Let’s see…we’re living in a country run by openly corrupt oligarchs. The educational system is being undermined by fundamentalist Christian fanatics. We’re almost certainly headed for an economic crash, as billionaires pour billions of our dollars into the AI fantasy. MAHA is similarly chasing illusions, that removing food dyes will correct systematic patterns of abuse by Big Food, and that autism is caused by whatever unlikely correlation Robert Felching Kennedy Jr names. The anti-war
president is searching for a casus belli to blow up boats in the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Caribbean. What else could possibly go wrong?
How about another pandemic? How about a bird flu pandemic?
After a quiet summer, bird flu is on the move again, and experts say it poses an escalating threat. While the virus doesn’t appear capable of spreading from human to human, it has killed people exposed to sick poultry. This year, the United States saw its first death from bird flu, a Louisiana senior with a flock of backyard chickens.
Viruses are constantly evolving, and if a person catches bird flu while infected with a seasonal flu, the pathogens could mutate into a variant that infects large numbers of people. “The minute it transmits in humans, it’s done,” warned Erin Sorrell, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
In our recent bird flu epidemic, for most of us it was a nuisance: egg shortages in the grocery stores, higher prices. But in the center of the epidemic, factory farms in Ohio and Indiana, it was far worse. Entire flocks of chickens had to be killed to suppress the spread. Farmers going out of business. Would you believe mass graves with millions of birds?
ProPublica has published evidence that the avian virus is spread by airborne contamination.
Our finding: The wind was at least a plausible explanation for how the virus could have spread from farm to farm.
We shared our analysis of the outbreak with eight experts in avian flu who agreed with that assessment. Several of them felt it was more than a mere possibility.
“It just seems so likely to me that this was an airborne thing,” said Brian McCluskey, former chief epidemiologist with USDA’s agency that oversees the response to bird flu. “I mean, how else would it have moved around so quickly?”
The experts stressed the analysis didn’t prove the wind directly carried bird flu from one farm to another, or that it was the only factor at play. The virus typically spreads via multiple routes, which could include contaminated birds, rodents or workers; if farms share the same feed supplier or trash collector, those factors can’t be ruled out.
But several experts said ProPublica’s analysis underscores the shortcomings of the government’s strategy, which fails to take the wind into account at all.
“USDA has been grossly negligent in not establishing risk factors in real time,” said Simon Shane, a poultry veterinarian and consultant.
There has been talk of pre-emptively vaccinating chickens…but the idea is opposed by the chicken meat and egg industries. That might give foreign buyers the impression that American chickens are tainted, and we can’t have that! So instead we’ll dig trenches and bury millions of birds when the virus appears, which is our government approved strategy. You know who is behind this approach.
Adding to the headwinds is U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has said the virus should be allowed to burn through flocks so that farmers can identify birds with natural immunity, an approach public health experts have called “dangerous and unethical.”
That’s the same strategy many of these MAHA morons endorsed for COVID — let it burn through the human population until the virus was “done”. That would have been a disaster, but now they want to do the same thing for the poultry industry. Maybe they’ll get to do the experiment in the near future if the bird flu jumps to the human population.
We are so screwed in so many ways.
Burn out the cancer.
Primary any Dem collaborators.
After the midterms, block anything the government suggests.
No more half-baked compromises that the Republicans will betray anyway.
Increase the supreme court to 13 judges.
.
A somewhat more happy outlook for the future:
The Roundworld Year of 2026 shall be known as “The Year of the Curious Squid”
.https://www.facebook.com/share/p/174AiaLN9o/
I have trouble with the notion of a wind-borne virus. If we learned one thing from Covid, that was that the open air was our friend. Yes, one can get infected with a virus in closed settings simply by breathing contaminated air. From what I’ve read, these indoor viruses don’t last much longer than 24 hours. But out in the open? That’s a hard sell for me. How many times did we hear during lockdown to open the windows or get outside in the fresh air?
https://crooksandliars.com/2025/11/part-327-series-why-our-fda-trying-kill-us
Anti-vaxxer Vinay Prasad is going to make it much more difficult to get vaccines.
Yet, Peter Hotez (a doctor I have come to trust), the director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital, said in a text message that he wanted to see Prasad’s statement about a link between covid-19 vaccines and children’s deaths supported with more data as well as information about any underlying health conditions.
“With almost one billion COVID immunizations administered to Americans during the pandemic, and perhaps close to 100 million for children and adolescents, it is conceivable that such a one in 10 million or 100 million event occurred,” such as a child’s death, Hotez wrote, later adding, “given the public health implications, this is not something one casually blurts out in an email.”
@2 John Watts wrote: I have trouble with the notion of a wind-borne virus.
I reply: Yes, out in the open air is more likely to be safe in most circumstance in which we find ourselves. But, not if you are in or near the foul air of a factory poultry unit with tens of thousands of diseased birds contaminating the air. That is a recipe for rapid plague-like spread of any disease.
I shan’t link, but there are stories about the process of, um, ‘culling’ millions of birds as practiced.
