H5N1 bird flu is spreading to mammals, killing huge numbers.

April 22, 2024 12:09 PM

H5N1 bird flu has begun spreading between mammals, leaving coastlines dotted with the bodies of birds, seals, and sea lions. Agriculture increases human- animal contact. On the bright side, the human history of infection with other flu viruses may confer some resistance to H5N1. (Gift NYT article)
posted by Sleeper (28 comments total)

I know I usually come in here with my little doomer comments when we talk about pandemics, but on this one particular virus I am adamantly anti-doomer. As the NYT article points out, we do have surveillance in place (with caveats: "the U.S. Agriculture Department is requiring only voluntary testing of cows, and is not as timely and transparent with its findings as it should be"), we have antivirals, we should be prepared. It's worrisome, of course, but not panic-inducing, yet.
posted by mittens at 12:51 PM on April 22 [4 favorites]

Not panic inducing for which species?
posted by clew at 12:58 PM on April 22 [18 favorites]

The Daily also did a podcast version, for people who have more time to listen than read the news. I'm pretty doomer after listening myself - not so much about the fear of human transmission, but all the animals that have died/are dying and will likely die in the near future.
posted by coffeecat at 1:00 PM on April 22 [4 favorites]

The killing off of large numbers of sea lions and other sea mammals is pretty distressing. And it's starting to circulate in penguin colonies in Antarctica, and those birds have never had a bird flu before.

This is a pandemic that is going to reach humans eventually. The question is what will it be like by the time it gets to us.
posted by hippybear at 1:01 PM on April 22 [6 favorites]

Not panic inducing for which species?

Found the cop cow.
posted by wenestvedt at 1:32 PM on April 22 [8 favorites]

The WHO is calling transmission to humans of "enormous concern."
posted by tiny frying pan at 1:47 PM on April 22 [3 favorites]

Good thing we spent all that money upgrading our ventilation systems in response to COVID, right? /padme
posted by Horace Rumpole at 2:22 PM on April 22 [38 favorites]

The WHO is calling transmission to humans of "enormous concern."

Yay! I love this!!! I’m so excited!!!!!
posted by rhymedirective at 2:43 PM on April 22 [3 favorites]

I mean, we didn't learn any lessons from the previous 18 COVIDs, so why do we think we're ready for this?
posted by hippybear at 2:50 PM on April 22 [6 favorites]

Yay! I love this!!! I’m so excited!!!!!

I remember in December of 2019, hearing about this thing coming out of Asia, and feeling this frisson of thrill and horror while I realized it might mean my entire life for a few months might be cancelled.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

HA
HA

HAHA

HA

*sob*
posted by hippybear at 7:17 PM on April 22 [8 favorites]

So, how can I get a 222nm lamp?
posted by NotAYakk at 10:58 PM on April 22 [1 favorite]

It's remarkable that we can see such a threat to humanity coming before humans are actually getting sick. With so many mammals dying of H5N1 it seems like we should be preparing now for what happens if it jumps to humans. Are we?

I'd like to think with the new mRNA vaccine technology someone is already testing genetically tailored H5N1 vaccine in people. Are they? Or maybe it's not possible since none of the current strains are infecting humans; is developing vaccines for nearby hypothetical genomes worthwhile?

Wikipedia's article on H5N1 Vaccines indicates a better story than I feared, with a bunch of traditional vaccines for humans that have been licensed in the last 15 or so years. I guess I should have expected that, since H5N1 is an influenza variant and we have a lot of experience of producing flu vaccines. Part of what made Covid so tricky is SARS-CoV-2 is a totally different virus.
posted by Nelson at 8:09 AM on April 23

The worst part of bird flu is the feathers.
posted by orange ball at 8:12 AM on April 23 [1 favorite]

It has jumped to humans already. What hasn't been established yet is human to human transmission. But I would assume that could easily happen. 48 states in the U.S. have bird flu at this time, from what I can find.
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:24 AM on April 23 [1 favorite]

those mass animal deaths are horrifying. I know we must all be concerned at the threat of another human pandemic, but this situation is already catastrophic. we really don't want to see local ecosystems collapsing.
posted by supermedusa at 9:29 AM on April 23 [6 favorites]

In interviews, Peter Watts mentioned that global pandemics are getting more frequent and severe and will be even more frequent in the future.

We'll likely have human population decline from 8 billion to under 1 billion this century, given economists consider that future optimal, with disease being an immediate cause in many cases. We'll need really serious famines before diseases do really serious damage like that though, but right now the food & fertilizer export bans tracker looks pretty mild.

We've no idea how many people this particular bird flu shall kill of course, but it'll stay out of real doomer territory this time. Also, we'd need even higher mortality than covid before the economists permitted doing confinements again.
posted by jeffburdges at 9:53 AM on April 23

Metafilter's Own^TM Peter Watts
posted by supermedusa at 10:02 AM on April 23 [1 favorite]

global pandemics are getting more frequent and severe and will be even more frequent in the future

Unless--and you'll have to imagine a bit of an insane-optimistic cackling edge to my voice as I say this, having watched our COVID response--we create vaccines that don't have to be strain-specific, and so don't have to worry about constant mutations?
posted by mittens at 10:04 AM on April 23

I'm not a fan of Leana Wen, but this WaPo article actually made me feel better.

Why we shouldn’t panic if bird flu becomes the next pandemic

Health officials have a plan in the event avian flu becomes the next pandemic. In fact, as Dawn O’Connell, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services, told me, the federal government is much better prepared to respond to pandemic influenza than it was for covid-19.

