Are we at the edge of another pandemic? H5N1

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Bird Flu known as H5N1 is closely related to H1N1 that was once known as the Spanish Flu.

H1N1 decimated the human population during the First World War. It went by many names including the Spanish Flu which killed between 50 and 100 million people during the period from 1918-1919. This plague went by many names. The Americans fell ill with "three-day fever" or "purple death." The French caught "purulent bronchitis." The Italians suffered "sand fly fever." German hospitals filled with victims of Blitzkatarrh or "Flanders fever. Sand fly fever is an arthropod-borne viral disease, also known as “Phlebotomus fever”, “mosquito fever”.

From 1918 to 1919, the Spanish flu infected an estimated 500 million people globally. This amounted to about 33% of the world's population at the time. In addition, the Spanish flu killed about 50 million people, about 6 percent of the Earth's population. Since the world population has grown around 5 times in the last 100 years. The threat might impact 2.5 billion people should it materialize today.

So this virus is on the move and if it undergoes a small change, people will panic as they did during the beginning of COVID and throw all wisdom and knowledge out the door.

This was discussed in a Scientific American article back in 20 June 2017

Are You a Magnet for Mosquitoes?

“We know very little about the genetics of what makes us attractive to mosquitoes,” says James Logan, a medical entomologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who is leading the work. Earlier studies suggest visual, olfactory and thermal (body heat) cues all help drive mosquito attraction. “We hope this study will give us more insights into the mechanisms that help change our body odors to make us more or less attractive to mosquitos,” he says. “If we can identify important genes, perhaps we could develop a pill or medication that would allow the body to produce natural repellents to keep mosquitoes away.” The findings, he adds, could also help epidemiologists improve their models for how vulnerable certain populations may be to disease-carrying mosquitoes.

Already scientists know there are differences among us that contribute to why some of us get bitten more. Those of us who exhale more carbon dioxide seem to be a natural beacon for mosquitoes, in particular. Researchers have also found a correlation with body size, with taller or larger people tending to attract more bites—perhaps because of their carbon dioxide output or body surface area. There is also some evidence women who are pregnant or at certain phases of the menstrual cycle are more attractive to mosquitoes. Other work has found that people infected with malaria are more attractive to malaria-carrying mosquitoes during their transmissible stage of infection.

Mosquitoes focus in on attacking humans using several different methods, not just one method.

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What does the color of period blood mean?

During menstruation, the body sheds tissue and blood from the uterus through the vagina. This bloody discharge can vary from bright red to dark brown or black, depending on how old it is.
Blood that stays in the uterus long enough will react with oxygen (oxidize). Blood that has had time to oxidize appears darker.

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This falls under personal observation.

15 June 2024 - Several hours hard work outside produced one mosquito bite.

16 June 2024 - I suffered a destructive wound on my leg when a large concrete block (over 50 pounds) fell on my leg twice. It caused my leg to swell and bleed. I stopped work for the day.

17 June 2024 - Two hours of hard work outside, I was attacked at least 50 times by mosquitoes. I could hear them as they flu away. I would have been bitten more than 50 times but I had used a mosquito repellent before I left the house.

Source: This thread: 15 Jun 2024, 4:26 pm and 17 Jun 2024, 12:30 pm.

I began this thread 9 months ago on 01 May 2024. At the time, H5N1 was found in dairy cattle. But since most milk in the U.S. undergoes the pasteurization process, they theorized that the milk was safe to drink.

So in the initial thread, I brought up the point that milk is used to make cheese and some cheeses do not undergo the pasteurization process. Are we vulnerable when we consume cheese made from unpasteurized milk?

Not all cheeses in the U.S. are pasteurized. Generally, the following cheeses are unpasteurized:
-- Brie
-- Camembert
-- Feta
-- Gorgonzola
-- Mexican cheese

So I came across an article today where they are exploring this.

Bird Flu Not Detected in Interim Results from Aged Raw Milk Cheese Research

Last December, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) initiated an assignment sampling 60-day aged raw milk cheese to determine if it is effective at reducing or eliminating viable H5N1, also known as highly pathogenic avian influenza or bird flu.

The first sample was taken Jan. 2, and sample collections are anticipated to be complete by the end of March. As of March 10, 110 samples of the planned 299 have been collected. Of those 110 samples, 96 were negative by PCR (meaning that H5N1 was not detected in the analyzed samples), and 14 are still in progress. Final results are expected later this spring.

I was doing a deep dive into this subject at the time and I wrote on 4 May 2024 on this thread the following:

It seems like there are several problems with the approach being used to contain the new variant of the H5N1.
1. There are many people in the U.S. that use unpasteurized milk. For example the Amish and Mennonite communities.
2. Many young mothers breast feed their young child. If the mother becomes infected, does it pass onto the child?
3. There are some forms of cheese that are not pasteurized. You can go to any supermarket and buy them off the shelf.

Still absolutely zero evidence that mosquitoes are attracted by surface blood.

I am the evidence.

Forms of H5N1 are extremely deadly for birds. The virus is evolving and has become deadly for many mammals. If it reaches humans, how do you stop of control it? I came across an NPR article which is investigating that question.