I mean, they’re gonna die soon enough, no?
(Let us just note it’s rather hellish for the birdies)
can we take a moment and ponder the suffering this will cause other species? not just the poor captive birds, buried alive by the millions (because farmers love their animals /s), but the countless wild birds and other creatures that will be killed. Last year, bird flu was decimating elephant seals on remote islands.
There’s such an easy way for us all to do our part to minimize the risk of zoonotic pandemics: stop using animals, esp. for food. We have great vegan substitutes for all poultry and egg products.
That was never going to work.
Here it is, five years since the Covid-19 virus appeared, and it is still circulating at high levels in the US population.
The virus mutates way too fast for a strategy like that to work.
A strategy like that will also leave a lot of survivors that are permanently disabled and/or at high risk of dying. The Long Covid syndromes.
I knew three people who came down with Long Covid.
Two of them died within a year as a direct result of their Covid infection.
The third was just in the hospital again for a Long Covid related problem.
We had some sick and dying wild birds in my neighborhood a few weeks ago.
A few cell phone photos and a few phone calls turned up the likely cause.
Avian bird flu.
The same virus that is killing all those chickens.
Will a bird flu epidemic cause ICE agents to take their masks off?
microraptor, :)
To misquote the fda miscreants: I guess we’ve reached ‘full herd stupidity’.
Raven’s concerns are valid. There are Covid and a new strain of the flu surging.
From the 1960’s song by The Animals, ‘We’ve gotta get outta this place’.
But, then, Martha and the Vandellas warns us, ‘Nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide’
No he’s not.
There is no search for a casus belli, they found it: it’s drugs. It is literally incredible, which is good for them, since it means they can tell the loyalists from the disloyal.
Remember watching a movie where a guy is proposing a safety car to a bunch of big shot manufacturers. One of them objects to installing seat belts because they imply cars are unsafe. Same energy.
The factory farms already preemptively feed their chickens antibiotics so they don’t die. I just can’t with the fools who think letting diseases kill people rather than preventing them getting infected is somehow desirable. Just look at how getting polio and smallpox never seemed to result in herd immunity. It’s not like vaccinating them is somehow worse than having to kill the entire flock.
Avian bird flu is now known to infect cats. One surprising source of infection is giving cats raw bilk. And of course cats eat birds.
https://www.vet.cornell.edu/departments-centers-and-institutes/cornell-feline-health-center/health-information/h5n1-avian-influenza-and-your-cat
Tethys@14–
They feed antibiotics to livestock to make the animals grow faster and bigger. This is a known contributor to antibiotic resistance not just in the livestock but in the environment around farms, including downstream creeks and nearby towns. Since farming is politically untouchable, there is almost no action to curtail it and instead the only focus is on reducing medical prescriptions (which is still important, to be clear, but will have only limited effect while entire landscapes are being pumped with antibiotics on an industrial scale).
Also, antibiotics will do little to treat avian flu, which is a virus. At most they will reduce the load of secondary bacterial infections. Except of course that the endemic bacteria around farms are likely resistant, and the virus is quite sufficient to cause massive die-offs all by itself.
HPAI has been infecting a variety of mammals for years. It doesn’t seem capable of sustained transmission in wild mammal populations (yet).
There seemed to be two main strains circulating in the spring.
The one we get straight from birds is quite deadly to humans. Previous outbreaks killed something around half of those who got sick, and while numbers are low, it’s killed some people in the recent outbreaks.
The new one, which has gone through cows, seems relatively mild in humans, while extremely deadly in felids and mustelids. It spreads from dairy cows at a farm to other mammals at the farm, but not very well, so it can’t spread epidemics outside the confines of the farm context. Yet. Also: relatively mild could be as deadly as COVID, we haven’t had enough cases to tell yet. It just is definitely not killing 50% or even 10%.
And then of course the strain that does finally work out how to spread from human to human, we don’t know ahead of time how deadly it will be. Maybe the mechanism that lets it spread makes it super mild. Maybe it makes it super deadly.
chrislawson: point is, the farms willingly feed antibiotics routinely but now they claim that vaccination is a problem. It’s transparent bullshit.
“the farms willingly feed antibiotics routinely but now they claim that vaccination is a problem. It’s transparent bullshit.”
Maybe they should try horse-paste, since the MAHA-morons think it’s good against viruses.
numerobis:
Indeed. I agree with tethys. I was just pointing out that routine antibiotic use in farming is about yield size, not animal protection, and that antibiotics will do almost nothing to prevent avian flu deaths.
John Watts @2; shermanj @4
OK, my son works for the Ohio Dept. of Agriculture. He was actually involved in the investigation and testing of the birds, from the big agri-farms to small operations. He thought the story was fine and plausible.
What he told me, though, is that that particular area of Ohio has a particularly dense concentration of chicken farms. Obviously, the general safety of open air depends on the density of the pathogens. There can be viruses around in the air, but you are generally safe as long as there are not too many, and they get sufficiently diluted as they float along. In this case, because of the density of farms, the virus concentration was not very diluted. (I also wonder how much particular kinds of winds might have directed them and kept them from dispersing.)
