Palmer Lake. A fellow walker seeing their dismay at the corpses in the lake, delivered his two cents: "It's the Bird flu. We already got dead owls, dead ravens and the like where we live. We just better hope it doesn't hit the cats and dogs." He wasn't too far off.
Colorado has now lost more than 94% of its table egg-laying hens, while also seeing its population of wild birds including snow geese, raptors, hawks and eagles sickened, state officials said. Worse, The Denver Post reported over the weekend three dead mammals in the Denver- Boulder area: a cougar, a black bear and a skunk. According to Maggie Baldwin, Colorado’s state veterinarian:
“One of the challenges is that we don’t know why it has been able to thrive for so long. We’re almost a full year into this outbreak and it is ongoing, There is no historical context for this. It’s like when Covid hit for humans,”
To keep bird flu from spreading, entire poultry flocks must be destroyed after an infection is confirmed. The outbreak has caused the deaths of nearly 58 million poultry in 47 states, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data.
Avian influenza — has long hovered on the horizons of bio-researchers and epidemiologists' fears. And I have written earlier posts concerning this pathogen, namely, the H5N1 strain before, e.g.
New Avian Flu Virus: Eurasian H5N1 - How Much Should Americans Be Concerned?
What IF the Bird Flu Pandemic Is Coming: What Do You DO? (1)
While it hasn’t often infected humans, it's inflicted a 56 percent mortality for those known to have contracted it. So it's nothing to ignore or take lightly, or avoid vaccination if one becomes available. Truth be told, we've mainly been spared up to now on account of its inability to spread easily, if at all, from one person to another . This has doubtless kept it from causing a pandemic. But things are changing. The H5 N1 virus, which has long caused outbreaks among poultry, is infecting more and more migratory birds (such as the dead geese Janice saw), allowing it to spread more widely, even to various mammals (e.g. bear, cougar, skunk), raising the risk that a new variant could spread to and among people.
Alarmingly, it was recently reported that a mutant H5N1 strain was not only infecting minks at a fur farm in Spain but also most likely spreading among them, unprecedented among mammals. Even worse, the mink’s upper respiratory tract is exceptionally well suited to act as a conduit to humans. This according to Thomas Peacock, a virologist who has studied avian influenza.
As one NY Times virus specialist noted some weeks ago, the world needs to act now, before H5N1 has any chance of becoming a devastating pandemic. But what if anything can be done to make a difference? Thijs Kuiken, an expert in avian influenza at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands, says farms for pigs — another species susceptible to influenza — should also be surveilled for bird flu. This is a smart move and we know from documented history ('The Great Influenza' book) pigs in French pig farms played a role in the Spanish flu virus mutating to become a lethal pandemic.
In addition, we know people interacting with wild birds and animals, as well as susceptible species of pets like ferrets, are also at higher risk. It’s not enough to detect, though, as we learned in the lessons of Covid -19. There must be active suppression as well. As with Covid -19 this would require a major effort and global coordination.
Unfortunately, mink farms must be shut down — even if it means killing the minks. When the coronavirus infected Danish mink farms in 2020 and the minks generated new variants that then infected humans, the efforts to save the industry were futile because the outbreaks were uncontrollable.
As for vaccines, we know the U.S. government has a small H5N1 vaccine stockpile, but it would be nowhere near enough if a serious human outbreak occurred. The current plan is to mass-produce them if and when such an outbreak occurs, based on the particular variant involved. But this is the wrong approach. Producing hundreds of millions of doses of a new vaccine could take six months or more, and by then 100 million corpses could lie in U.S. streets. The time to act is NOW, as we see more and more mammals getting infected. (The brains of all 3 mammals cited earlier were found to have the virus, apart from which all their vital organs had turned to mush.) Alarmingly, all but one of the approved vaccines are produced by incubating each dose in an egg.
The only company with an F.D.A.-approved non-egg-based H5N1 vaccine expects to be able to produce 150 million doses within six months of the declaration of a pandemic. But there are seven billion people in the world. Half could well be dead, the bodies having to be burned in ditches, before this vaccine made it to them. And with all the idiotic vaccine paranoia in the U.S. we aren't even sure our own people would take it. As with the Covid -19 mRNA jabs they'd likely prefer to die than take it. But they have no remote idea what this virus does to a human body, with its triggering of a cytokine storm.
Research on genetically restored Spanish flu discloses that death likely arrived via the cytokine storm, i.e. the victim basically "drowns" in their own lung fluids. In a number of documented Asian Avian flu cases, victims with H5N1 experienced diarrhea followed rapidly by a coma without developing respiratory or flu-like symptom. This shows that one can perish that suddenly, and with no evident breathing problem. The inflammatory cascade triggered by H5N1 has been called a 'cytokine storm' by some, because of what seems to be a positive feedback process of damage to the body resulting from immune system stimulation. H5N1 induces higher levels of cytokines than the more common flu virus types.
There have been studies of the levels of cytokines in humans infected by the H5N1 flu virus. Of particular concern is elevated levels of tumor necrosis factor-alpha, a protein associated with tissue destruction at sites of infection and increased production of other cytokines. Flu virus-induced increases in the level of cytokines is also associated with flu symptoms, including fever, chills, vomiting and headache.
Let us sincerely hope we get on with developing a human Avian flu virus - preferably mRNA type- as soon as possible. As I suspect the impending human person-to-person transmission will not be long in coming, at least from what I'm seeing here in Colorado.
See Also:
And:
No comments:
Post a Comment