The real story is animal ag creates the conditions for selection for more virulent pandemic viruses (and antibiotic resistant bacteria through overuse of the chemically-identical antibiotics given to humans) and yet we don't take the actions necessary to prevent them.
That's ineffective action to enable the industry to continue rather than ending it and doing something less dangerous that won't kill millions. Not all motion is progress :rocking horse photo here: - One of Meta's "motivational" posters
AlexandrB 2 days ago [-]
While you're right, I suspect having the price of meat increase 2-5x will mean that whoever pushes for the elimination of factory farming won't be in power for long enough to "make it stick".
alfiedotwtf 1 days ago [-]
Plus, people won’t let authorities know their livestock is infected until it spreads further
Terr_ 1 days ago [-]
"If my neighbor is affected too, then they won't be able to undercut me in price later..."
Even if that scenario is very rare, it's interesting to think of how dramatically these discussions would change if we had perfect forensic knowledge for tracing the complex blame/liability.
Aloisius 2 days ago [-]
Animal agriculture isn't really required. Just humans coming into contact with animals or droppings will do. See: HIV, SARS, Zika, MARV, etc.
Clearly the solution is to exterminate all other species.
I don’t think the comment confused them. Two different and serious problems caused by the same conditions and practices.
fnordpiglet 1 days ago [-]
In fact you could argue antibiotics allows much denser farms and proportionately more viral transmission and therefore more mutation.
tiahura 2 days ago [-]
The real story is that bird flu has already completely spread across the country and there’s _1_ serious case.
sundaeofshock 2 days ago [-]
At one point in 2019, there was just 1 serious case of Covid 19.
ifyoubuildit 1 days ago [-]
Was that before or after spreading across the whole country?
tiahura 1 days ago [-]
At that point, it hadn’t spread and there were already tons of serious cases.
uptecwa 1 days ago [-]
For those in California, our union, University Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE) has blown the whistle on the inadequate avian bird flu testing in the state. There is only one lab rated in the state of California at UC Davis that is responsible for timely testing of poultry and dairy. You can read the article at the following: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-12-01/lab-worker...
The University of California system has failed to keep the health and safety of our food supply in safe and working order, with lab testing sometimes waiting weeks for turn around, causing avian bird flu to spread and causing mass culling of chickens, and tainting diary, and increasing the likelihood of animal to human spread.
UPTE members at CAHFS are raising concerns about severe understaffing and unsafe working conditions that jeopardize their critical role in testing for diseases like Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (H5N1).
After five out of seven lab workers quit since January due to inadequate compensation and a lack of support, the timely and accurate monitoring of our nation's food supply is at risk, potentially leading to catastrophic outbreaks affecting poultry and human health. Your can support us by urging CAHFS management to address these issues and protect the health and safety of our communities.
You can help by emailing the Dean of Veterinary Medicine, Dean Dr. Mark Stetter to support staffing and safety at CAHFS using the following link: https://upte.org/cahfs
to11mtm 2 days ago [-]
Wait so the guy who had bleeding eyes wasn't severe?
Edit: Read the article, this headline is semi-clickbait.
Article indicates this is the first severe case related to a 'backyard' (i.e. smaller farm or self-farmer range of size) farm.
Sooooo nothing that new aside from the bit that bird flu is still around TBH.
It's not surprising in it's own way, we are somewhere in a migratory season so these things will move around a bit more.
Not saying Bird flu doesn't concern me a lot, I'm just frustrated by the 'oh this isn't new except the person got it from their backyard coop rather than some more industrial-ish farm'.
Edit to Edit:
Ok, I guess this is the first 'technically' severe case. Not sure what the details are but at TBH I'm not a doctor so...
tptacek 2 days ago [-]
No. The "bleeding eyes" were just busted capillaries. It's a super common symptom you can get just from sneezing too hard†; it's happened to me --- the specific "bleeding" symptom that patient had --- a bunch of times.
