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The threat of bird flu is so insane to me. It exists because we farm birds to eat. We are gambling with so many people's lives just so we can continue eating birds when we could instead just eat something else. I know cultivated meat will help, but that is a ways away.

This is simply not true. Bird flu mainly spreads among wild birds and that is where it has its reservoir. It would still exist even if the world was free of bird farms. It also usually doesn't spread between farms because, in the event of an outbreak, all the animals on the affected farm are culled. At most, bird farms slightly increase overall contact between birds and humans.

It’s like this with most animals that we have learned to live with in close proximity. Zoonotic viruses are responsible for many of our diseases today, but through natural selection we are adapted to many.

This is partly why European disease wiped out Native American populations to a large extent. Europeans carrying diseases from animals they lived closely with.

But it's not (just) about us living in close proximity to them, it's about putting them in an environment that makes it impossible for them to live healthy lives and incubates potential zoonotic diseases.

Which has been happening for centuries.

I’m actually not arguing against this being a bad idea though lol, just giving some historic trivia.

We have not been factory farming for centuries. More like a century. And it hasn't been a century with a sterling track record! I think we can all recall an event in recent memory where having a lot of animals in close proximity and unhealthy conditions went super duper wrong. And we have problems with new strains of bird flu every couple of years.

I agree, I agree. I’m not a fan of the farming methods we have today mostly because of ethical reasons (hence why I’m vegetarian as well).

We are definitely making things worse, also by our use of antibiotics in livestock.

People used to literally live with the livestock attached to home or even under the same roof. This was probably the case for most of agricultural history.

Factory farming is bad, over use of antibiotics in live stock is bad. But OP's point is that this is how many of the diseases in human history and therefor unlikely we would ever be able to avoid this while raising animals for food. As they said, both are true

I can't speak for OP, they may have been advocating for giving up farming animals (or fowl) altogether, but personally I see a huge inflection point between traditional and factory farming methods with regards to the level of risk. When you are compromising the immunity of your livestock, you beg trouble.

I understand the temptation to zoom out to a several hundred year timespan, that can be clarifying. But when (as in this case) there are substantive differences in recent history, it muddies the waters. I totally buy that endemic diseases are largely zoonotic diseases plus time. But that doesn't clarify how much risk exists in our current methods of farming. Factory farming is not equivalent to traditional farming in this respect. History is not featureless and when we flatten it we lose important details.

Animals living on a farm are a far cry from modern factory farming.

Living in close proximity is one thing, but growing them at the speed and scale which we do with factory farming must massively increase the rate of development of viruses. It’s almost as if we designed a special program just to develop a virus that would wipe us all out.

But hey, cheap food!

Not even cheap food, just cheap meat. We could still have plenty of cheap, salty, fatty food without the livestock.

Yeah. It's very cheap to grow large amounts of canola seed, soybeans, potatoes, corn, and wheat to make all manner of high-salt, high-fat, high-carb junk food.

It’s even cheaper to just eat the potatoes, corn, wheat, soy directly like humans have at least for 1000s of years. It would also be healthier and less damaging to the planet as well as local environments, and save tens if not hundreds of billions of animals lives.

The processing is simply unnecessary and the output isn’t food but essentially drugs that people get addicted to. That’s completely different from the actual food that we grow.

Yeah bro, meat is the only non-junk food available.

I am not sure how dangerous it is. Not saying it is not but maybe hyperbole.

I have been hearing this and the climate change stuff since I was young as a threat to humans and I think there must be a lot more than science in here, at least, in my humble opinion.

Avian flu exists with or without farming birds.

The reasoning behind this is that birds have higher body temperature in our fever range.

They put mice infected with a flu virus modified to have the bird variant of a gene in an oven and the virus indeed didn't degrade as much compared to the unmodified control.

Huh. I don’t know if I’m picking up what they’re putting down here, but it kind of sounds like suppressing fever e.g. with Tylenol would actually be bad for (normal) flu progression.

Well, yes?

Very simplified... It is a suppressor of symptoms like pain and fever which are the bodies way of letting you know something is damaged and killing off unknown foreign bodies respectively.

Suppressing symptoms does not remove the cause and is not a cure.

I know someone who doesn't get fever. When he gets sick with regular cold or fly it's much longer and worse than for anyone else I know.

There is a vaccine though.

https://news.sky.com/story/uk-prepares-five-million-vaccine-...

That's a vaccine for one strain: H5N1. I'm sure birds have many more strains and variants of virus. I'm sure a proper virologist can dive in here ...

I think people assume that a fever is caused by an infection but my understanding is that a fever is a response to the infection. The body raises its temperature deliberately to destroy a viral infection, even though it is unpleasant, as well as deploying the other defenses.

