51–60 of 161 posts
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.
But the current administration is antivax so…
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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, r…
Bread is an ultra-processed food.
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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.
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…
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.)
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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.
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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.
So the current culling of entire flocks is seen as a means of nipping any of these mutations in the bud.
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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 no…
"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.
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.
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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.
We are definitely making things worse, also by our use of antibiotics in livestock.