If bird flu jumps to humans, immunity from seasonal flu may offer some protection

Bird flu has ripped through the animal kingdom for the past few years now, killing countless birds and crossing into an alarming number of mammals. Yet people remain largely untouched. Even though the official tally of human cases in the U.S. is most certainly an undercount, there's still no evidence this strain of H5N1 has spread widely among us. But if the virus gains certain mutations, scientists fear it could trigger another pandemic.

This prospect has propelled research into whether our defenses built up from past flu seasons can offer any protection against H5N1 bird flu. So far, the findings offer some reassurance. Antibodies and other players in the immune system may buffer the worst consequences of bird flu, at least to some degree.

The article then evolves into a deep dive on H5N1 and H1N1.

Flu immunity guards against the 'worst virus' seen in animals

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other researchers have found little to no evidence of past infections with H5N1 bird flu when they analyzed blood samples from the general population. These tests focus on looking for antibody activity that would directly neutralize the bird flu virus. Other more fine-tuned measures, however, do turn up evidence that we are already familiar with and partly armed to fight this virus.

When battling an infection, the immune system makes antibodies that are targeted all over the virus.

For example, Cobey's study (Sarah Cobey, a professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago) measured antibodies that bind to a particular part of a protein that covers the surface of seasonal flu virus in humans and bird flu. Hemagglutinin, or the HA protein, latches onto the receptors of a cell so that it can gain entry and replicate.

Lakdawala (Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University's School of Medicine) says you can picture the HA as a "lollipop." The heads can be very different, but those sticks, technically called "stalks," can sometimes be quite similar. That happens to be the case for bird flu and H1N1, which emerged as one of the predominant subtypes of seasonal flu after the 2009 pandemic. Antibodies directed against the stalks of H1N1 viruses can cross-react with H5N1, likely indicating some protection against severe disease.

Help may also come from antibodies aimed at the other dominant protein on the surface of influenza viruses, called neuraminidase. In her lab, Lakdawala has recently run experiments on ferrets (a common stand-in for humans when studying respiratory disease) that suggest antibodies against this N1 protein — gained from previous seasonal flu infections — can also reduce severe illness when the animals catch bird flu. "These animals all survived. They didn't get that sick. Importantly the virus remained restricted to the respiratory tract," says Lakdawala. She says this was a sharp contrast to previous studies where scientists took lab animals with no immunity to any kind of influenza and infected them with the current strain of bird flu. In that scenario, the infection went systemic, traveling into the bloodstream and brain. "People had described it as the worst virus they've ever put into an animal," she says. "So this offers a glimmer of hope."

Their results appeared in the journal of Emerging Infectious Diseases last month, alongside another ferret study showing immunity from H1N1 could also limit the spread.

A third piece of the immunity puzzle — what could also explain Lakdawala's findings — are T cells. Unlike antibodies, these immune cells hunt down the virus once it has broken into a cell and started to replicate. In a study published last year, Sette (Alessandro Sette, a researcher at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology) and his team tested blood samples collected from volunteers to identify whether their T cells that target fragments of the flu virus could do the same for H5N1 bird flu. "There was a nearly complete cross-recognition," says Sette. The reason, he explains, is that proteins inside both of these influenza viruses are quite similar. Those fragments end up decorating the outside of the cell once it's infected, which is how T cells recognize it.

So what is the bottom line? If H5N1 becomes highly contagious and very deadly for humans, a vaccine may provide protection against the most severe threat of the disease.

That's some very limited anecdotal evidence at best, so you can understand why there's skepticism over the claim, right?

You don't understand evidence, do you?

If it is evidence of something, it might be evidence that there are more mosquitoes active some days than other days.

The days were extremely similar (temperature/humidity/weather). This experience was anecdotal evidence.

Anecdotal evidence consists of personal experience or narrative used to draw a conclusion or make a point. It can be useful to use this evidence of others' observations to help form an opinion, learn more about a new experience, or to understand a concept.

Bird flu is on the move in mammals. This time sheep.

Bird flu has been detected in a sheep in northern England, the first known case of its kind in the world, Britain's government says, adding to the growing list of mammals infected by the disease and fuelling fears of a pandemic. "The case was identified following routine surveillance of farmed livestock on a premises in Yorkshire where highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1) had been confirmed in other captive birds," Britain's government said in a statement.

The sheep that tested positive was a ewe with signs of mastitis, an inflammation of breast tissue, and no other clinical signs, the statement from the British government's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and the Animal and Plant Health Agency said.

Source: UK case of bird flu in sheep stokes fears of spread

There is an interesting point that may have been overlooked. In the U.S. many of the cattle that became infected with H5N1 were females. The virus was found in extremely high concentrations in their udders, the milk glands. The animal effected in this case was an ewe, a female sheep known for its milk production.

Are the bird flu cases detected in the mammals the virus have migrated to been particularly deadly? It has not been the case so far in humans but the sample size is small. The hope is that bird flu variants will be like COVID variants and most other virus variants more transmissible but weaker.

Bird Flu has been killing birds and animals for many years. The San Diego zoo and their animals are on high alert.

