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Bird flu viruses are resistant to fever, making them a major threat to humans

medicalxpress.com

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Re: Bird flu viruses are resistant to fever, making them a major threat to humans

#31

Post by chongli »

crooked-v wrote: post #30
michaelteter wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Bird flu viruses are resistant to fever, making them a major threat to humans

#32

Post by MangoToupe »

msandford wrote: post #11
cratermoon wrote: post #3

[flagged]

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.

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

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

Re: Bird flu viruses are resistant to fever, making them a major threat to humans

#33

Post by chasil »

gerdesj wrote: post #16
throwawayffffas wrote: post #8

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 defe…

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.

Re: Bird flu viruses are resistant to fever, making them a major threat to humans

#34

Post by anonym29 »

cratermoon wrote: post #3

[flagged]

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.

Re: Bird flu viruses are resistant to fever, making them a major threat to humans

#35

Post by TSiege »

maxbond wrote: post #28
Insanity wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: Bird flu viruses are resistant to fever, making them a major threat to humans

#36

Post by TacticalCoder »

Maybe it'd then be a good idea to have labs secretly funded by a joint venture half-US, half-Chinese, in China, doing gain-of-function research on these?

And then maybe that if some shit hits the fan, it'd then be a great idea to ask someone neck and tie deep in that funding and in that research to act as the "expert" to tell us if we should put masks on or not once it leaks?

Re: Bird flu viruses are resistant to fever, making them a major threat to humans

#38

Post by maxbond »

TSiege wrote: post #35
maxbond wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Bird flu viruses are resistant to fever, making them a major threat to humans

#39

Post by hshdhdhj4444 »

chongli wrote: post #31
crooked-v wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Bird flu viruses are resistant to fever, making them a major threat to humans

#40

Post by engineer_22 »

mikkupikku wrote: post #14
msandford wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 ca…

You're right!
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