When H5N1 avian influenza started spreading among dairy cattle across the U.S. this year, regulators warned against consuming unpasteurized milk. What happened? Raw milk sales went up.
Distributors of this unsafe-for-human-consumption product deny H5N1—which has the potential to sicken millions of people—is a danger. Dairy farmers decline to allow disease detectives onto their properties.
So, when this finally jumps species, will we continue the tradition of naming a virus after its origin?
MAGA Influenza or maybe the Florida Flu?
- Flyover Flu
- Farmer’s Flu
- Milk Malady
- MAGA Malady
- Cow Contamination
- Cow’s Cough
- Dairy Disease
- Bird’s Blight
- Flying Fever
- Pigeon Pestilence
- Pigeon Plague
That’s enough alliteration for today
The White Death
The Lactonic Plague
The Culling of the Contrarians
American people
Dipshit Disease.
Texas Moo Flu
Nah, we’ll do like we did with the Spanish flu where we put our heads in the sand about a new flu strain from a farm in Kansas and name it after the first place to publicly acknowledge it exists.
I just bought 10 80-packs of toilet paper. $426.50. I should be fine now.
See you on ebay in 6 months
You can’t wipe your ass with jealousy and spite.
Don’t tempt me with a good time
He said spite, not spit
I got a shattaf (handheld bidet sprayer) at the start of the last pandemic. It’s incredible. It’s easy to install for a renter, and is so much cleaner than tp. Only downside is it’s cold water unless you run a second line from your sink’s hot water line.
I always wanted to try one of those things, but I don’t want to install one. I also want one with a remote control that has a range of at least 7 yards.
It’s super easy to install.
Close the water feed valve, flush the toilet, disconnect the feed line from the tank, connect the Y adapter valve to the tank, reconnect the feed line, open the water valve.
It took me ~15 minutes to install and had a towel’s worth of clean water spillage to clean up.
My took me about 4 hours to install. But I needed to run an outlet with a ground fault outlet for mine. But the water tap is dead easy.
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You’re thinking of a super soaker!
You can get ones that auto magically lift the lid with motion sensor. Add in a heated seat and by the time you get your panties down it’s nice and cozy.
The bidet is the way. I’ve used one for so long that I hardly ever notice the cold water.
The way they’re usually set up here in the Nordics where they’re pretty common is that the tap feeds into that sprayer, meaning that I have to open my tap and then set it to whatever water temperature I want, and then when I… err, pull the trigger on the sprayer the water flows from the sprayer and not the tap.
That sounds nice. I wish they were standard in the US. Does it just connect to the faucet or does a line run into the sink cabinet?
I have zero idea what the terminology is in English, but it’s connected to what translates to something like an “ejector line” that’s either built into the faucet or purchasable as a separate adapter. Here’s a diagram I found for Oras Bidetta as an example:
Here’s what it looks like under my sink (sorry about the awkward angle, didn’t want to remove a shelf so I had to shoot blind)
With the line on the left being the one for the hand shower, and it just connects into the faucet via a built in ejector thingamajig.
Yes! I’ve seen those. I’m very envious. As a renter, I’m not allowed to cut the necessary hole in the sink cabinet to access the warm water line, since it’s not exposed like yours. If I owned my home, you can be sure I’d install one before I started painting. Lol
Thank you for taking the time to find and take the photos!
No problem! I figured it’s easier to show a diagram and a picture than try to explain it when my plumbing terminology is shaky enough even in Finnish, let alone English 😅
That’s fair. I can assure you that your English is far better than my Finnish. The only words I know are salmiakki and pulla. Although I can say that 100% of the words I know are delicious. LMAO
Wouldn’t it still take time to heat up? My sink takes 30 seconds to get hot.
I bought a bidet with all the goodies - heated seat, heated water, heated air drier, charcoal air filtration, select-able sprays from elderly/small child gentle to peel the paint off your arse, and automatic seat raising. All temperatures can be adjusted to your personal comfort.
Worth every penny…Trump can keep his gold plated toilet. I crap like a King!
mine takes a whole minute. I just run it for the duration of the first log.
Great until I buy all your water
Jokes on you - I own my own well.
