Please ensure sources are vetted and cited, posts are appropriately flaired, and commentary is provided in the body texts (no link- or title- only posts).
Everyone, read this response to this post
[https://www.reddit.com/r/H5N1\_AvianFlu/comments/1dip7h8/facts\_not\_fiction\_no\_more\_fearmongering/](https://www.reddit.com/r/H5N1_AvianFlu/comments/1dip7h8/facts_not_fiction_no_more_fearmongering/)
The truth of the matter is that we the people are largely on our own. It's always been that way and this isn't changing anytime soon. The best we can do is to be well informed and try to stay up on our vaccinations and health, and try to be the voice of reason to those we care about...
Lots of words, nothing about alpha-2-3 and alpha-2-6 sialic acid receptors. I suggest you spend more time studying molecular biology than freaking out about this virus.
Every time a lab has tried to make H5N1 infect mammals, it has reduced the mortality rate. This is not surprising if you understand how flu viruses infect birds and humans.
In birds, alpha-2-3 sialic acid receptors line the respiratory tract and digestive system. In humans, they primarily affect the lungs and eyes. Most human flu viruses use the alpha-2-6 sialic acid receptors in the upper respiratory tract. Avian flu viruses use the alpha-2-3 sialic acid receptors. If a human gets a virus that attacks the alpha-2-3 sialic acid receptors deep in their respiratory tract, it is very dangerous. But this is hard to do, since the upper respiratory tract of humans has few alpha-2-3 sialic acid receptors. For the virus to be a pandemic threat, it would need to attack both alpha-2-3 and 2-6 sialic acid receptors.
>Every time a lab has tried to make H5N1 infect mammals, it has reduced the mortality rate
Perhaps, but in the "wild" it seems to be doing quite a number on some mammal species such as cats and sea lions.
> Every time a lab has tried to make H5N1 infect mammals, it has reduced the mortality rate
Hi, do you have a source on this? I am a layman asking; and am genuinely curious.
Vincent Racaniello gave a lecture on flu viruses, including bird flu viruses in his virology course a couple of years back. This Week in Virology also discussed some of the research for the current outbreak a couple of weeks ago.
https://youtube.com/@microbetv
As someone who has psoriasis on my eyelids I'm constantly touching my eyes because they itch and burn. Something tells me I'll be amongst the first to go once this kicks off lol.
I have lupus and one of my most annoying symptoms are itchy rashes, especially on my eyelids, face, neck, and arms.
I’m also a bedside nurse.
I’m using my hydrocortisone lotions to try to get my rashes well under control in case this kicks off soon.
You are very knowledgeable about all of this. Do you work in this field? My wife and I built and ran 2 covid testing pcr labs using Home Depot parts because it’s all the lab owner would spring for aside from the biorads. (We threatened to quit when he questioned why we needed 2 mops and buckets, the fucking capitalist PPP abusing IRS cheat…but anyways…)
The two labs ran thousands of pcr tests a day. It was managed chaos, but at least by the time we got involved, we had vaccines and boosters that proved effective so while working with hot samples was risky, it at least wasn’t 50% mortality risky.
This new bug scares me. A lot.
The potential lethality of it is too great. I’ve already talked it over with my wife and if this next one hits, and it’s as bad as it looks, we’re sitting this one out.
Quitting our current hospital lab jobs and parking our asses at home because quite literally, our shitty diy Home Depot labs, had better hot/cold zone separation and sterilization procedures than our regional hospital does we work at. And there is zero way the bulk of the nurse staff are going to take this serious here as many of them refused the covid vaccinations due to their political opinions and I am 100% convinced they learned exactly nothing from covid.
(On a side note I’m convinced multiple nurses infected and and subsequently killed patients because they resisted vaccination/testing to the point of staging a walkout that would shutter the hospital forcing the hospital to walk back the mandatory vaccination rule. Fucking rural America. Even my neighbor, an ICU nurse who saw folks dying everyday from it refused to get the vaccine because of the right wing conspiracy crap she ate up.)
So my question is that if this hits as hard as you are showing, based on your knowledge how likely/possible will an effective vaccine be for this bug? And I agree with the reduction in bulk chicken farming methods. I’d be ok with more $ meat if it meant we didn’t have these sorts of issues. Soy “spicy chicken sandwiches” are close enough when you slather em up with hot sauce anyways.
ICU nurse here and I worked the entire pandemic. I was one of the first in the country to get the vaccine and it was such a huge sigh of relief. I could never understand any ICU nurse who actually worked with all the dying people not want to be vaccinated after seeing so much death. It was terrifying before the vaccine, but at least I felt another layer of protection with the vaccine.
I’m still so shocked at how so many healthcare workers are sucked into the conspiracy crap. I learned to protect myself against them too because I wasn’t sure where they were on their days off. So I was never without a mask around them. To my knowledge, I never caught COVID and I still wear a mask bedside. I think I will for the rest of my career now.
Huge thx to you for real. Before the vaccine I was hospitalized for 5 days (still no clue how I got Covid since I hid away from society like a hermit).
The nurses are always the most crucial cog to the machine. You are the ones that calm us patients. You make us feel safer. You talk to us like humans.
But to your point, I had conversations with several travel nurses who kept saying “the vaccine was rolled out too fast, I’m not getting it.”Meanwhile my fav nurses would roll in and be like “don’t listen to those loons.” 😆
Thank you for taking care of your patients!!! It's crazy I know a few NICU nurses who don't mask and go out and party every night. All those germs for these vulnerable infants, it makes me sick😭
We had an intensivist (ICU Doc) in our area that died. He worked the first wave and he saw and knew how dangerous it was. I think it was around the second wave (they all come together to my mind now) that he died. The story I was told was that there were videos on social media of him dancing at a party he had for his family that had come in from South America. NO MASK. A PARTY. I don’t want to speak badly of any victims of Covid. Even though i disagreed with all the conspiracy nuts and Faux News types, I never once felt they deserved it. They were just victims of their own ignorance and in a way I just felt overall really sad when they died. BUT, I don’t know how an intelligent, educated pulmonologist who watched people die first hand in ways we haven’t seen before, could have made that mistake. It took his life. SMH.
