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.
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.
People confusing this with COVID might be in for a surprise because if this becomes a human pandemic it will likely be much worse.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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…
Moo Flu.
Trump flu.
Surely some rich republican ranchers can get Trump’s attention…
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.
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…
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.
You might want to read this.
Basically: it’s likely that the old age thing is mostly traced to bureaucratic errors
counter argument: taco rice and spam isn’t actually healthy, but lying about obachan being dead so you can keep pocketing her pension means you can buy more chu-hai.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/530073/scientist-snares-ig-noble-gong-for-work-debunking-blue-zones
I’ve read that the healthiest amount of meat is around one serving a week.
Can you do fish or pork? Those two don’t seem to be effected
Yep! But I add ghee to the fish because it’s too lean.
My complaint is mostly due to the threat of dwindling variety. And beef is my favorite.
Ah, find a local farmer, buy a full cows cut asap before the price spikes, toss the 500lbs of beef in a deep freezer. Bam profit?
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 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.
Pumpkin seed milk is so good. Too bad it’s hard to come by. Harder still for zero sugar versions.
Colour me intrigued, have never come across it before…
…and brand recommendations for the zero-sugar variety?
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.
Don’t cows eat oats as well? That would be able to be turned into just oat milk.
And oat milk is the superior plant based milk so its really a win win.
Hard agree. From an environmental (low water use), supply chain (we already grow a lot of it to feed livestock), and arguably flavour perspective it’s the winner of the nut milks.
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.
I haven’t had cows milk in years. Somehow all my sauces and things are still turning out delicious! Lots of plant milk is flavored or sweetened. Buying regular/unsweetened almond or oat milk will work for most cases. I am extremely partial to oat milk and I would honestly drink a glass of it
It drives me fucking nuts that in the US sweetened soy/almond milk is the default. Sometimes the unsweetened even costs a few cents more.
Haha corn subsidies go brrrrrrrr
I wish oat milk didn’t tear my guts up, because it’s easily the best plant milk I’ve had.
I’ve heard that pea milk tastes pretty neutral
I’ll have to give it a try if I ever see some, I think all I’ve ever seen here are soy, almond, rice, and oat.
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…
When it’s in California, it’s “God’s wrath”, when it’s under Trump, it’s “just a thing that happens, nothing to be done.”
And to the rest of the world, it will be the “Trump Pandemic”.
The second trump pandemic. We already had a “trump pandemic.”
I hope it will be called “Trump plague” or something this time around.
“Trump Flu 2” to emphasize this is happening AGAIN
Trump pandemic 2:The Flu Boogaloo
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 …
It’s all fun* and games until there’s human to human transmission.
(*Darwin award “fun”)
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.
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.
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.
Government told people to never drink raw milk. The sale and consumption of raw milk went up in ivermectin loving circles. It’s weird reverse psychology with raw milk.
What’s next? Surely these people wouldn’t be dumb enough to drink bleach.
Yeah, let alone inject it, or try to cure disease with a lightbulb suppository! I’m so glad americans are all rational people, and there’s not a significant voting bloc of willfully misinformed dingbats ready to slurp down whatever obvious idiotic lie gets shat out in their general direction by their orange fuhrer!
I’m kind of ok with that.
It’d be fine if they were just endangering themselves, but the most likely way we get a more virulent bird flu strain is one of these idiots catching in while they also have the regular flu
And then refusing to isolate or wear a mask. While being unvaccinated.
They’re basically dirty people.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they started refusing to ever wash their hands.
It reminds me a lot of the Herman Cain Awards.
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.
HIV-1 virus exposure was most likely from bushmeat trade. COVID might have as well.
I was aware that COVID most likely came from wet markets. But that’s selling hunted meat.
Animal agriculture is raising animals to eat. Often in confinement.
With bird flu, animal agriculture is a major cause for concern. But that doesn’t mean animal agriculture was the cause of all pandemics.
I guess we could argue that eating meat might be. But I also don’t want to tell folks who are living in poverty in other parts of the world that they can’t hunt for food.
So I feel like the ethical arguments are different too.
Meat is a vector for all pandemics, so the goal should be to create a world where no one ever has to eat meat ever again.
Or where meat can be grown in a lab in controlled conditions.
That’s always going to be vastly more expensive than just eating plants, it’s just not a realistic way to feed everyone. It could really only ever be a sometimes food.
this one. I know it’s a meme in vegan circles but meat really is fucking delicious.
Modern fake meat is not super distinguishable anymore. The stuff you buy at the market I mean, not the stuff that is sold at restaurants even when the brand is same (maybe restaurant cooks just don’t know?)
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>
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].
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.
Lol they aren’t trying to actually reduce expenses. If they did there’s clear places to go (we don’t seem to want to use our military, why do we spend 1/3 of our national budget on it?).
The goal is to inject confusion and uncertainty into everyone’s lives and to pwn the libs who think government is capable of doing good.
