Are we at the edge of another pandemic? H5N1

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One of the tools used to track the emergence of the H5N1 is monitoring the virus in wastewater across various locations in the U.S. Yesterday I commented that these tests are currently in limbo. I have come across a little more information.

The CDC’s Test for Bird Flu Works, but It Has Issues

The CDC has come across a glitch in their H5 human test. They have a workaround but several agencies are involved and their efforts currently are in chaos.

But a separate issue is Wastewater tracking. This tool provides information of what areas of the U.S. are experiencing H5N1 outbreaks. In my humble opinion this is a very valuable tool. The CDC was ahead of the game and began the program but it has no funding to carry it to full implementation. This is a very important tool that provides a first look at H5N1 across the U.S. and provides location information to track outbreaks. Right now the focus is on animals and only a few people associated with meat production are tested. It is extremely limited in scope. We need to look at the entire population of people in the U.S., otherwise we will be caught blindsided similar to what happened when COVID first appeared. We might be at the beginning of a major deadly pandemic with our eyes closed. Far deadlier than COVID, very fast, death is measured in hours, primary target is healthy young men and women

As the CDC came under fire at the July 23 congressional hearing, Daniel Jernigan, director of the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, noted that testing is just one tool. The agency needs money for another promising area — looking for the virus in wastewater. Its current program uses supplemental funds, he said: “It is not in the current budget and will go away without additional funding.”

A recent article points out the threat from H5N1 when it said:

“Bird flu pandemic could be ‘100 times worse’ than COVID,”

How to Pinpoint the H5N1 Mortality Rate in Humans

Avian flu is reported to kill more than half the people it infects.

There was a recent update from the CDC.

CDC A(H5N1) Bird Flu Response Update July 26, 2024

The article talks about farm workers that recently became infected with H5N1. The article stated that:

Colorado Investigation Update
More than 600 workers performing depopulation activities on three poultry farms have been screened for symptoms. Of these, 103 had symptoms and were tested, and nine were positive for influenza A(H5). Other respiratory viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) were also detected among symptomatic workers. Symptom onset began within two-three days and peaked within five days after the start of depopulation. Among nine workers who tested positive for avian influenza A(H5), all reported mild symptoms (predominantly conjunctivitis) and were tested within three days of symptom onset. All cases have been provided oseltamivir and are recovering. More in-depth summaries of the investigation are in process with Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

On 23 Jun 2024, 1:43 pm in this thread, I discussed one of the treatments to deal with H5N1. It was the last line of treatment before the infection becomes extremely deadly. I wrote:

There are four FDA-approved antivirals for influenza:
-- Oseltamivir phosphate (available as a generic drug or by the trade name Tamiflu)
-- Zanamivir (Relenza)
-- Peramivir (Rapivab)
-- Baloxavir (Xofluza)

I came across an interesting study today.

SARS-CoV-2 detected in common wildlife species

Just as H5N1 is traveling across different species including humans, the same thing can be said for SARS-CoV-2.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, is widespread among wildlife species, according to Virginia Tech research published Monday (July 29, 2024) in Nature Communications. The virus was detected in six common backyard species, and antibodies indicating prior exposure to the virus were found in five species, with rates of exposure ranging from 40 to 60 percent depending on the species.

Genetic tracking in wild animals confirmed both the presence of SARS-CoV-2 and the existence of unique viral mutations with lineages closely matching variants circulating in humans at the time, further supporting human-to-animal transmission, the study found.

Investigators tested animals from 23 common Virginia species for both active infections and antibodies indicating previous infections. They found signs of the virus in deer mice, Virginia opossums, raccoons, groundhogs, Eastern cottontail rabbits, and Eastern red bats. The virus isolated from one opossum showed viral mutations that were previously unreported and can potentially impact how the virus affects humans and their immune response.

On 27 June 2024, 9:49 am, I summarized the approach to survive a very deadly disease called H5N1. Since that time, more information has surfaced and I felt an update was in order.

Summery

I have covered a lot of information over the past several weeks on the next potential pandemic called H5N1.
I have come to realize this pandemic will primarily be transmitted by insects, primarily Mosquitoes. Mosquitoes infect humans with a blood to blood transfer between infected to uninfected animals/humans.

Mosquito-borne diseases include: West Nile Virus, Encephalitis, Zika Virus, Chikungunya Virus, Dengue Fever, Yellow Fever, and Malaria.

1. You can protect yourself from mosquito bites in two ways. If you spend a lot of time outdoors you can create protective clothing (boots, clothing and camping gear) that repel mosquitoes by treating them with Permethrin.

2. You can also protect yourself from mosquito bites by applying mosquito repellent on you skin. This will provide short protection (several hours) to drive away mosquitoes. There are a variety of products available. They include DEET, Picaridin, IR3535, Oil of lemon, Para-menthane-diol eucalyptus, and 2-Undecanone.