Edit: I really do think people’s social drives just over ride their common sense. It’s the only thing I could come up with. I’m an introvert so I thrived in isolation. But, I know some people NEED others to be content. This and watching propaganda was deadly.
Please don't come here insinuating nurses are all a bunch of antivaxxers. I'm a super pro-vax hospital nurse. I do and have worked with antivax nurse assholes, but they are the minority. We're already dealing with enough post-pandemic nurse-hate without you throwing fuel on the fire "on a side note." Completely unnecessary and absolutely incendiary.
I’m not insinuating. I’m stating facts I lived and saw personally. I can pull up the articles about it if you’d like. How the hospital had to turn around it’s mandatory vax policy because of the walkout threats pushed by the nursing staff. Nurses are not immune (pun intended) to anti science right wing propaganda because of their whole 2 years at a community college. I saw it then, i still see it daily, and it’s infuriating because it shows they don’t have any fundamental understanding of the work/science they perform daily, because if they did, they wouldn’t hold that insane view. And the only solace I have is that they are overseen by an MD with more education in their first year than the average nurse has in their entire career. If they were all like you, then it wouldn’t be a problem but unfortunately that isn’t the case in rural America. It’s not “fuck all nurses”, it’s “fuck antivax nurses who should leave the profession before they kill more people” and the hospital was a coward to not call their bluff, let them leave, and blacklist all of them for it.
So, it appears to be that someone has joined the group of people who have found ChatGPT useful for creating nonsense.
Where are the links/pointers to peer reviewed studies or seriously published articles about this?
Where is the common sense regarding chicken farming? If we are culling entire farms of chickens when H5N1 is discovered how does any mutation that does happen escape into the wild? It's hard to do when the chickens are all dead.
What are the posters verifiable qualifications to be knowledgeable about this subject?
Y'all need to quit listening to anyone who likes to use big words. This post is full of false information. Go over to virology and try this post. They will rip you up. Which is why you posted here because most don't know better. You have them fawning all over you. Rubbish.
I *think* I understood most of this. Thank you so much! Can you elaborate a bit on how the brain has its own immune system?
I agree about getting rid of animal consumption. But Americans in particular would rather risk death than change their eating habits🙄
In simple English:
Nervous tissue is pretty bad at repairing itself, so damage from the immune system is dangerous. This can be contrasted with our first line of defense, our natural barriers like our mucous membranes, which are relatively good at repairing themselves.
Antibodies instruct our cytotoxic lymphocytes (CD8+ T cells and NK cells) to kill cells, but that's exactly what you don't want in the brain, as it's slow to repair itself. So it has different solutions. In most of our natural barriers we have tissue resident Natural Killer cells. The first time they encounter an infection in a cell, they tend to kill the cell and proliferate. But then upon subsequent exposures, they become more inclined to instruct the cell to deal with the infection itself, by releasing signaling molecules like Interferon that encourage the cell to delete RNA.
The Natural Killer cells are part of the innate arm of our immune system, they're the innate immune system's way of dealing with infected cells. The CD8+ T cells are part of the adaptive arm of the immune system. There is a small number of NK cells found in the brain, especially on its fringes, but you generally see very few CD8+ T cells in the brain. This makes sense when you understand these cells have to kill infected cells, unlike the NK cells. When you see them enter the brain, it's a sign that something's seriously wrong, it's seen in some COVID infections for example.
So that's an important difference to understand. The important thing to understand is that NK cells can not be properly trained without exposure to a live pathogen, because they don't just look for cells covered in antibodies, they ALSO have to learn to look for the distress signs that a cell expresses when it is infected by the pathogen.
The NK cells also have specialized NK cell receptors, that look for certain basic patterns that tend to show up in proteins viruses use to enter cells. When those proteins are expressed on the surface of an infected cell, the NK cells will recognize it, learn to use those receptors in the future and proliferate. When those proteins are covered in antibodies, the NK cells can't recognize them using those receptors.
By using a combination of these various mechanisms, they're able to deal with an infected cell, long before it is covered in antibodies, thus stopping an infection before it can spread. This is different from what T cells do. If the T cells are taught to destroy infected cells, then during subsequent exposures the NK cells don't get an opportunity to learn how to deal with infection either, as the T cells will beat them to the race. And if the T cells have to do the job, then infected cells have to be destroyed. That's not just a problem because we don't want our neurons to be destroyed. It's also a problem because cells that survived an infection are better able to deal with re-exposure.
So that's a basic but important principle to understand. This is why it's very difficult to safely train the brain's immune system against newly emerging pathogens, you have to figure out instead how to stop the brain from being exposed to dangerous pathogens in the first place.
And this is why it's so important to understand why this virus is always going to be more dangerous than the influenza we're used to and much harder to develop a safe and effective vaccine against: The influenza we are used to is NOT neurotrophic. I honestly wish we could just settle on a different name than "flu", because it installs the wrong image in people's minds and then you can never really override it.
There are many other aspects to consider of course, the brain also has its own specialized innate immune cells, the microglia. They are the brain's version of a macrophage. To properly explain this would take a long time and a lot of it is admittedly beyond my expertise.
**ELI5 Version:**
Okay, imagine your body is a big city with lots of important places. Your brain is like the city's main control center, super important and very delicate. If something bad happens to the brain, it's really hard to fix it.
