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Denmark to cull millions of minks over mutated coronavirus

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Re: Denmark to cull millions of minks over mutated coronavirus

#241

Post by cannedslime »

tinus_hn wrote: post #240
cannedslime wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We simply do not know right now. I think ARDS and the risk of permanent lung damage is one of the main reasons that we named this SARS pandemic "COVID". For the previous SARS pandemic I believe it was about half of every infected person who developed long term respiratory problems. This strain shares around 80% of its genome with the previous SARS-1 strain.

If you don’t know, bringing it up as an established fact is dishonest. But again, if the claim is really so many people are experiencing an obvious issue, yet they are so hard to find we still don’t have an idea I’m rather skeptical.

If you never look for them you will never find them. I was very sick in december and still have bad lungs because of it. Wether it was "COVID" or just multiple types of the flu hitting me relentlessly I don't know, but the short story is that you basically are not taken serious by doctors if you come up to them and say "My lungs feel really bad after that thing you said was simply the flu one year ago". And I live in Denmark, the exemplary of free medical health care...

Governments seem more keen on burning an uncountable amount of money on dubious PCR testing instead of treating or at least debunking any concerns of long term issues.

Its obvious that MY government really has no clue what they are doing. They have given themselves absolute power in this state of emergency, they make decisions and then announe them before other parties have a chance to say anything about the material handed to them. First our government sold The state serum institute to a rediculous low price to some sheikh from Saudi Arabia, and now they pay BILLIONS every month to that very same company and take all the advice they give as unconditional fact.

But fact is they are a private company with a stake in government funded PCR testing.

Re: Denmark to cull millions of minks over mutated coronavirus

#242

Post by sword_smith »

It's probably the responsible thing to do and Denmark is a 1st world country, so they can afford it. But would the same thing happen if this problem occured in a poorer country? Probably not. So isn't it inevitable that a similar mutation happens in mink in another, poorer country and that it then spreads from there?

Re: Denmark to cull millions of minks over mutated coronavirus

#243

Post by cannabis_sam »

cheph wrote: post #25
signamos wrote: post #16

I hope that ends the industry. And make the state provide better/different jobs for the people affected.

Denmark is not a socialist/communist/marxist country, it is not the Danish state's function to provide jobs for people.

Who claimed that Denmark was socialist/communist/marxist? They have social democratic traditions sure, but like the other Scandinavian countries, they have generally transitioned to a more right-wing oriented economic policy over the last 20-30 years, while maintaining their social security net.

Is it somehow inherently socialist/communist/marxist to provide job retraining to people moving between jobs at privately owned companies?

Seems to me that it’s highly beneficial to the private companies involved.

Re: Denmark to cull millions of minks over mutated coronavirus

#244

Post by mercer »

sword_smith wrote: post #242

It's probably the responsible thing to do and Denmark is a 1st world country, so they can afford it. But would the same thing happen if this problem occured in a poorer country? Probably not. So isn't it inevitable that a similar mutation happens in mink in another, poorer country and that it then spreads from there?

Apparently a similar issue occurs with Raccoon Dogs in China, so I share your concerns.

Re: Denmark to cull millions of minks over mutated coronavirus

#245

Post by mercer »

_Microft wrote: post #36
abeppu wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are minks riskier than average? Is it because of biological similarity (but then, there are lots of other mammals), or because of the conditions they're kept in? Naively, I might have just expected that cows or pigs or sheep would be the highest risks in aggregate, just because of numbers.

I don't know why but it seems that in minks SARS-Cov-2 mutates a lot more frequently than it does in humans. This would mean a lot of new strains that we would not know how to detect or deal with.

Yup. I mean, put humans in fecal-infested close confinement in numbers of 10.000s and see what happens. Big petry dish.

Re: Denmark to cull millions of minks over mutated coronavirus

#246

Post by zaarn »

avar wrote: post #232
xvilka wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the food chain would collapse It's necessary for the world to realize breeding livestock like we do now is unsustainable. Either we go vegan, lab meat or hybrid agriculture. But the current industry is the dead end.

Livestock breeding isn't inherently unsustainable. E.g. you can have closed-off poultry or pork farms with greenhouse-fed animals, all powered by wind or solar, with sewage processing to ensure there's no external pollution. This isn't sci-fi, it exists today in e.g. the denser parts of western Europe. Yes it's costlier than beef from the developing world raised on cut-down rainforest land, but growing lab is a lot m…

growing lab meat is expensive because it requires an economy of scale.

Re: Denmark to cull millions of minks over mutated coronavirus

#247

Post by salawat »

autosharp wrote: post #139
salawat wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consuming excessive amounts of corn is associated with other issues, up to and including cannibalism, mind. https://phys.org/news/2017-01-corn-french-hamsters-deranged-... Do not discount the value add of multiple digestive and organ systems worth of energy work, even if the numbers otherwise look attractive. The entire planet is interrelated.

From the article: "A diet of corn is turning wild hamsters in northeastern France into deranged cannibals that devour their offspring, alarmed researchers have reported." Are you saying I might be a wild hamster from northeastern France? And I should not just be eating corn?

I am saying that mammalian research models have predictive power, and that shifting to a fully corn based diet without any of the livestock based foods we'd raise on corn could have unintended side effects. Not everything happens as a first order outcome.

Every creature in the logistical food chain is performing different nutrient accumulations for the next one in the chain. If you think about bioaccumulation as a mechanism, that research should have you realizimg that "You are what you eat" has a terrifyingly poignant meaning, in the sense that if we end up seeing a smaller creature fed on a single having potential in the wild population management problems, the same thing could happen to us. By the time we realized what was going on, the damage to the ecosystem could realistically already be done.

