It’s been a few weeks since this has been discussed here, but the story on H5N1 bird flu has NOT gone away. More cases have popped up in cows and people. While human-to-human transmission has not been documented yet, it sounds like it’s closer to becoming reality.
The good news is that the same precautions that work against COVID-19 would likely work against H5N1 bird flu. At least if there’s a new pandemic, I’ll be so much better prepared for it than I was for the old one. (I have lots of 3M Aura 95 masks. I recently bought a 3M HF-802SD elastomeric respirator and installed a DIY exhalation filter consisting of a layer of electrical tape, a layer of poster tape, and part of an old strapless N95 mask.)
The bad news is that most people have abandoned those precautions. Also, the governments are doing a lousy job of tracking things, getting farmers to do more about the problem, and taking care of the workers who are in the most danger.
H5N1 fizzles out this time, just like it did on past occasions.
H5N1 isn’t as deadly as feared. For all we know, there are lots of asymptomatic or mild cases that are not being detected, which means that the real case fatality rate is MUCH lower than the official one.
So far so good so lucky re: animal x-over diseases.
Having spent most of my life near to and so trained by large active earthquake faults (waking up flying through the air of your bedroom has that effect), I think of little H5N1 incidents as useful reminders of the inevitably coming big one.
I have my box of masks, carboys and tubes of varied disinfectants, oximeter, thermometer, blood pressure cuff, large volume room air filter fan, and oxygen concentrator (which saved lives of two neighbors so far when oxygen supplies fell short locally during the initial corona epidemic), and various useful drugs stored and ready, just like my “go bag” when I was living in a fire zone.
The next one is coming.
d fb
P.S. I had to use the bizarre “carboys” because nanny filter dislikes the plural form of “jug”
The virus they were working with that day was far from ordinary, and there should have been no room for the safety breach that was about to happen and the oversight failures that followed.
The experiment underway involved one of two infamous lab-made bird flu viruses that had alarmed scientists around the world when their creation became widely known nearly a decade earlier. In each case, scientists had taken an avian influenza virus that was mostly dangerous to birds and manipulated it in ways that potentially increased its threat to humans…
So it is fortunate that the H5N1 virus isn’t capable of spreading easily from person to person. If the virus were ever to evolve in ways that gave it that ability, it could cause a devastating pandemic.
And yet in late 2011 the world learned that two scientific teams – one in Wisconsin, led by virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka, and another in the Netherlands, led by virologist Ron Fouchier – had potentially pushed the virus in that direction. Each of these labs had created H5N1 viruses that had gained the ability to spread through the air between ferrets, the animal model used to study how flu viruses might behave in humans.
The ultimate goal of this work was to help protect the world from future pandemics, and the research was supported with words and funding by two of the most prominent scientists in the United States: Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases…
The story of how the H5N1 viruses came to be created – and how the University of Wisconsin and the Kawaoka lab would later respond to the 2019 safety breach during the ferret experiment – raises uncomfortable questions about the tremendous trust the world places in these kinds of labs.