It seems, according to this article, that these bird 'flu infections are resistant to being cooked by a fever and that makes them more dangerous - we've lost a defense strategy.

Not a proper virologist, but H5N5 killed a person in Washington state recently.

There will likely be some cross protection on the H5 antigen, just as some regular flu shots provide cross protection against the N1 antigen of H5N1. (The H5 and N1 subtypes won't be completely matched, respectively, but you don't always need complete matching for some protection.)

Kurzgesagt's fever video:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cRZOUcpiOxY

Edit: This video asserts that the heat shock protein excess is what reveals an infected cell to the immune system.

Everyone pops a Tylenol/advil when they get a fever. Can’t be that bad.

I'd imagine that in the event of a Bird Flu pandemic, a vaccine would be developed and dispatched quite quickly, unlike with COVID, where during the early days experts were saying it was possible we'd never get a vaccine.

The US has antivaxxers in charge of health policy now, and they have specifically targeted mRNA vaccines with funding cuts. They seem likely to hinder rather than help any near future vaccines development program in response to a pandemic.

But the current administration is antivax so…

So was the one during COVID-19

Something I love to point out to Trump supporters is that he is the one who fast tracked the “clot shot”.

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So much for the MAHA natural immunity line. No doubt avoiding ultraprocessed foods, seed oils, pesticides, and fluoride will keep bird flu at bay /s.

Why we keep killing the birds that survive the infection is beyond me. It's an evolutionary pressure that we refuse to allow to work.

It's almost as if we want to give the flu as many opportunities as possible to spill over, instead of just letting the birds who have immunity survive and thus basically drive the virus to extinction.

> Why we keep killing the birds that survive the infection is beyond me

We don’t know the reservoir capabilities of novel viruses, nor can we confidently rule when a previously-sick bird is well and non-infectious at scale.

> It's an evolutionary pressure that we refuse to allow to work

We’re selecting against birds that get infected in the first place. (Probably to no tangible effect. But the goal isn’t to have birds that can survive a plague, it’s to prevent it in the first place.)

Thanks for the response! I agree that it's not obvious the reservoir possibilities.

I don't agree that we're selecting against birds that get infected in the first place, or at least I don't think that's how it works. My understanding is that if any birds on a farm get sick, the whole house is killed. Maybe the whole farm.

To me that seems like selecting for lucky birds not selecting for populations that never get sick because lots of populations never get exposed.

I could be wrong on my understanding or how I interpret the impact, though, so I'm super open to learning more.

Because it's cheaper to fill the whole farm with foam and suffocate all the birds to death, then shovel them out.

I believe the rationale is that during the process of infecting a flock of birds the virus would be exposed to pressure that would encourage its mutation, especially as these birds begin to successfully fight it off. The current avian H5N1 only needs a couple of mutations to spread human-to-human pretty well.

So the current culling of entire flocks is seen as a means of nipping any of these mutations in the bud.

> It's an evolutionary pressure that we refuse to allow to work.

We also refuse to allow it to fail....

During the 20th century the American government (as well as others) put a lot of effort into finding ways to control people. Drugs, control of the media, MK Ultra and Mockingbird are just two examples of many. Everything more or less failed. Dosing unsuspecting civilians with LSD doesn't have much useful effect.

But one thing worked, and they should have known it all along. Fear. If you can make people afraid, you can control them. They want us to fear birds. They want us to fear our neighbors. They want us to fear other governments, and faceless terror organizations that are probably hiding in your bushes outside, if you see something, say something!

“They want us to fear birds” is wild man

Good thing birds aren’t real.

Technically they are dinosaurs man. Ancient fear comes back.

They did know it all along. It's been used since time immemorial.

But mass media and social media have given it new opportunities. Ironically I think we all expected that having access to more information would have been a tool against that, but it turns out to be much less effective at explaining fear than conjuring it.

You're right!

Even with a flawed messenger pointing the wrong tools at the wrong target, isn't "avoiding ultraprocessed foods, seed oils, pesticides, and fluoride" still fundamentally a step in the right direction, compared to previous politically-connected health campaigns, like the infamous one not so long ago to "get out and move", which placed blame on kids for being unable to out-exercise a bad diet, while doing absolutely nothing to criticize or curtail the industry that pumps carbonated water full of sugar and then deliberately markets it to impressionable, easily addicted, easily manipulated children?

All criticism levelled at the people loading obscene amounts of sugar into bread, tomato sauce, baby formula, water, and every other food under the sun is good criticism, even if it comes from a sometimes-problematic mouth.

Ultra processed foods is not a well defined category, so saying avoid UPFs is meaningless.

There are several “UPFs” that have better health outcomes than NOVA 1 “unprocessed” foods, because the NOVA system was never developed to categorize foods by how healthy they were but instead how closely they matched a fairly regional Brazilian diet.