I got 80 acres of red pine and birch trees. I’m selling toilet paper Log Kitstm ~Some Assembly Required~
“American” contrariness, scientificametican? Really? You sure you can’t narrow it down more than everyone who’s an American?
Not even a little bit?
Well, then fuck you. Because we both know exactly who you’re talking about.
Yeah, Americans. As much as i disagree with Republicans on things, they’re still Americans.
Our educational system, our economic and our social systems have failed them and led them to unscientific contrary positions.
We need to find ways to bridge that gap and stop things like this without it being a political issue.
We need to find ways to bridge that gap and stop things like this without it being a political issue.
When the problem is political in nature I really don’t see how it’d be beneficial to pretend like it’s not
If people understood germ theory, it wouldn’t be an issue. Instead, we spend a lot of time in high school biology on hydras, for example. Hydras are cool, reproduction by budding is weird, but maybe that time would have been better spent on some history of plagues and their impact on society?
With better education half our population would not be so easily manipulated into bad choices.
Instead, we spend a lot of time in high school biology on hydras … maybe that time would have been better spent on some history of plagues
I think there’s a different class that might be better suited to discussing past plagues lol
On a serious note, I get what you mean. I think classes need to be more integrated on their lessons, so like the science class is discussing the mechanics of how diseases reproduce at the same time history class is covering past epidemics, while the social studies class covers how systemic injustice worsened epidemics for the poor and minorities.
☝️👍
Well, I don’t know. Finland has – or rather had until very recently, thanks to conservatives doing what they always do – one of the best education systems in the world and our conservatives were just about as easily manipulated into idiotic shit during COVID.
I think the reality of the matter is that a huge chunk of the population is simply too stupid to be able to function in a modern, complex society and no amount of education can fix them.
Perhaps we all need more classes on media, propaganda and civics?
Regardless, my point is this: the more we try to us/them our problems, the shittier our problems get.
the more we try to us/them our problems, the shittier our problems get.
I agree to a point, but we also have to recognize that with eg. COVID and now H5Nx preparedness, the conservative mindset is a huge issue and purely driven by politics that they themselves purposefully try to polarize, by eg. outright lying about the effects of vaccines or even whether the disease was a real one or just some sort of communist plot to sap and impurify their precious bodily fluids.
I’m not sure how something like this can be solved, when there’s a huge segment of the population who not only doesn’t believe in basic science but sees attempts at teaching it as attacks against their “values” and will sometimes react with literal violence
The solution is going to be that those groups self-select for infectious death. Taking some good people with them.
Its just so unnecessary.
Perhaps we all need more classes on media, propaganda and civics?
YES. Yes. Exactly. Or, y’know, ANY classes on those things. Civics isn’t even taught in most schools now. BECAUSE REPUBLIQANS.
That’s very sweet, but really not how conservative groupthink works. All for better education, though, sign me up for that.
Our educational system, our economic and our social systems have failed them and led them to unscientific contrary positions.
That’s so wrong i don’t even know where to start.
Our education, economic, and social systems have led them to plainly ignore basic common sense? No. Just, no. religion, okay, maybe.
They’re not wrong.
Joke’s on them, I never stopped being a paranoid shut-in from the last pandemic.
You waited for the pandemic? Either way, welcome to this way of life.
The best part about the bird flu in humans is that it is not airborne. And human to human transmission is, at the moment, a rare occurrence. So only the people who refuse to take precautions should be impacted.
So only the people who refuse to take precautions should be impacted.
Only if transmission between those people doesn’t result in a mutation that turns it airborne. That’s not an “if” I’d personally like to risk. To assume it will only affect those who don’t take precaution is foolish at best and cruelly disingenuous at worst.
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.
Wear a mask, avoid morons, let the morons die.
You mean like how COVID is “not airborne”?
Can we please put some kindergarten nannies in charge of that nation…?
I’ve seen some freaking health professionals go full anti-mask and anti-vax. Like one of my friends is an RN and she went full Facebook Karen.
You can’t fix stupid.
Yeah covid revealed there are a LOT of registered nurses i do not want involved in my health care.
Like, a lot
I’ve seen the same here in Finland too. What is it with nurses going off the reich wing anti-vax / anti-mask deep end?
They want to help people, but all the science stuff is boring. I guess.