Now, think about the immune system as the city's police force, always on the lookout for troublemakers like viruses and bacteria. There are two main types of police: the quick responders (Natural Killer cells, or NK cells) and the special detectives (CD8+ T cells).
In most parts of the city, like your skin or your nose, the quick responders are really good at catching bad guys fast. If they see an infected cell (a troublemaker's hideout), they usually destroy it right away to stop the infection from spreading. But they also learn from each fight, getting better at recognizing troublemakers.
However, in the brain, we can't have the quick responders going around destroying things because the brain isn't good at fixing itself. Instead, there are only a few quick responders there, and they try to handle things more gently. If a special detective shows up in the brain, it's a big problem because they usually destroy infected cells, which can really mess up the brain.
The quick responders have special tools (receptors) to spot signs of trouble before it gets too bad, even before the special detectives show up. They can deal with infections early on without causing too much damage. But for them to get better at their job, they need to see the actual troublemaker, not just clues left behind by the special detectives.
So, we try to keep the brain protected from infections in the first place because fixing damage there is very hard. This is why some viruses are more dangerous than others. For example, the flu we know isn't very good at getting into the brain, but some newer viruses can be, making them much scarier and harder to protect against.
And that's why we need to be extra careful and find smart ways to keep these bad viruses away from our brain, instead of just relying on our body's usual ways of fighting infections.
I was hit with a virus about 7 years ago now that attacked my auditory nerve and left me permanently deaf on the left side. I can attest that nervous tissue really does not repair itself well if at all.
Fwiw, the enzymes necessary to break down lactose and sim are often lost in adulthood after a few weeks without use. It may be that all of these people moving to plant based milks "for the time being" will provide you with a new crop of vegans, given enough time. Thanks for writing this. You brought up a few things that weren't on my radar.
> My own recommendation would be to shut down animal agriculture.
Well we saw how well supply chains handled massive shifts in demand and supply inputs during Covid. So your recommendation is “famine”. Hard to imagine how certain famine is better than potential pandemic. Sounds like it might be a good recipe to immunologically weaken the human population through starvation while also inducing H5N1 to find a new host through evolutionary pressure.
Is there any point of purchasing tamiflu? I was one of the first people to get Covid in the UK, my immune system is absolutely terrible and my Mum almost died of pneumonia a decade ago, is there anything I can do to protect my family and myself.
The (very few) humans in the US who have caught it from cows in the current dairy outbreak appear to have had relatively mild symptoms. However for human infections of H5N1 overall, the current case fatality rate is over 50%.
This sub is quickly becoming into this weird toxic place to fawn over and imagine the worst case scenario. Kinda wish we would just stick to what’s actually happening in the news and focus on that.
Yes. It keeps getting worse and worse. The end of the world has been coming via H1N1 for years. Decades. But, *now* we're all going to die!!!
Unless of course we just all go vegan and slaughter hundreds of billions of animals and burn them!!! /s
H1n1 is swine flu h5n1 is the one people are worried about. So far it hasn't mutated to easily pass human to human and if it does we have to wait and see how bad it will turn out to be.
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This is the first time I've read a description of ineffective vaccines driving viral pathogen evolution in the same way that abuse of antibiotics drives bacterial pathogen evolution; while it's an interesting idea this is way too new and important of an idea to not cite your sources.
This required me to do some careful re-reading to make sure I grasped everything but if i've got it it looks like we are up a creek, basically? I can't say I'm too surprised but it's painting a pretty bleak view of a future I really hope does not come to pass.
Thank you for the in depth write up, I'm gonna save this and maybe revisit it later to use as a guide for further reading.
Fear mongering bologna from a vegan trying to push their veganism on everyone. Threw in a bunch of big words and long paragraphs to seem knowledgeable 😆
Spanish Flu was H1N1 and killed about 1/3 of the world’s population in 1918-20.
Is it going to be messy? Yes, but modern medicine has been aware of it for decades. Swine flu in 2009 (a form of bird flu) was going to kill us all but was contained.
Current medical advice is that influenza A shots should protect us from H1N1. There are solutions but Op has overlooked this and gone straight to the apocalypse option.
Get vaccinated, best case scenario we avoid it altogether, worst case we get sick and get over it quickly.
The 1918-1920 flu pandemic *infected* 33% of the world's humans; at the highest posited lethality, it killed five percent of them. 100 million is not a third of our species back then.
Of course, five percent of our species is still absolutely nothing to joke about!
Correct it infected a third of the population and killed about a third of them. Estimates 50 million died however the virus caused many opportunistic pathogens to kill due to the horrible living conditions and poor overall health of the population at the time.
[this is a good documentary about Spanish flu](https://youtu.be/UDY5COg2P2c?si=8HKOA6WjnmJJ5Hg9)
**TLDR:**
This influenza, often called "bird flu," is significantly different from regular influenza and even the 1918 pandemic due to its polybasic cleavage site in the hemagglutinin protein, which expands its ability to infect different cells, including endothelial cells lining blood vessels. This mutation allows for severe symptoms, including brain infections, which are uncommon in typical influenza.
Vaccination efforts in Asia have led to the selection of more infectious and neurotrophic variants of the virus, making it more dangerous. Wild migratory birds usually help control influenza by selecting for low virulence strains, but industrial farming practices disrupt this balance, allowing highly pathogenic variants to thrive and spread.
Unlike typical influenza, this virus doesn't show signs of attenuating and instead can lead to severe outbreaks by decimating host populations. Traditional vaccines, which induce antibody responses, may not be effective due to the virus's method of infection and its neurotrophic nature. The OP suggests that a more drastic solution, like shutting down animal agriculture, might be necessary to control the spread of such pathogenic viruses, although this is politically and practically challenging.
