Let’s see…we’re living in a country run by openly corrupt oligarchs. The educational system is being undermined by fundamentalist Christian fanatics. We’re almost certainly headed for an economic crash, as billionaires pour billions of our dollars into the AI fantasy. MAHA is similarly chasing illusions, that removing food dyes will correct systematic patterns of abuse by Big Food, and that autism is caused by whatever unlikely correlation Robert Felching Kennedy Jr names. The anti-war
president is searching for a casus belli to blow up boats in the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Caribbean. What else could possibly go wrong?
How about another pandemic? How about a bird flu pandemic?
After a quiet summer, bird flu is on the move again, and experts say it poses an escalating threat. While the virus doesn’t appear capable of spreading from human to human, it has killed people exposed to sick poultry. This year, the United States saw its first death from bird flu, a Louisiana senior with a flock of backyard chickens.
Viruses are constantly evolving, and if a person catches bird flu while infected with a seasonal flu, the pathogens could mutate into a variant that infects large numbers of people. “The minute it transmits in humans, it’s done,” warned Erin Sorrell, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
In our recent bird flu epidemic, for most of us it was a nuisance: egg shortages in the grocery stores, higher prices. But in the center of the epidemic, factory farms in Ohio and Indiana, it was far worse. Entire flocks of chickens had to be killed to suppress the spread. Farmers going out of business. Would you believe mass graves with millions of birds?
ProPublica has published evidence that the avian virus is spread by airborne contamination.
Our finding: The wind was at least a plausible explanation for how the virus could have spread from farm to farm.
We shared our analysis of the outbreak with eight experts in avian flu who agreed with that assessment. Several of them felt it was more than a mere possibility.
“It just seems so likely to me that this was an airborne thing,” said Brian McCluskey, former chief epidemiologist with USDA’s agency that oversees the response to bird flu. “I mean, how else would it have moved around so quickly?”
The experts stressed the analysis didn’t prove the wind directly carried bird flu from one farm to another, or that it was the only factor at play. The virus typically spreads via multiple routes, which could include contaminated birds, rodents or workers; if farms share the same feed supplier or trash collector, those factors can’t be ruled out.
But several experts said ProPublica’s analysis underscores the shortcomings of the government’s strategy, which fails to take the wind into account at all.
“USDA has been grossly negligent in not establishing risk factors in real time,” said Simon Shane, a poultry veterinarian and consultant.
There has been talk of pre-emptively vaccinating chickens…but the idea is opposed by the chicken meat and egg industries. That might give foreign buyers the impression that American chickens are tainted, and we can’t have that! So instead we’ll dig trenches and bury millions of birds when the virus appears, which is our government approved strategy. You know who is behind this approach.
Adding to the headwinds is U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has said the virus should be allowed to burn through flocks so that farmers can identify birds with natural immunity, an approach public health experts have called “dangerous and unethical.”
That’s the same strategy many of these MAHA morons endorsed for COVID — let it burn through the human population until the virus was “done”. That would have been a disaster, but now they want to do the same thing for the poultry industry. Maybe they’ll get to do the experiment in the near future if the bird flu jumps to the human population.
We are so screwed in so many ways.
Burn out the cancer.
Primary any Dem collaborators.
After the midterms, block anything the government suggests.
No more half-baked compromises that the Republicans will betray anyway.
Increase the supreme court to 13 judges.
.
A somewhat more happy outlook for the future:
The Roundworld Year of 2026 shall be known as “The Year of the Curious Squid”
.https://www.facebook.com/share/p/174AiaLN9o/
I have trouble with the notion of a wind-borne virus. If we learned one thing from Covid, that was that the open air was our friend. Yes, one can get infected with a virus in closed settings simply by breathing contaminated air. From what I’ve read, these indoor viruses don’t last much longer than 24 hours. But out in the open? That’s a hard sell for me. How many times did we hear during lockdown to open the windows or get outside in the fresh air?
https://crooksandliars.com/2025/11/part-327-series-why-our-fda-trying-kill-us
Anti-vaxxer Vinay Prasad is going to make it much more difficult to get vaccines.
Yet, Peter Hotez (a doctor I have come to trust), the director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital, said in a text message that he wanted to see Prasad’s statement about a link between covid-19 vaccines and children’s deaths supported with more data as well as information about any underlying health conditions.
“With almost one billion COVID immunizations administered to Americans during the pandemic, and perhaps close to 100 million for children and adolescents, it is conceivable that such a one in 10 million or 100 million event occurred,” such as a child’s death, Hotez wrote, later adding, “given the public health implications, this is not something one casually blurts out in an email.”
@2 John Watts wrote: I have trouble with the notion of a wind-borne virus.
I reply: Yes, out in the open air is more likely to be safe in most circumstance in which we find ourselves. But, not if you are in or near the foul air of a factory poultry unit with tens of thousands of diseased birds contaminating the air. That is a recipe for rapid plague-like spread of any disease.
I shan’t link, but there are stories about the process of, um, ‘culling’ millions of birds as practiced.
I mean, they’re gonna die soon enough, no?
(Let us just note it’s rather hellish for the birdies)
can we take a moment and ponder the suffering this will cause other species? not just the poor captive birds, buried alive by the millions (because farmers love their animals /s), but the countless wild birds and other creatures that will be killed. Last year, bird flu was decimating elephant seals on remote islands.
There’s such an easy way for us all to do our part to minimize the risk of zoonotic pandemics: stop using animals, esp. for food. We have great vegan substitutes for all poultry and egg products.
That was never going to work.
Here it is, five years since the Covid-19 virus appeared, and it is still circulating at high levels in the US population.
The virus mutates way too fast for a strategy like that to work.
A strategy like that will also leave a lot of survivors that are permanently disabled and/or at high risk of dying. The Long Covid syndromes.
I knew three people who came down with Long Covid.
Two of them died within a year as a direct result of their Covid infection.
The third was just in the hospital again for a Long Covid related problem.
We had some sick and dying wild birds in my neighborhood a few weeks ago.
A few cell phone photos and a few phone calls turned up the likely cause.
Avian bird flu.
The same virus that is killing all those chickens.
Will a bird flu epidemic cause ICE agents to take their masks off?
microraptor, :)
To misquote the fda miscreants: I guess we’ve reached ‘full herd stupidity’.
Raven’s concerns are valid. There are Covid and a new strain of the flu surging.
From the 1960’s song by The Animals, ‘We’ve gotta get outta this place’.
But, then, Martha and the Vandellas warns us, ‘Nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide’
No he’s not.
There is no search for a casus belli, they found it: it’s drugs. It is literally incredible, which is good for them, since it means they can tell the loyalists from the disloyal.