That’s not at all what I said. The meat Industry already exists and is scaled profitable, even if it’s terrible for our planet.
I said to get any scale of another version, it’s going to have to be as equally profitable or corporations are not going to go for it.
Sustainable, scalable and profitable.
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.
I don’t disagree with your general sentiment, but what I see as responses here are often empty responses… Just the obvious “we should stop being terrible arbiters of our planet”. Like no shit, but it’s hard and MOST humans are not gonna ever be vegan/vegetarian unless forced.
MOST humans are not gonna ever be vegan/vegetarian unless forced.
Maybe. What about you, though?
I am 100% in that category. I have some aspirations to be in a lifestyle where I catch a lot of my own fish but zero desire to move off animal protein to a vegetarian lifestyle.
You’re curious how beans and rice scales to 350 million people?
Apparently he’s confused by the idea that we can eat the stuff we used to feed to cows.
I try to buy local fruit and veg only. Fun fact: if we all went vegan, we could free up 70-80% of the land currently being used for animal ag. We could rewild that land and still have excess food. We currently grow enough plants to feed 15B people, but we feed that to the animals instead.
My point is, you try to… I try to also, but in the dead of winter there’s no a local fruit and veggies. I’m also not vegan/vegetarian, I eat meat. Fish, and chicken primarily but I don’t raise either, so I have to rely on someone else to do that for me.
We do actually get probably half our eggs from someone at my wife’s work, and some. fruits and vegetables at the farmers market down the street in the summer. But they’re closed now and have been most of winter.
It’s harder than just saying “just stop” was my point. I’d love to be part of the solution where I can but there’s zero chance of me not eating meat if it’s available.
We currently grow enough plants to feed 15B people, but we feed that to the animals instead.
a lot of the plant matter fed to animals is parts of plants we can’t or won’t eat.
and a lot of the land used isn’t crop land, but grazing land
and they’re is no reason to believe the land would ever be rewilded.
Still results in overall reductions in arable-land usage. Even more than just eliminating 100% of food-waste
we show that plant-based replacements for each of the major animal categories in the United States (beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs) can produce twofold to 20-fold more nutritionally similar food per unit cropland. Replacing all animal-based items with plant-based replacement diets can add enough food to feed 350 million additional people, more than the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food loss.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1713820115
Grazing usage isn’t free from harms either
Livestock farmers often claim that their grazing systems “mimic nature”. If so, the mimicry is a crude caricature. A review of evidence from over 100 studies found that when livestock are removed from the land, the abundance and diversity of almost all groups of wild animals increases
Even just replacing 25-50% meat with plants in the US would have incredible outcomes for the people. I guarantee we would be a far healthier population. The cheap meat being served up to Americans is not good.
Maybe this is bias from 20ish years of not eating meat, but most of the time it just smells foul to me, like an overly sour smell that only goes away if you spice the fuck out of it. Beef and chicken are the main offenders for this for me.
It’s mostly corn.
Granted, it’s not processed in a way to be fit for human consumption.
But still, most of it is corn. Some of it is corn cobs and stalks but most of it is kernels.
Outside of that, other grains are very common. Oats for example.
So, they are right. Raising plants to feed animals so we can eat the animals is less efficient than raising plants for us to eat. Especially in regards to cattle. Which is one of the most inefficient things in the US food system. The only reason it’s so cheap is because of subsidation, both of the cattle and the corn that’s grown to feed them.
And countries much larger than our own survive on rice and beans just fine. As queerminest eluded to in her comment.
As far as local food, I have a co-op. So I buy local vegetables and fruits when I can.
Raising plants to feed animals so we can eat the animals is less efficient than raising plants for us to eat.
if that were the situation, you might be right. but since we actually feed livestock mostly crop seconds and byproducts, it’s actually a conservation of resources in a lot of situations, with minimal competition with human food sources
1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
we show that plant-based replacements for each of the major animal categories in the United States (beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs) can produce twofold to 20-fold more nutritionally similar food per unit cropland. Replacing all animal-based items with plant-based replacement diets can add enough food to feed 350 million additional people, more than the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food loss.
your shepon paper shows a great deal of spinach being fed to chickens. why would it be fed to chickens if it were suitable for human consumption? I don’t actually know, but my guess is that it is not suitable for human consumption, and that is why it is fed to chickens. that’s a conservation of resources. the potatoes fed to cattle are likely the same.
this paper doesn’t discuss this discrepancy at all. I have to say I don’t find the analysis very compelling.
See, if you bury your head in the sand, the virus can’t get you
Well, ya know, it’s primarily a respiratory disease among humans. You literally aren’t likely to catch if if your head is buried in sand. And once you suffocate or whatever, you won’t have to worry about the flu.
LMAO first time seeing this. Perfect.
This is the kind of outside the box thinking that makes this nation great.