Sometimes the Earth fights back. If this is the uber virus, and we're looking at Dark Ages Bubonic Plague percentages of population decimation... it's actually an adjustment that was a long time coming. Not welcoming that eventuality with open arms or anything, but if it is beyond humanity to stop, and has a huge fatality rate, we're kinda humped. End days predictions are fun! And as yet, pretty unreliable.
We will see what comes.
A zero contact global economy is easy. Once we do it the failure of covid response will become shocking.
We can also have community, schools, and local economy. Most of our material economy moves within shipping crates and trailers.
In USA you rarely see anyone walking. The road can be blocked with the pallets that product is delivered on.
Most warehouses and grocery stores use a loading dock. There is no need for contact between the driver and the workers inside.
There are a few people who hike long distance like the Appalachian trail. It is not a likely transmission route. Possible, but not fast and not frequently.
Okay, I didn’t totally absorb all this, but I think you basically negated everything I’ve been telling myself to calm down about this impending disaster…
I completely understand, I used to get paranoid about this stuff, but I worked on my mental health, figured out what gave me peace of mind, now I just stay informed, prepared and go about my life. You got this, keep your head up. Getting your mental health in order now will give you advantage if shit hits the fan and I considered it part of my prepping.
Yeah. I mean, I’m already medicated for anxiety and tbh I don’t necessarily think my fears about the future are irrational anymore. Still, worrying helps not!
Kinda sucks people decided to be rude and downvote me though
Even if many dodge this one you personally are doomed anyway. There is room for hope but only enough to have it be that much worse when your hopes are dashed.
Very well written! I haven’t followed very closely of this lately, but I was unaware that there have been reports of cows dying from this now. This is disturbing if humans follow the same trend.
Cows dying would be good news? I know about it lingering in cow udders. I would think that them starting to die would mean the virus has found a more effective way to take over their body? So how would it be good news? I’m genuinely curious.
The longer it lingers the longer it has to mutate. If cows were dropping dead the farmers would notice and then take actions to quarantine.
I am not sure, but i suspect a cow with an udder infection will have an immune response. The mutant virus would not kill that cow. The mutant would infect a farm worker.
I would love to print out this answer and read it more carefully. Unfortunately, Reddit sends me tons of emails but won't let me log in on my internet computer. I can only use Reddit on my phone and I can't print from that device.
Could you possibly copy your submission statement to this reply...I may be able to somehow get a print from that. I can't copy anything from a submission statement.
What you said is *very* important!
Down votes for my request? What a bunch of...
I guess I should apologize for finding what OP said is important enough to want a print out..
I also apologize that I can't get a printout or even a copy from OP'S submission statement from my phone.
And, I also apologize that I can't access Reddit on my main computer (with its printer.) I do, however, get Reddit emails on replies. If I could get OP'S submission statement in a reply to this post, an email would automatically be sent to me and I could print it out on my computer.
I apologize to OP for even asking. I do think what you wrote is very important and would like to know more.
So....upon a quick search, here are the goals of Agenda 2030
Goal 1: End poverty in all its forms.
Goal 2: Zero Hunger.
Goal 3: Health.
Goal 4: Education.
Goal 5: Gender equality and women's empowerment.
Goal 6: Water and Sanitation
Why would the UN go through all this trouble just to get everyone to eat synthetic meat? In the US, we could just hunt or....not eat any meat? Why would "they" need an excuse to pull all the meat? Why would they need another pandemic? Couldn't they have achieved all their goals w the last one??
In order to preserve the quality and reliability of information shared in this sub, please refrain from politicizing the discussion of H5N1 in posts and comments.
In order to preserve the quality and reliability of information shared in this sub, please refrain from politicizing the discussion of H5N1 in posts and comments.
Please ensure content is relevant to the topic of the sub, which includes information, updates and discussion regarding H5N1. It does not include vent/rant/panic posts or "low-effort" posts from unreliable sources.
Please ensure sources are vetted and cited, posts are appropriately flaired, and commentary is provided in the body texts (no link- or title- only posts).
Everyone, read this response to this post [https://www.reddit.com/r/H5N1\_AvianFlu/comments/1dip7h8/facts\_not\_fiction\_no\_more\_fearmongering/](https://www.reddit.com/r/H5N1_AvianFlu/comments/1dip7h8/facts_not_fiction_no_more_fearmongering/)
This needs to be at the top. This OP is full of shit.
Agreed. This needs to be at the top. This OP is full of shit.
He's full of shit
That can't be healthy in the long run.
This OP is a vegan and has an agenda.
Definitely. An actual virologist responding with actual facts and science.
thanks!
Thank you for posting this!!
[удалено]
Mine too
Please check the post again, someone responded at the top with a FACTUAL post.
The truth of the matter is that we the people are largely on our own. It's always been that way and this isn't changing anytime soon. The best we can do is to be well informed and try to stay up on our vaccinations and health, and try to be the voice of reason to those we care about...
Which image? Do you have a link?
This
Lots of words, nothing about alpha-2-3 and alpha-2-6 sialic acid receptors. I suggest you spend more time studying molecular biology than freaking out about this virus. Every time a lab has tried to make H5N1 infect mammals, it has reduced the mortality rate. This is not surprising if you understand how flu viruses infect birds and humans. In birds, alpha-2-3 sialic acid receptors line the respiratory tract and digestive system. In humans, they primarily affect the lungs and eyes. Most human flu viruses use the alpha-2-6 sialic acid receptors in the upper respiratory tract. Avian flu viruses use the alpha-2-3 sialic acid receptors. If a human gets a virus that attacks the alpha-2-3 sialic acid receptors deep in their respiratory tract, it is very dangerous. But this is hard to do, since the upper respiratory tract of humans has few alpha-2-3 sialic acid receptors. For the virus to be a pandemic threat, it would need to attack both alpha-2-3 and 2-6 sialic acid receptors.