3. Another product that can help prevent mosquito bites is Metofluthrin. Metofluthrin is a pyrethroid used as an insect repellent. The vapors of metofluthrin are highly effective and capable of repelling up to 97% of mosquitoes in field tests. Metofluthrin is used in a variety of consumer products, called emanators, for indoor and outdoor use. These products produce a vapor that protects an individual or area. Effectiveness is reduced by air movement. Metofluthrin is neurotoxic, and is not meant to be applied directly to human skin.

4. Accidents can happen. What to do immediately after being bitten by a mosquito? Treat the bit with Tecnu Topical Analgesic Anti-Itch Spray (Diphenhydramine HCl 2% ).

5. If you become infected with H5N1 treat the condition immediately using one of four FDA-approved antivirals for influenza: (1) Oseltamivir phosphate (Tamiflu), (2) Zanamivir (Relenza), (3) Peramivir (Rapivab), (4) Baloxavir (Xofluza). These are prescription drugs and will require a doctors prescription. Time is of the essence here. This condition will begin to destroy the human body and make it impossible to treat within a few days. Time is of the essence.

Nine farm workers in Colorado recently came down with H5N1. They were quickly treated with Oseltamivir and survived.

6. Some people are very vulnerable to mosquito bites. These are people with open wounds. Just covering the wounded area with bandages will not protect you. Mosquitoes can smell your blood and you become a prime target. This is also a problem for women who are going through their menstrual period. I suffered a small bleed and was attacked by around 50 mosquitoes in less then two hours outdoors.

7. Go on the offensive. Wage a war on mosquitoes. In general, mosquitoes live in a hot humid environment. They most commonly infest Ponds, Marshes, Swamps, and Other wetland habitats. So minimize their breeding grounds. Wage war on mosquitoes.

8. Use our friends. What you didn't realize we have allies in our war on Mosquitoes. We have many friends. Some are birds like woodpeckers, some are other insects like dragonflies, some are fish like gambusia affinis.

9. Wastewater tracking of H5N1 can identify the specific regions in the U.S. where the outbreak is underway. One of these regions is San Francisco, California. This area could be Ground Zero of the outbreak. But we cannot monitor the threat because the funding for Wastewater tracking has been halted.

Humans are pitted against an ancient enemy. They have existed on Earth for over 130 million years, even during the age of the dinosaurs - mosquitoes lived here. A New York Post article recently noted, “Bird flu pandemic could be ‘100 times worse’ than COVID.” In my opinion, the effects of H5N1 could be very similar to the Spanish Flu that struck during the First World War and caused so many deaths that it brought the war to an end.

In the historic past, migrating birds were the long distance transport agents of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza H5N1. Seasonally they would move the infectious disease between the northern and southern hemispheres as the seasons changed from summer to winter. But now as humans have developed means of rapid transport, such as jet aircraft, the speed and distance this virus can spread is rapidly accelerated.

Wastewater tracking and analysis provides an early warning system to emerging diseases. It can provide a tool to track an outbreak of deadly H5N1. Canada has been using this tool but appears to be pulling the plug.

'Incredibly disappointing': Ontario halts wastewater testing for COVID, other viruses

Ontario is officially ending its COVID-19 wastewater surveillance program today in a move some public health experts call shortsighted.

Dr. Fahad Razak, the former scientific director of the COVID-19 Ontario Science Table, says the province’s decision is “incredibly disappointing.”

Razak says wastewater testing gives an early indication of when COVID-19 and other viruses are on the rise.

Razak says the wastewater surveillance in dozens of communities across Ontario is useful not only for detecting COVID, but for monitoring potential threats, including the possible arrival of H5N1 avian flu.

The Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza H5N1 is a very fast moving disease. Death is measured in terms of hours not days (such as what happened in COVID). Wastewater tracking can provide early data, very important data that can be used to stop the spread.

Why Wastewater Monitoring is Being Tapped to Prevent an Avian Flu Pandemic

Wastewater surveillance is an approach to testing sewage for the presence of nucleic material from specific harmful pathogens at the neighborhood or community level. This approach is possible because infected individuals with certain illnesses shed genetic material from pathogens in their feces and bodily fluids.

One of the reasons why wastewater surveillance has developed so successfully is that it can be an early detection or warning system regarding the presence of disease. It can pick up genetic material from potential pathogens even before people start showing symptoms and, importantly, it requires no action on the part of an individual such as seeing a doctor or providing a laboratory sample for testing. With the COVID-19 pandemic, it also proved useful in detecting the presence of different variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and, as its recent preliminary usage in the screening of H5N1 spread, it may also prove useful in other ways.

