Florida scientists have reported the first known and fatal case of highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza in a bottlenose dolphin.
Florida scientists have reported the first known and fatal case of highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza in a bottlenose dolphin.
Just gonna leave this here – the recent fatality rate in humans is about 30%. There are a tiny number of data points but the point is, it looks to be more deadly than Covid was by quite a lot. And clickbaity news about the 2022 dolphin case aside, it’s clearly everywhere, and able to jump to new mammal species readily.
Maybe I am missing something but assertion that the current public health risk is low seems to be based on more or less nothing. Why is the risk low? People are still working among animals some of whom are definitely infected, every day, in messy conditions. The consequences once it figures out how to spread person-to-person will be somewhere from moderate to apocalyptic, and what we’re doing right now is clearly just half-measures to delay that happening by a little bit. Why is that low risk?
What matters more for public health risk is virility, and mortality tends to have a negative correlation with virility. In simpler terms, the more deadly it is the worse it is at spreading. It’s not a hard rule but is true more often than not, though I don’t know any details about avian flu. I assume if the CDC has determined the public health risk is low that it’s probably because it’s not particularly virile.
Do you mean transmissibility? I get what you mean, but I’ve never heard this word used this way. (Virulence is, more or less, the non-fatal version of mortality – how much damage the disease does – so not that.)
Be that as it may, once the disease is established in a new species it tends to get less harmful because of exactly what you’re talking about – but plenty of diseases through history have been in the short run both fast-spreading and deadly, especially right after they jump into a new population. Which is exactly what H5N1 is doing right now (on all three counts).
One of the reasons how deadly it is correlates to lower spreading is just how quickly deadly things kill.
If something like the original SARS had a 7 day infectious window before killing you things would have been very different.
I’d be interested to know how quickly it incapacitates humans, and how long you’re infectious for.
Edit: changed infectious window, accidentally used a incubation period by mistake.
The risk is low because we have not yet detected a variant with the mutations needed to facilitate human to human spread. If we do it will jump from low to extreme very quickly.
“It is okay! The fire is only in the building next door along with the 10-15 others it spread to. Once we’ve detected it in our building, the risk won’t be low anymore, of course.”
(Edit: Actually, once it’s spreading inside our building the risk won’t be low – we’ve already detected it in our building a couple of times, but it didn’t spread so it’s fine.)
That paragraph kind of reminds me of this…
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
We could use a new Black Death to lower real estate and rent prices.
I am going to assume you don’t really understand what it would mean if there was a pandemic with a 10-50% case fatality rate in the modern global economy where it would be on every single continent on earth in a matter of days. I can assure you that housing prices would be the last fucking thing on your mind.
It was a sardonic comment.
Yes, obviously the end of the world as we know it would be /extremely/ bad.
the world as I know it is a bit shit tbh
Yeah, but when the old world dies without a new one being born, we’ll all yearn for the days of ‘a bit shit’.
Fair enough, and thank you for clarifying. I was really hoping that was the case.