I mean, scoff if you like. Me? I'm trying to figure out how to companion farm. Better for the ecosystem as a whole, and I like the plethora of wildlife that end up benefitting as result too.

On another note, I don't remember making this posting twice? Did I pocket post somehow? Hrrm.

Re: Denmark to cull millions of minks over mutated coronavirus

#248

Post by ada1981 »

hvidgaard wrote: post #222
ada1981 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes was banned due to academic outcry, but then lifted by Trump. “Gain of Function” is often a dog whistle for bioweapons research.

Why else would you actively develop bacteria and virus that spreads more?

So, the reason given is that you have a virus that exists naturally. If we can artificially find a variant that is more lethal and or contagious (those are often the vectors that are selected for) you can then calculate the delta between the DNA of the original and the variation and make some guesses as to the likelihood that this variation will emerge naturally via mutation and then perhaps develop some sort of preventive countermeasures.

Here is a good lecture by a harvard professor on risks of gain of function research:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5fe7KEkwQM

-- Risks and Benefits of Gain-of-Function Experiments in Potentially Pandemic Pathogens

--- The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk's January 2015 Seminar, with Professor Marc Lipsitch (Harvard) and Professor Derek Smith (Cambridge).

A growing trend in experimental virology has been the modification of influenza viruses that are antigenically novel to, and virulent in humans, such that these variant viruses are readily transmissible in mammals, including ferrets which are thought to be the best animal model for influenza infection. Novel, contagious, virulent viruses are potential pandemic pathogens in that their accidental or malevolent release into the human population could cause a pandemic.

Professor Marc Lipsitch (Harvard) describes the purported benefits of such studies, arguing that these are overstated; estimates the magnitude of the risk they create, argues for the superiority of alternative scientific approaches on both safety and scientific grounds, and proposes an ethical framework in which such experiments should be evaluated. The talk also explore recent developments following the pause in funding for this research announced by the United States Government in October, and steps towards the risk-benefit analysis called for by the announcement.

Professor Lipsitch is a professor of epidemiology and the Director of the Centre for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard University. He is one of the founders of the Cambridge Working group, which calls for a “quantitative, objective and credible assessment of the risks, potential benefits, and opportunities for risk mitigation” of gain of function experiments in potentially pandemic pathogen strains.

A response is given by Professor Derek Smith, Professor of Infectious Disease Informatics at Cambridge University. --

Re: Denmark to cull millions of minks over mutated coronavirus

#249

Post by tinus_hn »

cannedslime wrote: post #241
tinus_hn wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t know, bringing it up as an established fact is dishonest. But again, if the claim is really so many people are experiencing an obvious issue, yet they are so hard to find we still don’t have an idea I’m rather skeptical.

If you never look for them you will never find them. I was very sick in december and still have bad lungs because of it. Wether it was "COVID" or just multiple types of the flu hitting me relentlessly I don't know, but the short story is that you basically are not taken serious by doctors if you come up to them and say "My lungs feel really bad after that thing you said was simply the flu one year ago". And I live in…

Not sure what your point is.

You tell us an anecdote about how you are experiencing problems after you were sick in December.

I’m pretty sure you didn’t get tested for Corona in December but anyway I don’t see how that justifies scaremongering about ‘a lot of cases’ where people have longlasting damage. Again, if it is so pronounced and affects so many people it shouldn’t be hard to show.

Re: Denmark to cull millions of minks over mutated coronavirus

#250

Post by setgree »

disown wrote: post #141
setgree wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This question is easy for me — hog farming is, overall, a greater harm because we are talking about more pigs and more horrendous conditions. Both are morally impermissible, in my opinion, which is why I keep to a vegan diet and don’t wear fur. Putting aside the harms to animals for a moment, we might consider both mink farms and hog farms to be part of a larger problem, which is monoculture agriculture. Minks weren’…

> which is why I keep to a vegan diet Animals are killed to provide for your vegan diet too, though you can argue they are indirectly killed. And then there is the moral issue of murdering plants and consuming them. > Minks weren’t meant to live in tiny cages all cramped together The same goes for plants/vegetation used to feed vegans. Unless you are grazing the great plains like wild buffalo. > just like raising not…

In general, I like it when people make their objections to veganism explicit, rather than just going about their lives eating meat. It suggests openness to conversation that I appreciate. So an upvote for you.

To the point that veganism requires industrialized farming: this may be true, I don't know. I think we do know that widespread veganism would reduce some of environmental harms associated with industrialized farming, because:

* A lot of currently cultivated farmland produces feed for livestock (Vox estimates 36% [0]);

* This paper [1] estimates that switching land currently used for animals to plants would lead to a manifold increase in nutrient output per acre;

* The BBC [2] estimates that "A meat-eater’s diet requires 17 times more land, 14 times more water and 10 times more energy than a vegetarian’s;"

And so on [3] [4].

I don't think we know for sure what would happen if the world stopped eating meat, but I think overall, environmentally and ethically, it would be an improvement.

(To a point about worse nutritional profiles of vegan vs. omnivore diets (raised in [4]), I think the answer is to eat oysters, clams and mussels, which are high in iron, protein, and fish oil, but don't have capacity for pain/experience, as far as we know. This is called ostroveganism and I picked up the idea from Michael Huemer [5].)

[0] https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel...

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/115/15/3804

[2] https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/what-would-world-loo...

[3] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/11/what-would-happen-if...

[4] https://www.pnas.org/content/114/48/E10301

[5] https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...

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