BTW, my son was also involved in Covid testing of gorillas and tigers. Not taking the samples, mind you, but just the testing. Heh.
France and Netherlands vaccinate. RN they are only selling within their borders. The EU has a vaccination strategy. People in the EU are said to not-want vaccinated birds, and the market for vaccinated birds is not well-trusted because a vaccinated bird looks just like an un-vaccinated one.
Yes, this is scary stuff and all too plausible an eventuality. Covid certainly showed how massive the impact of virii can be .. Then we have the Black Death Plague as the perhaps the ultimate example of how utterly devastating pandemics have been..
However, I also recall the reading Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone – a book that made me miss the bus a few times whilst caught up in it waiting at a bookshop next to a bus stop and being seriously concerned that a global Ebola or Marburg virus outbreak could well be coming.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hot_Zone )
For a while that concern seemed to be shared and the ebola virus in particular was a very much feared thing. Of course, there were and still are outbreaks of it in Africa – see wiklist of ebola outbreaks, casualties and fatality percentages here :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ebola_outbreaks#Major_or_massive_cases
But there’s been no global ebola pandemic as of yet and our knowledge and treatments seem to have improved and thanks to scientists we now have a vacccine for it :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_vaccine
Of c, having such a vaccine is one thing and getting dropkicks to actually take it in event of pandemic is now another. Anyhow.
Whilst still an issue in some areas, ebola’s threat to our globe appears greatly lessened.
So, might the avian flu be a similar thing to ebola? Dunno. Yes, they are very different virii but still?
It’s worse than that, and not just because there are other viral hemorrhagic fevers around.
Documented outbreaks in 2025: Marburg virus disease in Ethiopia and Tanzania, Lassa fever in Nigeria, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever in Iraq.
—
Avian flu is deadly, but not that way. Sorta worse, because direct contact with infected bodily fluids is required for those fevers. Maybe more awful, but less transmissible and easier to quarantine.
A friend in China reports she recently contracted a form of H1N1. That shocked me out of my underpants. But it may be true, too. She says its spreading rapidly. Ironically, she lives in Hubei, near Wuhan. I’m hoping it’s just normal variants of COVID-19.
@ ^ John Morales : Yes – there’s the risk of other new diseases and virii emerging as jungles fall and permafrost thaws too. Whole books have been written on this :
Source : https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231201-fevered-planet-how-climate-change-spreads-infectious-disease
Plus the potential return of smallpox since we have samples of that around still and the re-emergence of old diseases like polio and measles thanks to the anti-vaxxers and anti-Science mobs and Trumpists esp RFK Jr.
hillaryrettig1@#6:
There’s such an easy way for us all to do our part to minimize the risk of zoonotic pandemics: stop using animals, esp. for food.
Easy indeed. We just die off. Unfortunately we’ll probably take everything else down with us.
SteveoR@#26:
Plus the potential return of smallpox since we have samples of that around still
It’s telling that our samples are all in the biowarfare labs. I don’t know if it’s the entire US supply, but USAMRIID used to keep it in the freezer at Ft Detrick. Why? Of course, “in case we have to develop defenses against it.”
Defenses? Like, you mean, the innoculation? Ha, ha, ha, humanity are being their usual pieces of shit – they’re keeping the demon in the freezer until everyone’s immunity wears off and then they can use it against a non-resistant population. Too bad the Russians have the same idea. And god knows who all else. Ironically, those of us who got the classified compound shot in the 1980s are probably immune – I wonder where they thought they might send us, and why there might be smallpox running wild there.
well depending on how “we ” and “everything else” are defined maybe but if it is only life processes we are talking about I doubt it.
Bad oh yes most defiantly but it would not be like a giant asteroid or comet striking earth or a coronal mass ejection leaving earth mostly sterile . We would not be missed by the planet much and who knows in a few hundred million years there might be new “people” running around all over the place the earth is not in any hurry .
Politics again: good news.
Let’s Talk Elections
“Texas Republicans Can’t Save Their Star Candidate”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=LcsWKxUavTg
I’m old enough to remember the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak in the UK.
That was spread by the practice of burning infected carcases on open bonfires; allowing live virus particles to be carried high up on the updraught before they suffered any heat damage, and spread on the wind to neighbouring farms. The number of new infections really only began to decrease when they switched to burying infected animals.
@13 Recursive Rabbit
Not to mention, “We is Amarikanz. We no unerstan other places. No one else also stabby chickens with needles to make safe!”, like, say, the UK, or literally any other country, who bloody think we are absolute idiots for not vaccinating food animals. Hint: They wouldn’t think our food is dangerously infected, they already know it is, and that the US is run by idiots.
People have pointed out that domestic chickens are highly interbred with little genetic variability so the idea of selecting for more resistant chickens by allowing them to get infected is likely to be even less successful than otherwise.