Probably a nontrivial amount of wanting to feel smarter than “those know-it-all doctors with their fancy degrees” with a side of Dunning-Kruger
That is genuinely freaky. I mean they should know better. Like way better.
I don’t think you understand just how stupid my fellow country members are. We literally say “hey to prevent getting yourself and others sick, you should do these steps” making it a suggestion of reasonable things.
the response “my freedoms are being trampled”. I fucking wish they actually were.
The scary thing is that that frame of mind exists elsewhere as well. But I guess it’s more of it in the US.
That would be some really cool data to view “how stubborn are the attitudes in different countries” and “how many personalities are stubborn in different countries”
I like foolhardy in this context. And a foolhardy index would be interesting.
true true, that’s an excellent term for it. If only we could somehow assess it with metrics and data
I don’t have a solution for that, unfortunately.
republiQans. We’re talking about republiQans.
(Okay, fine and also some nazis, Qultists, some facebook boomers, a fair few Libertarians, and some woowoo newager people.)
But, look, just say republiQans and have done with it. “Americans” is more than too general, it’s an absolute cop-out.
You know, looking at world news, maybe kindergarten nurses should be in charge of the world?
edit: this was an odd double post.
“Contrariness”?
Just call it mulish obstinacy to be kind, willful stupidity to be real.
You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons.
On the bright side we will never see a republican president ever again
I’m not so sure about that, it’s not like news like this makes it to right-wing voters, they are too busy consuming “alternate” facts media and being outraged about whatever they’re expected to be outraged about now. And republicans need just 1 more presidential win for there never to be a non republican president ever again.
Not much can be done. November is going to be a nail biter that’s for sure. And no mater what 2025 is going to be rough.
Gotta say, this was entirely predictable. So much so… was it a plan to kill off conservative voters. Hmmmmm
One possible scenario for spillover into the population: a raw-milk drinker or a farmworker gets infected with this strain of H5N1 that’s moving among cattle and also gets co-infected with a human-adapted strain of influenza. In such a situation viruses can swap genes in a process called reassortment. A major fear about H5N1 has always been that it might do this. H5N1 has shown it can easily move from one species to another, acquiring new genetic material in the process.
Airborne diseases don’t acknowledge party registration, voting habits, or political identification. If H5N1 does reassort with influenza it’s going to be killing humans.
If it is then it’s not working well enough.
“It not that people are stupid or ignorant or that they don’t know what the science is,” he said. “They’re motivated to reject it on the basis of partisanship, their political ideology, their religion, their cultural values.”
I wonder why he doesn’t figure “The government has provided misinformation recently on health topics” into his list of reasons people don’t trust government health information.
I’m pretty sure rejecting facts based on partisanship, political ideology, religion, of cultural values can easily qualify you for being stupid.
On the other hand, the us has done idiotic things to tarnish it’s reputation in the past.
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what misinformation
This is what I would like to know as well.
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I’m sorry what? How am I anti-vax and a covid denier? Did you just make that up for no reason,
Regardless of intention, the US government put its stamp of approval on a lot of misinformation during the pandemic. Whether that was an attempt to deceive or just incompetence, it doesn’t inspire trust at all.
This is just blatant dog-whistling. What misinformation, bruh. Share your crazy conspiracy theories so I can dismiss them out of hand.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/
I am in no way antivax or anti-science, but it makes you wonder what other propaganda the US is pushing.
Our fuckery with other countries is well documented. Right now we’re talking about the things that our government tells us. Quite frankly, if one wanted to make a decent argument about our government lying to us they should point to Snowden. He is a much better example than the covid conspiracy theory garbage that OP has spewed forth.
Early on in the COVID pandemic, the CDC told the public that masks weren’t important for stopping the spread, when they knew this to be false. This was to prevent a run on N95s which needed to be prioritized for healthcare workers, which could have been bad (see: toilet paper situation). Iirc they changed this messaging to a more nuanced version, basically “don’t buy n95s leave those for healthcare workers, but make a cloth mask for yourself” after a couple weeks but the human brain retains the first thing it hears and a bunch of morons saw the updated messaging as contradictory to the previous message and threw up their hands about masks entirely.
The CDC said that masks would not be very effective at preventing you from getting the disease if you don’t already have it. They are however extremely effective at preventing you from spreading it if you are already infected.
THAT is the difference.
