494
H5N1 Bird Flu Isn’t a Human Pandemic—Yet. American Contrariness Could Turn It into One
(www.scientificamerican.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2024
494 points (98.2% liked)
News
21665 readers
6756 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
And there's a frankly scarily high likelihood that it's not an "if" but a "when" – some forecasters like the ALERT team, who are usually fairly accurate, give H5N1 turning into a pandemic about a 25% chance in the coming decade, which would generally mean it'd successfully specialized for infecting human lung tissues.
If or when that pandemic does happen, there's a chance it'd be extremely bad. Estimates for the infection fatality rate (IFR) range anywhere from 1 to 80%, eg. this article estimates 14 – 33%, but this article estimates 30 – 80% for the current strains. Needless to say that even a 10% fatality rate would be disastrous, something like 20x – 50x worse than COVID. Note that the IFR is distinct from the case fatality rate (CFR) which is currently something like 50% – 80%, but those are only the cases we know of and the ones bad enough to end up in hospital, but based on eg. wastewater studies the number of total infected is probably a lot higher than the cases we've seen so far.
Some estimates for eg the 1918 pandemic put its IFR at around 2% but some studies have pointed out it's likely that that's an underestimate, and eg. the ALERT team gives it a ~60% chance that the IFR for H5N1 would be ≥10%. Not letting this thing turn into a pandemic should be a top priority for health authorities, but nobody seems to be willing to actually take the steps needed, such as shutting down mink farms here in Finland – our extremist right-wing government is instead paying subsidies to a dying industry that centers around animal torture even though it's a prime zoonosis candidate. And let's not forget that H5N1 is just one of the highly pathogenic avian influenzas going around right now, although it is by far the most pressing one at the moment.
Conservatives will always prioritize money over lives. The only consolation I have is that even though they might still lead us to potentially even hundreds of millions of needless deaths if/when this does turn into a pandemic, they'll be the ones refusing to get vaccinated and therefore more likely to die.