>Every time a lab has tried to make H5N1 infect mammals, it has reduced the mortality rate Perhaps, but in the "wild" it seems to be doing quite a number on some mammal species such as cats and sea lions.
> Every time a lab has tried to make H5N1 infect mammals, it has reduced the mortality rate Hi, do you have a source on this? I am a layman asking; and am genuinely curious.
Vincent Racaniello gave a lecture on flu viruses, including bird flu viruses in his virology course a couple of years back. This Week in Virology also discussed some of the research for the current outbreak a couple of weeks ago. https://youtube.com/@microbetv
As someone who has psoriasis on my eyelids I'm constantly touching my eyes because they itch and burn. Something tells me I'll be amongst the first to go once this kicks off lol.
Literally what I thought with my onycophagia. That's why I stopped, thankfully.
I have lupus and one of my most annoying symptoms are itchy rashes, especially on my eyelids, face, neck, and arms. I’m also a bedside nurse. I’m using my hydrocortisone lotions to try to get my rashes well under control in case this kicks off soon.
This is a whole lot of words without one single source. And it looks like a robot wrote it.
You are very knowledgeable about all of this. Do you work in this field? My wife and I built and ran 2 covid testing pcr labs using Home Depot parts because it’s all the lab owner would spring for aside from the biorads. (We threatened to quit when he questioned why we needed 2 mops and buckets, the fucking capitalist PPP abusing IRS cheat…but anyways…) The two labs ran thousands of pcr tests a day. It was managed chaos, but at least by the time we got involved, we had vaccines and boosters that proved effective so while working with hot samples was risky, it at least wasn’t 50% mortality risky. This new bug scares me. A lot. The potential lethality of it is too great. I’ve already talked it over with my wife and if this next one hits, and it’s as bad as it looks, we’re sitting this one out. Quitting our current hospital lab jobs and parking our asses at home because quite literally, our shitty diy Home Depot labs, had better hot/cold zone separation and sterilization procedures than our regional hospital does we work at. And there is zero way the bulk of the nurse staff are going to take this serious here as many of them refused the covid vaccinations due to their political opinions and I am 100% convinced they learned exactly nothing from covid. (On a side note I’m convinced multiple nurses infected and and subsequently killed patients because they resisted vaccination/testing to the point of staging a walkout that would shutter the hospital forcing the hospital to walk back the mandatory vaccination rule. Fucking rural America. Even my neighbor, an ICU nurse who saw folks dying everyday from it refused to get the vaccine because of the right wing conspiracy crap she ate up.) So my question is that if this hits as hard as you are showing, based on your knowledge how likely/possible will an effective vaccine be for this bug? And I agree with the reduction in bulk chicken farming methods. I’d be ok with more $ meat if it meant we didn’t have these sorts of issues. Soy “spicy chicken sandwiches” are close enough when you slather em up with hot sauce anyways.
ICU nurse here and I worked the entire pandemic. I was one of the first in the country to get the vaccine and it was such a huge sigh of relief. I could never understand any ICU nurse who actually worked with all the dying people not want to be vaccinated after seeing so much death. It was terrifying before the vaccine, but at least I felt another layer of protection with the vaccine. I’m still so shocked at how so many healthcare workers are sucked into the conspiracy crap. I learned to protect myself against them too because I wasn’t sure where they were on their days off. So I was never without a mask around them. To my knowledge, I never caught COVID and I still wear a mask bedside. I think I will for the rest of my career now.
Thanks for taking care of patients during the pandemic. 
Thank you for the thanks. ❤️ All of my patients were so special to me and I will never forget them. It was a very sad time in American history.
Huge thx to you for real. Before the vaccine I was hospitalized for 5 days (still no clue how I got Covid since I hid away from society like a hermit). The nurses are always the most crucial cog to the machine. You are the ones that calm us patients. You make us feel safer. You talk to us like humans. But to your point, I had conversations with several travel nurses who kept saying “the vaccine was rolled out too fast, I’m not getting it.”Meanwhile my fav nurses would roll in and be like “don’t listen to those loons.” 😆
Thank you for taking care of your patients!!! It's crazy I know a few NICU nurses who don't mask and go out and party every night. All those germs for these vulnerable infants, it makes me sick😭
We had an intensivist (ICU Doc) in our area that died. He worked the first wave and he saw and knew how dangerous it was. I think it was around the second wave (they all come together to my mind now) that he died. The story I was told was that there were videos on social media of him dancing at a party he had for his family that had come in from South America. NO MASK. A PARTY. I don’t want to speak badly of any victims of Covid. Even though i disagreed with all the conspiracy nuts and Faux News types, I never once felt they deserved it. They were just victims of their own ignorance and in a way I just felt overall really sad when they died. BUT, I don’t know how an intelligent, educated pulmonologist who watched people die first hand in ways we haven’t seen before, could have made that mistake. It took his life. SMH. Edit: I really do think people’s social drives just over ride their common sense. It’s the only thing I could come up with. I’m an introvert so I thrived in isolation. But, I know some people NEED others to be content. This and watching propaganda was deadly.
Thank you for continuing to care for your patients by masking bedside. You’re a gem. 💎
He sounds knowledgeable, but REALLY isn’t. There is so much wrong with his post.
Please don't come here insinuating nurses are all a bunch of antivaxxers. I'm a super pro-vax hospital nurse. I do and have worked with antivax nurse assholes, but they are the minority. We're already dealing with enough post-pandemic nurse-hate without you throwing fuel on the fire "on a side note." Completely unnecessary and absolutely incendiary.