† I'm not saying that's what happened to him, just that it's not some freaky rare "crying blood" thing.
chefandy 2 days ago [-]
It’s surprisingly common. Additionally, it can develop as a secondary symptom when temporary neurological impairments induce self-exposure to YouTube comments sections.
dylan604 2 days ago [-]
How related to the bleeding ear syndrome from listening to certain types of music?
chefandy 1 days ago [-]
I haven’t researched that but I have read there is significant comorbidity with a low tolerance for “kids these days.”
dylan604 19 hours ago [-]
While I can appreciate the sentiment, there's some ol'timey music that defnitley makes my ears bleed and has been known to make a Martian get all explodey
chefandy 18 hours ago [-]
We’re talking broad-stroke statistics here.
thfuran 2 days ago [-]
Some people hold their head at an angle and confuse one for the other.
brailsafe 2 days ago [-]
Can confirm, having been coughing for the last week enough to do this to my eyes. Was pretty alarming actually, but turns out to be common, it's gone now.
My wife works in medicine. Severe in medicine basically means ICU.
That terrible flu you had that one time where you could barely function and were puking multiple times would be mild in medicine.
2muchcoffeeman 2 days ago [-]
Tell me about it. First time I was “very” ill from the flu, the doc was nonchalant. He was all, “yeah, this isn’t uncommon”. I was bed ridden for 2 weeks and wasn’t really 100% for almost 3months after.
arcticbull 2 days ago [-]
Yep, the flu kills tens of thousands every year. CDC says about 36,000.
lurking_swe 2 days ago [-]
and it makes sense when you think about it. doctors in a hospital see the whole gamut, from people with an ear infection to someone in a fatal car accident. “bleeding eyes” isn’t severe at all lol.
Severe means “i’m going to die unless i get medical attention very soon”.
m_fayer 1 days ago [-]
And this is the structural dynamic that degrades doctor’s bedside manner and makes them appear nonchalant in the face of suffering.
tedunangst 2 days ago [-]
Why does the article devote so many paragraphs to bird flu in cows when the patient contracted it from birds and it's not the strain prevalent in dairy herds?
throwup238 2 days ago [-]
There are two big news items about H5N1 and this article talks about both of them. The CDC announced the first severe case in Louisiana and California declared a state of emergency because of bird flu detected in cows (which is mostly just a bureaucratic formality to release funds and enable agencies to cooperate with less red tape).
tedunangst 2 days ago [-]
I think it would be better to make two stories to avoid the possibility of an inattentive reader concluding this severe case could have been avoided if only the dairy flu had been responded to sooner.
charliebwrites 2 days ago [-]
Why can’t agencies always have easier access to funds and cooperate with less red tape?
Seems more…efficient?
mort96 2 days ago [-]
I don't know the reason in this specific case, but sometimes, "red tape" exists for a reason. Things like documenting why things are done the way they are, why funds go where they go, going through ethics committees, etc has real benefits (including from an efficiency perspective; without oversight over e.g where funds go, you open up for both embezzlement and bad allocation). However getting rid of that stuff might make sense in situations where being able to rapidly respond is essential.
ska 2 days ago [-]
> but sometimes, "red tape" exists for a reason.
Pretty much always. And a lot of the time, the reason (if not the implementation) was pretty good. But these things almost always grow, and interact, and are very hard to update with changing times. SO you get a mess, and you get friction, but mostly as you note, the friction is viewed as a brake on other undesirable outcomes. So people learn to work with it. I guess there aren't enough incentives for people to clean up/optimize it until well past when it becomes an obvious problem.,,
cududa 2 days ago [-]
You don’t want a central authority doing this nationwide. You want a central authority synthesizing results and setting minimum practices for states to adopt.
But generally, each state already has bodies that are inspecting cows and chickens daily, with FDA representatives present. They’re experts at testing regularly to catch normal flu etc, and the data is shared. This happens and they’re still doing the same exact same thing - which we want.
In these cases, there’s tons and tons of cooperation. Some folks are investigating cows independently. Some birds. All this research is shared federally and with all states.
Then, CDC, department of agriculture, etc, all are activating their protocols to deal with their various parts of this.
We actually have plans for this and haven been executing decently well.
It’s called a Swiss cheese filter. If you cut one slice of cheese, there’s holes for things to slip through. Stack a bunch of slices on top, less chance of something to get through a hole.