Yes, masks (not just N95 masks either) were indeed in short supply when the pandemic hit and the morons were buying them up like hot cakes in an effort to be “protected” from getting the virus. Except even if you are wearing a mask the virus can get in your eyes or get on your skin and get wiped on you nose, mouth, and eyes and you can get it. The only way to prevent the spread is for those who are infected to stop spreading the disease and masks are extremely effective at that.
Fauci and the CDC didn’t lie, they were trying to stop idiots from hoarding masks that were in desperate need in hospitals and immediate care facilities. They just underestimate how unfathomably dumb you all are.
I don’t know why you’re lecturing me about this and including ad hominems, I understand how the virus spreads and take it very seriously, including masking where appropriate and getting the vaccine 4 months before it was available to the general public. I’m merely explaining how the CDC bungled the messaging at the beginning of the pandemic, it absolutely contributed to the amount of confusion. The public is simply not mentally equipped to handle that level of nuance, the CDC should have just said “masks work, wear one” and left it at that. The level of detail you explained is correct, and it’s way too much detail for the average brainrotted Facebooker to understand.
Early on in the COVID pandemic, the CDC told the public that masks weren’t important for stopping the spread, when they knew this to be false.
This is why. It’s not true. This is not what they said. At all. They said what I outlined above.
What you said here is what has been distorted by conservative media in the smear campaign against Fauci. A man we owe a great debt too and yet he continues to get threats and hate because of the absolute distortion of what he was saying and doing during the pandemic. All in an effort to shift the blame for how bad things got away from the great orange dipshit who bungled every aspect of our response to the disease when it hit the world.
Don’t take it from me, here is the literal CDC Facebook page telling people in Feb 2020 not to wear masks. And here is a scientific paper analyzing comments on their Facebook page comparing reactions of citizens to that Feb 2020 announcement, and the later April 2020 announcement where they did recommend masks. The paper explores lessons public health officials can learn from the failed messaging, it’s important to learn what we can so we’re ready for the next one. I do believe they were doing their best but this messaging was a mistake and it absolutely contributed to the confusion around this virus early on.
Paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10298096/#B3-ijerph-20-06062
Wondering if a mask would protect you from COVID-19? CDC does not currently recommend the general American public use a facemask to protect against novel coronavirus. Only healthcare professionals caring for COVID-19 patients, people who are sick with COVID-19, or in some cases people caring for patients who are sick with COVID-19 need precautions like a facemask to help limit their risk of spreading COVID-19.
CDC always recommends everyday preventive actions, like staying home when you are sick and washing hands with soap and water, to help prevent the spread of respiratory illness.
This literally says exactly what I just did. Wearing a mask will not protect you from getting covid or any other disease but it can protect other people from catching it from you by stopping you from spreading it.
P.S. and yes, at the time healthcare professionals needed the masks desperately so that they could administer to patients without the fear of spreading the disease all over the place if they caught it because COVID has such a long incubation period that overlaps significantly with its shedding phase.
They should have their fucking farms shut down until they comply with the FDA. Telling them they can’t investigate on their farms then you lose all farm subsidies.
Why did you post this as a reply to my comment? It doesn’t seem to actually respond to anything I said.
and many don’t trust government.
For good reason. Really hard to trust politicians when they’re all bought out by corporations (especially Pharma and health insurance) and billionaires.
Governments and pharmas don’t intentionally create new diseases to make money.
Governments and pharmas don’t intentionally create new diseases
No, but that doesn’t stop them profiteering off them when they happen, at the expense of public health
(E: though lets not act as if H5N1 isn’t spreading entirely due to corporate greed and the lack of regulations and enforcement it buys from the government)
The same people who refuse to get vaccinated are the ones that let them do it.
You’ve got it the wrong way around - those making all the money also control the education system and the media and bot farms and very deliberately create an ignorant population and sow mis and dis information to encourage movements like anti-vaxxers. You shifting blame to the people being manipulated absolves the manipulators of their responsibility.