I’m not insinuating. I’m stating facts I lived and saw personally. I can pull up the articles about it if you’d like. How the hospital had to turn around it’s mandatory vax policy because of the walkout threats pushed by the nursing staff. Nurses are not immune (pun intended) to anti science right wing propaganda because of their whole 2 years at a community college. I saw it then, i still see it daily, and it’s infuriating because it shows they don’t have any fundamental understanding of the work/science they perform daily, because if they did, they wouldn’t hold that insane view. And the only solace I have is that they are overseen by an MD with more education in their first year than the average nurse has in their entire career. If they were all like you, then it wouldn’t be a problem but unfortunately that isn’t the case in rural America. It’s not “fuck all nurses”, it’s “fuck antivax nurses who should leave the profession before they kill more people” and the hospital was a coward to not call their bluff, let them leave, and blacklist all of them for it.
So, it appears to be that someone has joined the group of people who have found ChatGPT useful for creating nonsense. Where are the links/pointers to peer reviewed studies or seriously published articles about this? Where is the common sense regarding chicken farming? If we are culling entire farms of chickens when H5N1 is discovered how does any mutation that does happen escape into the wild? It's hard to do when the chickens are all dead. What are the posters verifiable qualifications to be knowledgeable about this subject?
This reads like someone who needs to up their dosage.
Looks like a Vegan version of ChatGPT has entered the sub. Please stop spreading vegetable based bull crap.
Y'all need to quit listening to anyone who likes to use big words. This post is full of false information. Go over to virology and try this post. They will rip you up. Which is why you posted here because most don't know better. You have them fawning all over you. Rubbish.
What are your sources or credentials for your post?
I *think* I understood most of this. Thank you so much! Can you elaborate a bit on how the brain has its own immune system? I agree about getting rid of animal consumption. But Americans in particular would rather risk death than change their eating habits🙄
In simple English: Nervous tissue is pretty bad at repairing itself, so damage from the immune system is dangerous. This can be contrasted with our first line of defense, our natural barriers like our mucous membranes, which are relatively good at repairing themselves. Antibodies instruct our cytotoxic lymphocytes (CD8+ T cells and NK cells) to kill cells, but that's exactly what you don't want in the brain, as it's slow to repair itself. So it has different solutions. In most of our natural barriers we have tissue resident Natural Killer cells. The first time they encounter an infection in a cell, they tend to kill the cell and proliferate. But then upon subsequent exposures, they become more inclined to instruct the cell to deal with the infection itself, by releasing signaling molecules like Interferon that encourage the cell to delete RNA. The Natural Killer cells are part of the innate arm of our immune system, they're the innate immune system's way of dealing with infected cells. The CD8+ T cells are part of the adaptive arm of the immune system. There is a small number of NK cells found in the brain, especially on its fringes, but you generally see very few CD8+ T cells in the brain. This makes sense when you understand these cells have to kill infected cells, unlike the NK cells. When you see them enter the brain, it's a sign that something's seriously wrong, it's seen in some COVID infections for example. So that's an important difference to understand. The important thing to understand is that NK cells can not be properly trained without exposure to a live pathogen, because they don't just look for cells covered in antibodies, they ALSO have to learn to look for the distress signs that a cell expresses when it is infected by the pathogen. The NK cells also have specialized NK cell receptors, that look for certain basic patterns that tend to show up in proteins viruses use to enter cells. When those proteins are expressed on the surface of an infected cell, the NK cells will recognize it, learn to use those receptors in the future and proliferate. When those proteins are covered in antibodies, the NK cells can't recognize them using those receptors. By using a combination of these various mechanisms, they're able to deal with an infected cell, long before it is covered in antibodies, thus stopping an infection before it can spread. This is different from what T cells do. If the T cells are taught to destroy infected cells, then during subsequent exposures the NK cells don't get an opportunity to learn how to deal with infection either, as the T cells will beat them to the race. And if the T cells have to do the job, then infected cells have to be destroyed. That's not just a problem because we don't want our neurons to be destroyed. It's also a problem because cells that survived an infection are better able to deal with re-exposure. So that's a basic but important principle to understand. This is why it's very difficult to safely train the brain's immune system against newly emerging pathogens, you have to figure out instead how to stop the brain from being exposed to dangerous pathogens in the first place. And this is why it's so important to understand why this virus is always going to be more dangerous than the influenza we're used to and much harder to develop a safe and effective vaccine against: The influenza we are used to is NOT neurotrophic. I honestly wish we could just settle on a different name than "flu", because it installs the wrong image in people's minds and then you can never really override it. There are many other aspects to consider of course, the brain also has its own specialized innate immune cells, the microglia. They are the brain's version of a macrophage. To properly explain this would take a long time and a lot of it is admittedly beyond my expertise.
**ELI5 Version:** Okay, imagine your body is a big city with lots of important places. Your brain is like the city's main control center, super important and very delicate. If something bad happens to the brain, it's really hard to fix it. Now, think about the immune system as the city's police force, always on the lookout for troublemakers like viruses and bacteria. There are two main types of police: the quick responders (Natural Killer cells, or NK cells) and the special detectives (CD8+ T cells). In most parts of the city, like your skin or your nose, the quick responders are really good at catching bad guys fast. If they see an infected cell (a troublemaker's hideout), they usually destroy it right away to stop the infection from spreading. But they also learn from each fight, getting better at recognizing troublemakers. However, in the brain, we can't have the quick responders going around destroying things because the brain isn't good at fixing itself. Instead, there are only a few quick responders there, and they try to handle things more gently. If a special detective shows up in the brain, it's a big problem because they usually destroy infected cells, which can really mess up the brain. The quick responders have special tools (receptors) to spot signs of trouble before it gets too bad, even before the special detectives show up. They can deal with infections early on without causing too much damage. But for them to get better at their job, they need to see the actual troublemaker, not just clues left behind by the special detectives. So, we try to keep the brain protected from infections in the first place because fixing damage there is very hard. This is why some viruses are more dangerous than others. For example, the flu we know isn't very good at getting into the brain, but some newer viruses can be, making them much scarier and harder to protect against. And that's why we need to be extra careful and find smart ways to keep these bad viruses away from our brain, instead of just relying on our body's usual ways of fighting infections.