You want redundancy.
Source: I worked on all sorts of COVID related data, and danced around CDC federal systems and state/ other partner integration API’s.
In regards to testing and investigation, we want multiple layers
acdha 2 days ago [-]
Call your confessional representatives’ offices and ask them to allow that. Federal agencies can only spend money as directed by Congress, and there’s a lot of political fear and misrepresentation about money being spent improperly, which creates a ratchet effect where new layers of approval are created to prevent hypothetical waste even if the cost of the extra overhead is greater than the savings.
jfengel 2 days ago [-]
People keep making it harder to access funds. That adds red tape.
Cooperation also means devoting money to a project. People already have work; there aren't bodies waiting around to be assigned. Usually that means getting a contractor, which takes time.
It would be a lot more efficient if people trusted the government to make decisions. But we just elected people with the express goal of hating government, and that will as usual result on more red tape and more costs.
fc417fc802 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
llamaimperative 2 days ago [-]
People seem to forget this when their people are in charge, but a lot of the US governmental system is designed to be rather slow and limited in its power (both statutory and effective).
DrillShopper 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
bee_rider 2 days ago [-]
Did they edit it or something? The version I see has only one paragraph about cows. And it is only there to explain that it isn’t the version going around in cows (But I did have to use the archive link shared here—normally I don’t like those, but curiosity about a potential public health issue overrode my principles).
tedunangst 2 days ago [-]
The archive version seems to be missing several paragraphs like
> But the virus is changing, said John Connor, an associate professor of microbiology at Boston University. “It is essentially going to the gym all the time and training to be better,” Connor said at a webinar on H5N1 this week hosted by hosted by Boston University’s Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases. “The virus is not just getting into birds, now it’s getting into cows. There’s evidence that it’s getting into other animals, cats, dogs, mink,” he said. “Now what we are seeing is that this is a virus that used to be only good at breaking and entering into bird cells and causing disease there and transmitting there, now its getting better at breaking and entering into a bunch of other cells.”
jacobgkau 2 days ago [-]
Thanks for giving an example. It looks like someone added an additional snapshot on the archive site which now includes that paragraph. Just have to click "next" to see the next snapshot.
southernplaces7 2 days ago [-]
And if one John Conner is worried about the future of this virus, i'd be worried too..
2 days ago [-]
Polizeiposaune 2 days ago [-]
My understanding is that much of the H5N1 bird flu detected in north america before this event was detected in cows and in people with exposure to cows. So if you want to provide background on H5N1 in america you end up talking about cows.
I feel like general press calling it “bird flu” over “highly-pathogenic avian influenza” (as what it is called in literature) might be a big oversight…
Would we have used homeopathy and juice cleanse (edit: or just nothing) instead of antibiotics in industrial farms, we would have less meat but an easier weapons for ourselves against H5N1.
Sabinus 2 days ago [-]
Somehow I doubt RFK is going to reduce antibiotic use on farms.
cmrdporcupine 2 days ago [-]
How... does antibiotics have anything to do with H5N1?
aziaziazi 2 days ago [-]
Absolutely nothing. I threw that out of rage but shouldn’t have.
> In seeking to respond to the pandemic, Trump has been widely condemned for not taking the pandemic seriously enough soon enough, spreading conspiracy theories, not encouraging mask wearing and undermining scientists and others seeking to combat the virus’s spread.
llamaimperative 2 days ago [-]
[inset “I told my people to slow down testing” video]
BadHumans 2 days ago [-]
I'm pretty sure the OP is being sarcastic.
2 days ago [-]
bangaloredud 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 16:10:02 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Even if that scenario is very rare, it's interesting to think of how dramatically these discussions would change if we had perfect forensic knowledge for tracing the complex blame/liability.
Clearly the solution is to exterminate all other species.
Round 2 versus insects or viruses?
https://www.dw.com/en/munich-study-confirms-severe-decline-i...
We had an informational picket at UC Davis last week, and you can find more details at our website at https://upte.org/news/upte-members-at-uc-davis-blow-the-whis...