Beginning in 2020, wastewater monitoring has been utilized as a component of the enhanced surveillance for COVID-19. Since then, it has been repeatedly tapped. It was employed in monitoring for the presence of Mpox and other diseases—which resulted in the detection of polio viruses in New York City.

As these examples demonstrate, its employment is expanding rapidly. Over the last few years, CDC has provided funds, analytics, training, and technical assistance for wastewater surveillance across the country. Consequently, local and state public health departments have begun to add this method to bolster other more traditional disease detection and monitoring options. Today, there is some level of wastewater surveillance in all fifty states plus Puerto Rico, USVI, Guam, and six tribal communities using samples from more than 1,500 sites representing about 40% of the American public.

Wastewater surveillance has been largely reliant on specialized, but short-term COVID-19 funding. Much of that funding will end in another year or so and, without new sources of funding within CDC’s core annual budget, the system will be in jeopardy. The evidence appears solid that wastewater surveillance for avian flu and other pathogens is a useful complement to the already existing disease surveillance efforts at CDC and state, tribal, local, and territorial health departments.
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So the bottom line is Wastewater surveillance in my humble opinion is an extremely useful tool in determining where in the U.S. an explosion of H5N1 is occurring. But funding for this tool is being eliminated. The data before funds began to disappear showed locations where H5N1 was active. One of these areas was in San Francisco, California. Signs of H5N1 bird flu virus have been detected at three wastewater sites in the San Francisco Bay Area [San Francisco, Palo Alto, and West County (Richlond) wastewater facilities]. This could very well be Ground Zero in an H5N1 pandemic outbreak. Why? This region in California is the only one in the U.S. that has yet to report a bird flu outbreak in a herd of dairy cows. So if the outbreak is not related to an outbreak in Cows or Chickens, perhaps it is a human outbreak?

I began to investigate the linkage between Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza in H1N1 and H5N1. Perhaps we are dealing with twins. I came across the following article:

Source: Characteristics of human infection with avian influenza viruses and development of new antiviral agents

Avian influenza virus (AIV) is a potential source for the emergence of human influenza pandemics. Historically, several harmful influenza pandemics have originated from AIVs through genetic reassortment between human and avian influenza strains, as happened in the 1918 H1N1, 1957 H2N2, and 1968 H3N2 pandemics. The unprecedented emergence of H5N1 human infections in 1997 provided the first evidence that AIV could directly transmit from poultry to humans. Since February 2013, there have been cases of severe human infection with H7N9 AIV in China; this AIV strain consists of genes from three AIV strains and is viewed as a pandemic threat.

Avian influenza virus (AIV) is an influenza A virus, which is a member of the genus Orthomyxovirus. The genome of AIV consists of eight minus-sense single-stranded RNA segments that encode a minimum of 10 unique viral proteins. The current classification into subtypes is based on the surface glycoproteins hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA). To date, 16 HA subtypes and nine NA subtypes have been described. The unique genome of influenza virus H17N10 was recently discovered in bats in Guatemala. One remarkable feature of influenza viruses is their inclination to undergo antigenic variation through antigenic drift and antigenic shift. Antigenic drift consists of relatively minor mutational alterations in the antigenicity of HA or NA and occurs continuously as a result of selection pressure from host immunity. Antigenic shift by genetic reassortment of the eight gene segments can result in the appearance of a novel HA/NA combination against which the human population has little or no immunity. If the majority of people are immunologically naïve to novel strains and such strains can be transmitted efficiently from human to human, influenza pandemics may occur.

Aquatic birds are the reservoirs of all influenza A virus subtypes. Most influenza viruses infect wild and/or domestic birds with limited or no signs of the disease and are thus classified as low pathogenic avian influenza (LPAI) viruses. However, highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) viruses can cause severe diseases in poultry, with fatality as high as 100%. Currently, all HPAI viruses belong to subtype H5 or H7, but not all H5 or H7 viruses are HPAI.

So currently we are experiencing a pandemic in wild and domestic birds. It is H5N1. In the past couple years, it has crossed into the world of animals including cows, mice and cats. And it has now crossed over to humans.

When I began this threat on 01 May 2024, I discussed how H5N1 might be transmitted to humans by drinking unpasteurized milk. I came across an article today that provides a scientific study that supports this theory.

Study Shows Human Sickness Risk From Bird Flu-Tainted Raw Milk; Virus Is Infectious In Unpasteurized Milk For Five Weeks

According to a team of researchers from the University of Tokyo and other institutions, milk from cows infected with the H5N1 strain of bird flu contained high levels of the virus, and mice that were fed the milk subsequently became infected. The team’s work was published in the U.S. medical journal The New England Journal of Medicine on May 24.

The research team examined milk from infected cows in the United States and found that the milk contained over 10 million particles of the virus per milliliter. Mice to which the milk was administered showed viral multiplication in organs throughout their bodies.

The numbers of farm workers with H5N1 keep rising.