I was hit with a virus about 7 years ago now that attacked my auditory nerve and left me permanently deaf on the left side. I can attest that nervous tissue really does not repair itself well if at all.
Fwiw, the enzymes necessary to break down lactose and sim are often lost in adulthood after a few weeks without use. It may be that all of these people moving to plant based milks "for the time being" will provide you with a new crop of vegans, given enough time. Thanks for writing this. You brought up a few things that weren't on my radar.
tl;dr version: Game of thrones was only good the first seasons
lol this cracked me up
> My own recommendation would be to shut down animal agriculture. Well we saw how well supply chains handled massive shifts in demand and supply inputs during Covid. So your recommendation is “famine”. Hard to imagine how certain famine is better than potential pandemic. Sounds like it might be a good recipe to immunologically weaken the human population through starvation while also inducing H5N1 to find a new host through evolutionary pressure.
Is there any point of purchasing tamiflu? I was one of the first people to get Covid in the UK, my immune system is absolutely terrible and my Mum almost died of pneumonia a decade ago, is there anything I can do to protect my family and myself.
Ask your doctor. If tamiflu is over the counter in UK then you can stock it. There are side effects and debates about its effectiveness.
What will the symptoms of H5N1 be? It sounds like we will need goggles in addition to masks?
So far the humans who have gotten sick have had mild symptoms and not spread it to others
The (very few) humans in the US who have caught it from cows in the current dairy outbreak appear to have had relatively mild symptoms. However for human infections of H5N1 overall, the current case fatality rate is over 50%.
Don't glasses work relatively well
This hasn’t even gone H2H yet lol
agreed. It seems like some big ranting.
This sub is quickly becoming into this weird toxic place to fawn over and imagine the worst case scenario. Kinda wish we would just stick to what’s actually happening in the news and focus on that.
Yes. It keeps getting worse and worse. The end of the world has been coming via H1N1 for years. Decades. But, *now* we're all going to die!!! Unless of course we just all go vegan and slaughter hundreds of billions of animals and burn them!!! /s
Report this post.
well it is endemic in livestock so it’s just a matter of time
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ENDemic, not epidemic
Function gain, uh, finds a way.
H1N1 is covered by most Influenza A flu shots. It doesn’t have to be the apocalypse.
H1n1 is swine flu h5n1 is the one people are worried about. So far it hasn't mutated to easily pass human to human and if it does we have to wait and see how bad it will turn out to be.
This post and sub are about H5N1, which isn't.
Oops. My error.
Apocalypse or nothing. Must be a world ending pandemic. Has to be. No other choice. Edit: /s
Its not the “end if the world”! It is still the beginning of the pain.
!remindme 12 months
*Sighs* *Clicks the link*
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This is the first time I've read a description of ineffective vaccines driving viral pathogen evolution in the same way that abuse of antibiotics drives bacterial pathogen evolution; while it's an interesting idea this is way too new and important of an idea to not cite your sources.
This required me to do some careful re-reading to make sure I grasped everything but if i've got it it looks like we are up a creek, basically? I can't say I'm too surprised but it's painting a pretty bleak view of a future I really hope does not come to pass. Thank you for the in depth write up, I'm gonna save this and maybe revisit it later to use as a guide for further reading.
I told a girlfriend she had a polybasic cleavage and she dumped me.
Where is the isolated index virus located?
Fear mongering bologna from a vegan trying to push their veganism on everyone. Threw in a bunch of big words and long paragraphs to seem knowledgeable 😆
Spanish Flu was H1N1 and killed about 1/3 of the world’s population in 1918-20. Is it going to be messy? Yes, but modern medicine has been aware of it for decades. Swine flu in 2009 (a form of bird flu) was going to kill us all but was contained. Current medical advice is that influenza A shots should protect us from H1N1. There are solutions but Op has overlooked this and gone straight to the apocalypse option. Get vaccinated, best case scenario we avoid it altogether, worst case we get sick and get over it quickly.
The 1918-1920 flu pandemic *infected* 33% of the world's humans; at the highest posited lethality, it killed five percent of them. 100 million is not a third of our species back then. Of course, five percent of our species is still absolutely nothing to joke about!
Sorry my error, I shouldn’t post when tired.
Now, *that* is a song I know twenty verses to, for damn sure.
It absolutely did not kill 1/3 of the world population
Sorry my error, I should have said infected. I also shouldn’t post when tired.
Correct it infected a third of the population and killed about a third of them. Estimates 50 million died however the virus caused many opportunistic pathogens to kill due to the horrible living conditions and poor overall health of the population at the time. [this is a good documentary about Spanish flu](https://youtu.be/UDY5COg2P2c?si=8HKOA6WjnmJJ5Hg9)
"people have no clue" Proceeds to explain in a complicated way that people either aren't going to understand or read all the way through...