The University of California system has failed to keep the health and safety of our food supply in safe and working order, with lab testing sometimes waiting weeks for turn around, causing avian bird flu to spread and causing mass culling of chickens, and tainting diary, and increasing the likelihood of animal to human spread.
UPTE members at CAHFS are raising concerns about severe understaffing and unsafe working conditions that jeopardize their critical role in testing for diseases like Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (H5N1).
After five out of seven lab workers quit since January due to inadequate compensation and a lack of support, the timely and accurate monitoring of our nation's food supply is at risk, potentially leading to catastrophic outbreaks affecting poultry and human health. Your can support us by urging CAHFS management to address these issues and protect the health and safety of our communities.
You can help by emailing the Dean of Veterinary Medicine, Dean Dr. Mark Stetter to support staffing and safety at CAHFS using the following link: https://upte.org/cahfs
Edit: Read the article, this headline is semi-clickbait.
Article indicates this is the first severe case related to a 'backyard' (i.e. smaller farm or self-farmer range of size) farm.
Sooooo nothing that new aside from the bit that bird flu is still around TBH.
It's not surprising in it's own way, we are somewhere in a migratory season so these things will move around a bit more.
Not saying Bird flu doesn't concern me a lot, I'm just frustrated by the 'oh this isn't new except the person got it from their backyard coop rather than some more industrial-ish farm'.
Edit to Edit:
Ok, I guess this is the first 'technically' severe case. Not sure what the details are but at TBH I'm not a doctor so...
† I'm not saying that's what happened to him, just that it's not some freaky rare "crying blood" thing.
That terrible flu you had that one time where you could barely function and were puking multiple times would be mild in medicine.
Severe means “i’m going to die unless i get medical attention very soon”.
Seems more…efficient?
Pretty much always. And a lot of the time, the reason (if not the implementation) was pretty good. But these things almost always grow, and interact, and are very hard to update with changing times. SO you get a mess, and you get friction, but mostly as you note, the friction is viewed as a brake on other undesirable outcomes. So people learn to work with it. I guess there aren't enough incentives for people to clean up/optimize it until well past when it becomes an obvious problem.,,
But generally, each state already has bodies that are inspecting cows and chickens daily, with FDA representatives present. They’re experts at testing regularly to catch normal flu etc, and the data is shared. This happens and they’re still doing the same exact same thing - which we want.
In these cases, there’s tons and tons of cooperation. Some folks are investigating cows independently. Some birds. All this research is shared federally and with all states.
Then, CDC, department of agriculture, etc, all are activating their protocols to deal with their various parts of this.
We actually have plans for this and haven been executing decently well.
It’s called a Swiss cheese filter. If you cut one slice of cheese, there’s holes for things to slip through. Stack a bunch of slices on top, less chance of something to get through a hole.
You want redundancy.
Source: I worked on all sorts of COVID related data, and danced around CDC federal systems and state/ other partner integration API’s.
In regards to testing and investigation, we want multiple layers
Cooperation also means devoting money to a project. People already have work; there aren't bodies waiting around to be assigned. Usually that means getting a contractor, which takes time.
It would be a lot more efficient if people trusted the government to make decisions. But we just elected people with the express goal of hating government, and that will as usual result on more red tape and more costs.
> But the virus is changing, said John Connor, an associate professor of microbiology at Boston University. “It is essentially going to the gym all the time and training to be better,” Connor said at a webinar on H5N1 this week hosted by hosted by Boston University’s Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases. “The virus is not just getting into birds, now it’s getting into cows. There’s evidence that it’s getting into other animals, cats, dogs, mink,” he said. “Now what we are seeing is that this is a virus that used to be only good at breaking and entering into bird cells and causing disease there and transmitting there, now its getting better at breaking and entering into a bunch of other cells.”
See, for instance, https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/situation-summary/mammals.html
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2024/m1218-h5n1-flu.html
This is probably because H5N1 was detected in dairy cows in Southern California.
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2024/m1218-h5n1-flu.html
> In seeking to respond to the pandemic, Trump has been widely condemned for not taking the pandemic seriously enough soon enough, spreading conspiracy theories, not encouraging mask wearing and undermining scientists and others seeking to combat the virus’s spread.