What's killing us this week?

[Doctor X]

Getting slaughtered at a young age in Democrat-led cities like Chicago will bring the mean down.

– J.D.

[Pyrrho]

https://i.imgur.com/KNin9TS.jpg

[Ben Trovado]

https://i.imgur.com/KNin9TS.jpg

I would pay good money for a cable management gadget that looked exactly like that.

[Pyrrho]

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00201-2

An outbreak of avian influenza on a mink farm in Spain provides the strongest evidence so far that the H5N1 strain of flu can spread from one infected mammal to another.

The outbreak of H5N1 flu, reported in Eurosurveillance on 19 January1, occurred on an American mink (Neovison vison) farm in Carral in October 2022. Genetic sequencing showed that the animals were infected with a new variant of H5N1, which includes genetic material from a strain found in gulls, as well as a genetic change known to increase the ability of some animal-flu viruses to reproduce in mammals.

The new variant puts bird flu in “uncharted territory”, says Wendy Puryear, a virologist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Researchers have warned that, unless careful precautions are taken, the disease might eventually spread among people.

[Pyrrho]

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/bir ... a-pandemic

The good news is that flu drugs and vaccines that work against the virus already exist, Wille says. Compared with where the world was when the coronavirus behind the COVID-19 pandemic came on the scene, “we are already ahead of the game.”

How the virus would need to change to spread among people is a big unknown
This new iteration of bird flu is what’s called a highly pathogenic avian influenza, one that is particularly lethal for both domestic and wild birds. Aquatic birds such as ducks naturally carry avian flus with no or minor signs of infection. But when influenza viruses shuffle between poultry and waterfowl, variants with changes that make them lethal to birds can emerge and spread.

Avian viruses can be severe or even deadly for people. Since 2003, there have been 873 human cases of H5N1 infections reported to the World Health Organization. A little less than half of those people died. In February, an 11-year-old girl in Cambodia died after she developed severe pneumonia from an avian flu virus, the country’s first reported infection since 2014. Her father was also infected with the virus — a different variant than the one behind the widespread outbreak in birds —though he has not developed symptoms. It’s unknown how the two people were exposed.