Bird flu has decimated flocks — but not at San Diego zoos. Here’s how they keep condors, penguins and more safe.

Bird flu is thought to have been around for hundreds of years. In 1878, an illness that killed poultry in Italy and other parts of Europe was described as a “fowl plague.” By 1955 it was determined to be a type A influenza virus, and in 1981, it became known as avian influenza, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The H5N1 subtype of the virus can be traced back to poultry in Scotland in 1959 and in geese in China in 1996, which then spread to poultry farms. Since then, there have been multiple waves of intercontinental transmission of the virus.

Infections have led to the death and slaughter of more than 633 million poultry birds worldwide between 2005 and 2024, according to the World Animal Health Information System, which tracks official data on epidemiologically important diseases.

As the virus spread through the bird and animal population, the death and destruction has become a prime concern for many of our zoos.

11 dead wild birds found on the sprawling grounds of Safari Park (in Disney World) have tested positive for the virus since 2022, when the outbreak reached California.

Other zoos haven’t been so lucky. An animal sanctuary in Washington reported losing 20 big cats including cougars and bobcats in late 2024 from the virus, while a harbor seal and Chilean flamingo were felled at Chicago, Illinois Lincoln Park Zoo in January. Last month in New York, at least three ducks at the Queens Zoo died because of bird flu, and a dozen other dead birds at the Bronx Zoo (New York) were being tested.

San Diego sits on the Pacific Flyway, a north-south route taken by migratory birds that can travel from Alaska south to South America. Wild birds that make the twice-a-year migration are considered a risk because they can be infected and show no signs of illness. Waterfowl such as ducks and geese can be of particular concern.

From 1997 to May 26, 2024, 911 human H5N1 infections were reported across 24 countries, with most cases reported between 2004 and 2016, predominantly in Asia and Africa. Between 2003 and 2024, 896 individuals were confirmed to have contracted HPAI H5N1 with 463 reported deaths, resulting in an approximate fatality rate of 52%.

The deadliest version of H5N1 has been spreading globally in humans for many years but only recently has this deadly version begun to spread in North America. Recently a 13 year old girl in British Columbia, Canada became infected and almost died. The other person was an elderly man over the age of 65 from Louisiana, United States. His death was reported on 7 January 2025.

Many birds and animals are becoming sick and dying from Bird Flu. Why not vaccinate them to protect them from the diseases?

Keeping an Eye on Virulent Threats to Public Health

Vaccination is not easy as it seems. Many countries won’t buy vaccinated fowl and still require sellers to prove their birds are free of bird flu. Vaccines can mask the presence of the virus. Vaccines prevent severe disease, but don’t prevent infection. Lobbying groups such as the Congressional Chicken Caucus have also protested vaccination, noting that “vaccinating any poultry sector … will jeopardize the entire export market.”

So I dug deeper:

U.S. Department of Agriculture

With the recent attention around increased egg prices due to highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), There have been renewed conversations about whether the U.S. should vaccinate our commercial poultry flocks against the virus. However, there should be a very clear distinction between all "poultry" to protect American's family farmers and global trading relationships. To be clear, vaccination in any poultry sector - egg layers, turkeys, broilers, or ducks - will jeopardize the entire export market from all U.S. poultry products.

The problem is that most U.S. trading partners do not recognize countries that vaccinate as "free of HPAI" due to concerns that vaccines can mask the presence of the virus. Therefore, U.S. trading partners do not accept exports from countries that vaccinate, either for specific product categories, regions that vaccinate, or for all poultry from the country. In other words, if an egg-laying hen in Michigan is vaccinated for HPAI, It's unclear to the rest of the U.S. poultry industry whether our trading partners would accept an unvaccinated broiler chicken from Mississippi.

So the entire argument about whether or not to vaccinate birds seems to rely entirely on the American dollar rather then incorporating the best practices approach. And as a result, H5N1 is moving through many species of animals, creeping closer and closer to humans. We have developed vaccines to protect ourselves from many of the human diseases, why are we so afraid of using them on birds and animals?

Deadly human cases of bird flu are spreading. This time in Cambodia.

Young boy in Cambodia contracts H5N1 bird flu

Among the three human cases of H5N1 so far this year, two had died, and all patients reportedly had a history of recent exposure to sick or dead poultry prior to their illness.

From 2003 to date, there were 75 cases of human infection with H5N1 influenza, including 45 deaths in the Southeast Asian country, according to the ministry.

The latest case was a young boy (3 years 6 months old) from northeast Cambodia’s Kratie province. “According to queries, the patient’s family raised chickens, and about five chickens had died, while some others were sick. His family members cooked the dead poultry for food,” the statement said.

A few days later it was reported that this young boy died.

Cambodia reports third fatal human H5N1 case of the year

Cambodia experienced a dramatic uptick in human H5N1 cases at the end of 2023. Some have involved a novel reassortant that combines genes from an older 2.3.2.1c clade known to circulate in Southeast Asia with internal genes from the newer 2.3.4.4b clade that has spread globally. The older clade still circulates in Cambodian poultry, with sporadic infection reported in people.