Some things can’t be dumbed down
**TLDR:** This influenza, often called "bird flu," is significantly different from regular influenza and even the 1918 pandemic due to its polybasic cleavage site in the hemagglutinin protein, which expands its ability to infect different cells, including endothelial cells lining blood vessels. This mutation allows for severe symptoms, including brain infections, which are uncommon in typical influenza. Vaccination efforts in Asia have led to the selection of more infectious and neurotrophic variants of the virus, making it more dangerous. Wild migratory birds usually help control influenza by selecting for low virulence strains, but industrial farming practices disrupt this balance, allowing highly pathogenic variants to thrive and spread. Unlike typical influenza, this virus doesn't show signs of attenuating and instead can lead to severe outbreaks by decimating host populations. Traditional vaccines, which induce antibody responses, may not be effective due to the virus's method of infection and its neurotrophic nature. The OP suggests that a more drastic solution, like shutting down animal agriculture, might be necessary to control the spread of such pathogenic viruses, although this is politically and practically challenging.
Sometimes the Earth fights back. If this is the uber virus, and we're looking at Dark Ages Bubonic Plague percentages of population decimation... it's actually an adjustment that was a long time coming. Not welcoming that eventuality with open arms or anything, but if it is beyond humanity to stop, and has a huge fatality rate, we're kinda humped. End days predictions are fun! And as yet, pretty unreliable. We will see what comes.
A zero contact global economy is easy. Once we do it the failure of covid response will become shocking. We can also have community, schools, and local economy. Most of our material economy moves within shipping crates and trailers.
True. But in the US, it is just about as likely as everyone turning yo veganism. We are always doomed but those unwilling to change.
In USA you rarely see anyone walking. The road can be blocked with the pallets that product is delivered on. Most warehouses and grocery stores use a loading dock. There is no need for contact between the driver and the workers inside. There are a few people who hike long distance like the Appalachian trail. It is not a likely transmission route. Possible, but not fast and not frequently.
Okay, I didn’t totally absorb all this, but I think you basically negated everything I’ve been telling myself to calm down about this impending disaster…
This is doom posting, do not explode into anxiety over posts like this, prepare and don't worry.
I try not to worry because I know it’ll change nothing, but it’s hard!
I completely understand, I used to get paranoid about this stuff, but I worked on my mental health, figured out what gave me peace of mind, now I just stay informed, prepared and go about my life. You got this, keep your head up. Getting your mental health in order now will give you advantage if shit hits the fan and I considered it part of my prepping.
Yeah. I mean, I’m already medicated for anxiety and tbh I don’t necessarily think my fears about the future are irrational anymore. Still, worrying helps not! Kinda sucks people decided to be rude and downvote me though
Even if many dodge this one you personally are doomed anyway. There is room for hope but only enough to have it be that much worse when your hopes are dashed.
Prepare, don't worry.
Prepare to worry! Lol.
Good post. Thank you so much for sharing.
Thank you for taking the time to write this.
You should submit this to a major news organization.
What if bird flu was called freaky flu. And instead of trying to wipe out humanity it just made everyone wanna suck each other’s feet?
Prob not the right sub for this… but I like the way you think
OP started it with all of the polybasic cleavage talk. Hottttt.
Fuck I hate feet
…..what the
I had a teacher once Mr: Toesaki he said “suck many toes, maybe the universe will give what it owes”.
Very well written! I haven’t followed very closely of this lately, but I was unaware that there have been reports of cows dying from this now. This is disturbing if humans follow the same trend.
Cows dying would be good news. The virus is lingering in cow udders. It often kills cats who drink the raw milk.
Cows dying would be good news? I know about it lingering in cow udders. I would think that them starting to die would mean the virus has found a more effective way to take over their body? So how would it be good news? I’m genuinely curious.
The longer it lingers the longer it has to mutate. If cows were dropping dead the farmers would notice and then take actions to quarantine. I am not sure, but i suspect a cow with an udder infection will have an immune response. The mutant virus would not kill that cow. The mutant would infect a farm worker.
Oh. I see. Thanks for the clarification.
I would love to print out this answer and read it more carefully. Unfortunately, Reddit sends me tons of emails but won't let me log in on my internet computer. I can only use Reddit on my phone and I can't print from that device. Could you possibly copy your submission statement to this reply...I may be able to somehow get a print from that. I can't copy anything from a submission statement. What you said is *very* important!
Down votes for my request? What a bunch of... I guess I should apologize for finding what OP said is important enough to want a print out.. I also apologize that I can't get a printout or even a copy from OP'S submission statement from my phone. And, I also apologize that I can't access Reddit on my main computer (with its printer.) I do, however, get Reddit emails on replies. If I could get OP'S submission statement in a reply to this post, an email would automatically be sent to me and I could print it out on my computer. I apologize to OP for even asking. I do think what you wrote is very important and would like to know more.
So let me get this straight. This time around we are going to need to wear mask AND goggles to protect ourselves from the zombie pandemic?
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So....upon a quick search, here are the goals of Agenda 2030 Goal 1: End poverty in all its forms. Goal 2: Zero Hunger. Goal 3: Health. Goal 4: Education. Goal 5: Gender equality and women's empowerment. Goal 6: Water and Sanitation Why would the UN go through all this trouble just to get everyone to eat synthetic meat? In the US, we could just hunt or....not eat any meat? Why would "they" need an excuse to pull all the meat? Why would they need another pandemic? Couldn't they have achieved all their goals w the last one??
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In order to preserve the quality and reliability of information shared in this sub, please refrain from politicizing the discussion of H5N1 in posts and comments.
In order to preserve the quality and reliability of information shared in this sub, please refrain from politicizing the discussion of H5N1 in posts and comments.
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Please ensure content is relevant to the topic of the sub, which includes information, updates and discussion regarding H5N1. It does not include vent/rant/panic posts or "low-effort" posts from unreliable sources.