There is no evidence that “seed oils” are bad beyond their caloric density, and seed oils like Canola oil are some of the healthiest fats we have, far more than the lard they’ve been encouraging people to consume instead (which is almost certainly worse than most seed oils, except possibly rhe single scenario where a fast food chain may be heating and reheating the same fat source many times over).

No one is buying and consuming oesticides, so that’s in actionable advice for people.

There is absolutely no evidence fluoride levels in US water are anywhere near dangerous levels. Having people buy and maintain expensive filters simply to keep fluoride out of their water likely won’t help with anything, and will likely displace some other more healthful actions they could be taking, like spending the money on buying berries for their kids.

1. The idea that UPFs being poorly defined == UPF is a meaningless designation has always sounded like absurd whataboutism that stops real progress to me.

Surely you don't mean to suggest that just because UPFs aren't perfectly defined, that means there's no fundamental difference between a diet composed of skittles, donuts, and ice cream cookie sandwiches versus a diet composed of organic, plant-based whole foods, right?

2. You say there is "no evidence" that seed oils are bad... yet when I search for "canola oil health hazards", the very first thing I see is "Canola oil has been associated with potential health hazards due to its high omega-6 fatty acid content, which may contribute to inflammation and chronic diseases when consumed in excess. Additionally, the refining process often involves chemicals like hexane, which raises concerns about the presence of harmful byproducts, although these are typically present in very low amounts in the final product."

Am I crazy to prefer that the amount of hexane in my food be as close to absolutely none as possible? Am I crazy to not wanting to be loading myself up with something that's at least clearly associated with inflammation and chronic disease?

3. Why do we have to assume that the optimal replacement for seed oils is lard? Is it possible to consider that maybe we'd all be better off if we stopped eating french fries, rather than merely switching what greasy junk we're frying them in?

4. Plenty of non-organic foods have pesticides on them! https://www.ewg.org/foodnews/full-list.php

Is EWG not a generally reliable and trustworthy source of information? Do you mean to suggest that no foods grown outside ever have any pesticides on them, or that the pesticides never follow the food all the way to the grocery store? Haven't plenty of agricultural products over the years, including Round Up, been linked with high probability to various cancers, neurodegenerative diseases, etc?

5. Why do we assume that filtering water means taking away other healthy actions? Do we need to be giving kids MORE sugar just because it's natural (berries)? Is there not extensive scientific literature linking fluoride ingestion with decreased IQ?

6. Why can't we have a open, good-faith conversation about these topics without engaging in tribal politics? Why do we get so emotionally attached to current narratives and beliefs about these kinds of things even when we know those beliefs are formed based on incomplete information and should be subject to change as we learn more over time, a standard exercise of basic epistemic humility?

Skittles are bad for reasons having nothing to do with "ultraprocessing". This is just the new incarnation of people believing Mexican Coke is healthier because it's made with cane sugar instead of corn syrup.

Bread is an ultra-processed food.

Care to engage more substantially than this, or are you just repeating the argument that because UPF is imperfectly defined, that means UPF as a category is absolutely worthless and therefore we should dismiss all precautionary options surrounding any and all UPFs with prejudice?

I may have seen it here, but there's a new article out on childhood fluoride exposure: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adz0757

"Whereas most prior research has estimated effects of exposure to extremely high levels of fluoride, we consider exposure to levels of fluoride within the range typical in most places and of greatest relevance to policy debates about government water fluoridation. We use data from the nationally representative (United States) High School and Beyond cohort, characterize fluoride exposure from drinking water across adolescence, adjust for confounders, and observe cognitive test performance in both secondary school and at age ~60. We find that children exposed to recommended levels of fluoride in drinking water exhibit modestly better cognition in secondary school, an advantage that is smaller and no longer statistically significant at age ~60."

I'm very much overweight, though not morbidly obese. I have been at my best weight when I did "get out and move". The problem, of course, is that schools, jobs, and modern infrastructure don't make that as easy to do as in prior decades. You can't just tell people to do something that has been made difficult to do and expect them to do it.

Just don't make comments like this here. Easy political snark doesn't add to the conversation.

I think this is a legitimate concern and criticism.

We've let too many bad ideas leak into the Overton window. Not every idea deserves the participation trophy of being taken seriously.

> Not every idea deserves the participation trophy of being taken seriously

They are literally the ones bringing it up.

Can we simply remove fever and coughing somehow… super annoying and more dangerous than the virus themselves sometimes.

> Can we simply remove fever and coughing somehow… super annoying and more dangerous than the virus themselves sometimes.

You're basically asking to become a bat

So we can also fly? Sign me up!

And echolocation! Time to form a queue.

> Teach Yourself to Echolocate A beginner’s guide to navigating with sound.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-to-echolocate#

Fruitbat!