I get the same content and went to the same schools they do. Are they victims? Sure, but what else can we do about it when they don’t listen? Not to Godwin but you can say the same thing about nazis and other groups like them
Imagine being so privileged and out of touch that you think going to the same school makes your experience there identical to everyone else’s, as if it is the only influence (it isn’t, that’s why I listed others which you have conveniently ignored) or that they outright teach fascism and you were spared, instead of what they really do which is teach white-washed history and civics, and discourage critical thinking, which has clearly worked perfectly well on you too. Never mind acting as if socioeconomics, religion, ability, race, gender, and so on, and the biases against them that exist in the educational system (and society at large), or the pipelines that rely on those biases and designed (by those in power who need the support) to pick up on those who are most susceptible to it and send them directly in to white supremacy, don’t exist and aren’t fundamental to shaping a person’s experience, understanding of the world and even ability to understand the world (despite there being ample evidence of all of this happening, you just have to be willing to look, and no, I’m not wasting my time doing your research for you because I don’t think you really want to know).
Guess what? Your experience isn’t universal and being less susceptible to one kind of propaganda doesn’t mean you aren’t susceptible to others, or more aware than they are that you too have been manipulated - you’re literally doing the manipulators dirty work for them by blaming their victims instead of them. and the systems they maintain to manipulate and oppress the rest of society for their own gain (I wonder where you learned to do that… 🤔).
As for your ending this discussion - if you actually knew anything about the Nazis, you’d know just how crucial a part propaganda and manipulation played in making them popular enough to gain power. Acting as if Nazis and other bigots are “just born that way” and that you’re simply better than them, is almost as dangerous as they are, and will never lead to any change (which is fine by you, because just like them, you’d rather have someone to punch down at, than aim your anger at those actually responsible and punch up).
TL;DR:
(E: actually, it isn’t quite you, since as we established, you clearly have been influenced by propaganda, just like every other person on the planet because you’re not special, and you certainly do lack those critical thinking skills)
Edit again because I know some people are dedicated to misunderstand things that make them uncomfortable - none of this is a defence of bigots, you’re just never going to address, never mind end bigotry if you insist on ignoring its source, like anyone who blames individuals for systemic issues is doing.
You don’t know me, i grew up in a red as fuck town that grew to love trump I literally had the same experience they did. So maybe instead of giving me some shit about privilege you can stop and think for a moment about about how much you know about me off some internet post.
Shit I grew up with a lot of of native Americans in schools that taught their history with streets named after russian colonizers. And a lot of them still become trump supporters.
I never said they were born that way by the way. But don’t let that stop you from making a multiparagraph post to passively tell me about my life.
Regardless of intention, the US government put its stamp of approval on a lot of misinformation during the pandemic. Whether that was an attempt to deceive or just incompetence, it doesn’t inspire trust at all.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
this wouldn’t be an issue if we simply stopped exploiting animals
The problem is that we exploit the land animals are on. People build suburbs in areas where these diseases are endemic. E.g., they clear cut a forest near caves and build a massive suburb, and people move in for the cheap housing. The bats that lived in the forests and caves are pushed to the eves of houses. Ebola virus is naturally endemic in those bats, and when a bat shits, it lands on a picnic table. Some mom sets up a picnic on the table and brushes off what she thought was a stick before serving sandwiches and touching her itchy face.
She handles wet grapes that are for the entire fourth grade class picnic, and everyone ingests them. The next day, multiple children get sick, but one family flew to Yellowstone that evening, and another flew to Japan for spring break, spreading the disease internationally before humans are even aware such a disease has even started.
Three weeks later, the health authorities see a mysterious disease in local hospitals, but have no tests for it, and the local health authority doesn’t issue a shutdown notice for schools because it’s become politicicized and they will lose their job if they make a bad call. A few people dying will get them a repremand at most. That’s how pandemics start.
Well, livestock are definitely a major source of animal contact outbreaks, but I do agree with you that wild animals displaced from their environment as a result of land use change is a factor as well.
And what is the biggest contributing factor in land use? Oh, it’s animal agriculture again…
thank you for this chart, haven’t seen it before but super useful ❤️
making food is a good use of land
Yes, but as you can see, growing plants to feed animals and raising them is a very inefficient use of land.
most of that land is grazing, not cropland. and much of what is fed to animals is waste from crops after we have taken the best for ourselves.
you are right that this is a legitimate source as well, but that’s why i’m suggesting that we eliminate the source that we have more control over: animal agriculture. it is far easier to adopt a plant-based diet than it is to move entire towns around geographically