To start, it’s much easier today to access personal protective equipment such as masks, gowns and goggles through commercial markets than it was before the coronavirus hit. But even if those supply chains are “pinched,” O’Connell said, the Strategic National Stockpile has plenty to provide for farms, health-care systems and other affected entities.

The stockpile also contains the antiviral medication Tamiflu, which works against seasonal flu and is expected to work well against H5N1. Like antivirals for covid, Tamiflu reduces the chance of an influenza infection becoming severe when taken soon after symptoms emerge. Unlike covid treatments, however, Tamiflu can also be given to close contacts of infected individuals to prevent them from falling ill.

O’Connell explained there are tens of millions of courses of Tamiflu available in the national stockpile. The federal government has also funded states to build their own stockpiles, which means “tens of millions” more treatments are available. And this is on top of commercially available Tamiflu, which people can buy at pharmacies with a prescription from their doctors.

In fact, the federal government has already developed hundreds of thousands of vaccine doses that are ready to be deployed against the avian H5N1 strain. In addition, they have 10 million doses that need finishing touches, which could be completed within weeks.

If more are needed, there are two options. The first is to make more vaccines using the same technology as seasonal vaccines. O’Connell estimates that manufacturers could produce 125 million doses within 130 days. Because the vaccine is a two-dose vaccine, this would only cover a fraction of the U.S. population.

The second option would be to pursue mRNA vaccines, which could be made much faster than the traditional platforms. Even if these vaccines end up not being as effective or as durable as traditional ones, they could be a useful first shot that buys time for additional vaccines to be made.

With no evidence of human-to-human transmission, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has assessed that the risk to humans is low. Therefore, we have not yet reached the point where ramping up vaccine production is necessary.

posted by jenfullmoon at 11:04 AM on April 23 [3 favorites]

"The worst part of bird flu is the feathers."

I thought the worst part was that it's untweetable!
posted by schyler523 at 1:53 PM on April 23 [3 favorites]

mittens> Unless .. we create vaccines that don't have to be strain-specific, and so don't have to worry about constant mutations?

I mentioned future scenarios in which many people die from immune suppression caused by famine. I kinda doubt vaccine improvements matter much there, but..

It's possible non-starving nations could avoid the new pathogens created by the famines, which they maybe contributed to by continiuing to eat meat. That's progress. :)
posted by jeffburdges at 6:03 PM on April 23

"The U.S. is prepared for an influenza pandemic"

yeeeah. how'd the last one of those go?
posted by lkc at 8:20 PM on April 23

yeeeah. how'd the last one of those go?

The last few H5N1 / avian flu outbreaks, the US successfully kept it from turning into a pandemic or having significant ecological or human impacts outside of the subset of the agricultural industry involving birds, so I’d say it went well.

There is a whole, decades-old monitoring and vaccine development infrastructure for influenza viruses (human, and more recently avian or other agricultural species) that wasn’t (and is no longer) present for other viruses - even other respiratory viruses, though they get somewhat caught up incidentally through the flu monitoring infrastructure. (The Obama administration did make progress in developing more infrastructure for monitoring outbreaks of SARS type viruses to prevent pandemics, but that got dismantled at the beginning of the Trump regime and hasn’t really been rebuilt to the same level, if I understand correctly.)
posted by eviemath at 10:19 AM on April 24 [7 favorites]

Well, now they're finding flu virus particles in milk, so maaaaaaybe I'm back to dooming over it.
posted by mittens at 10:59 AM on April 26

Early test results show pasteurized milk with traces of H5N1 virus isn’t infectious, FDA says

Dr. Eric Topol, founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, said the finding of viral particles in milk on grocery store shelves means the outbreak is probably more widespread than we’ve known.

“The dissemination to cows is far greater than we have been led to believe,” Topol said in an email Tuesday.

And

The infected cows stopped eating as much as they usually did, and their milk became thickened and discolored. Veterinarians running tests on the animals found that the milk was teeming with the virus, although samples from their lungs didn’t show much evidence of infection, leading the doctors to believe that the animals’ mammary glands were directly infected, perhaps through shared milking equipment.

Researchers are still trying to determine how cows initially became infected and how the virus is spreading between animals.

Cats that have lived on the same farms as infected cows have died, perhaps after exposure to their milk.

The article says the real fear is it spreading to pigs, since we would be more susceptible to infection from them.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:56 AM on April 28 [1 favorite]

Helen Branswell on Stat today:
https://www.statnews.com/2024/04/29/bird-flu-raw-milk-h5n1-risk-us-cattle
- the number of virus particles they have found in commercial milk samples is much higher than scientists would have predicted (not just that it's widespread but that individual samples have a lot more virus particles)
- scientists are advising people not to drink raw milk at all (or other raw dairy)
- this virus seems to cause more non-respiratory symptoms (eg neurological) than the common public stereotype of a flu

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/30/7/24-0508_article
- more on the cats that died after contracting this strain of flu after being fed raw milk from infected cows

Zeynep Tufekci in NYT from a few days ago - basically we should be responding more strongly-
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/opinion/bird-flu-cow-outbreak.html
posted by LobsterMitten at 4:21 PM on April 29 [1 favorite]

Remember back in March when Metafilter came down hard in favor of raw milk
posted by hydropsyche at 3:17 AM on April 30 [1 favorite]

USDA chief Tom Vilsack is a dairy lobbiest (see Sierra Club from 2020)
posted by jeffburdges at 10:11 AM on May 3