Previously undetected H5N1 avian flu cases in farmworkers revealed in new report

A team of US researchers has revealed evidence of highly pathogenic H5N1 avian flu infections in two Texas farmworkers not previously confirmed to have the disease.

The researchers tested 14 milk samples, 9 of which (64%) tested positive for H5N1 avian flu via polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and were also grown in culture, indicating the presence of live, infectious virus.

All 17 nasopharyngeal swabs collected from the farm workers were negative by molecular assays for influenza A viruses and coronaviruses. Microneutralization assays conducted on the 14 farm workers' sera samples demonstrated that 2 workers, both from Farm A, had antibodies to influenza A H5N1 virus, indicating a previous infection.

These workers, both of whom had recent respiratory symptoms, are not included in the US total of 13 human cases of H5 avian flu confirmed since April. Four of these infections are associated with exposure to sick dairy cows, and 9 are tied to H5N1-infected poultry.

Another article commented on this outbreak.

Bird flu cases in humans may be going undetected. Why that’s a problem.

Richard Webby, director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Influenza at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, said the results confirmed his suspicions that the 13 human bird flu cases reported this year by the CDC were an undercount.

“Maybe what we see isn’t exactly the tip of the iceberg, but it’s certainly not the whole story,” Webby said.

Another article states this study in the following way:

The U.S. is failing to fully surveil, let alone contain, a virus with pandemic potential.

Source: Troubling bird flu study suggests human cases are going undetected

Some scientist are trying to develop a timeline of the spread of H5N1 in the U.S.

Scientists Confirm Bird Flu Is Now Spreading Between Mammals

The strain causing the U.S. dairy cow outbreak was first genetically sequenced from a Canada goose (Branta canadensis) in Wyoming on 25 January 2024. The goose was found along the Central North American migratory bird flyway. By 25 March 2024, cows in dairy farms across multiple states along that same flyway had contracted this version of the virus.

Genetic testing confirmed cow-to-cow spread occurred after apparently healthy dairy cattle were transported interstate from an affected farm to a location far from the flyway. The genetic data also revealed multidirectional spread, with cats and a racoon becoming infected presumably after consuming raw milk from infected cows.

If we all pass away, I'll see you all in Heaven.

I came across a recent article that describes the problems of very detailed wastewater tracking of H5N1 in the United States.

Tracking the spread of avian influenza A(H5N1) with alternative surveillance methods: the example of wastewater data

There are two sides to every coin. There are two types of wastewater tracking of H5N1. One looks at the presence of H5N1 in municipal wastewater. This picks up H5N1 across all species (birds/animals/people). The other is looking for the presence of H5N1 in the human population. The second approach is more difficult because it cannot measure the difference between Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) A(H5N1) and the mild form of the disease Low Pathongenicity Avian Influenza. The Low form is quite common. It is sometimes referred to as the common flu. Symptoms include fever, sore throat, cough, stuffy or runny nose.

Thus there is a problem. In birds and animals you can generally tell the difference between the two forms because you land up with dead or dying or extremely sick animals.

So the article seems to describe H5N1 in the following words DOOM, DOOM, DOOM.

We are on the brink of a potential crisis, where pandemic risk is severely underestimated and efforts to prepare for outbreaks are underfunded. Conventional surveillance methods, including pathogen genome sequencing, laboratory diagnostics, and mortality rate monitoring, are inadequate in the face of such a complex and rapidly evolving threat.

The article then goes on to say, "Although recognition of the potential usefulness of real-world data is increasing, such data cannot be shared openly due to various ethical, legal, and privacy issues, regulations and policy concerns, and computational limitations."

So it sounds like the decision makers have decided to keep the information hidden. Keep everyone in the dark, except for a small group. We may be at the verge of a major pandemic and don't let anyone know.

I have focused on Mosquitoes as being the primary transmission agent for H5N1 in humans. A mosquito bite an infected bird/animal/human and passes the infectious blood directly to another human. Currently many different species of birds and animals are becoming infected in South and North America. Mosquitoes may only be one insect that passes this threat. Other insects may also play a role in spreading the disease. This is important in understanding and controlling the spread of H5N1.

Last week I was outside and I was bitten by something. It wasn't a mosquito but something much smaller. Perhaps a chigger. I had 10 very small bite marks on my arm. So I treated this with Tecnu Topical Analgesic Anti-Itch Spray (Diphenhydramine HCl 2% ). It took the desire to scratch the area away. But the bite marks still remained for almost a week. I had to constantly apply the ointment once or twice a day to kill the desire to itch.

Chiggers are bugs so small that you need a magnifying glass to spot them.



A smaller bird or animal might have found this sting to be deadly.

I am from South America, i am hearing the same rumours spoken in Spanish language too.

I'm afraid Mad Bill may be cooking something in his labe..