7 ms·
Bird flu viruses are resistant to fever, making them a major threat to humans
- cratermoon 11mo ago[flagged]
- colechristensen 11mo agoJust don't make comments like this here. Easy political snark doesn't add to the conversation.
- add-sub-mul-div 11mo agoWe've let too many bad ideas leak into the Overton window. Not every idea deserves the participation trophy of being taken seriously.
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago> Not every idea deserves the participation trophy of being taken seriously They are literally the ones bringing it up.
- more_corn 11mo agoI think this is a legitimate concern and criticism.
- msandford 11mo agoWhy 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.
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago> 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.)
- msandford 11mo agoThanks 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.
- mikkupikku 11mo agoDuring 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!
- BriggyDwiggs42 11mo ago“They want us to fear birds” is wild man
- anonym29 11mo agoEven 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.
- hshdhdhj4444 11mo agoUltra 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.
- anonym29 11mo ago1. 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 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?
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- markus_zhang 11mo agoCan we simply remove fever and coughing somehow… super annoying and more dangerous than the virus themselves sometimes.
- pengaru 11mo ago> 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
- paholg 11mo agoSo we can also fly? Sign me up!
- markus_zhang 11mo agoFruitbat!
- a96 11mo agoI do like some fruit.
- throwawayffffas 11mo agoThere is a vaccine though. https://news.sky.com/story/uk-prepares-five-million-vaccine-doses-in-case-of-bird-flu-pandemic-13265880 https://news.sky.com/story/uk-prepares-five-million-vaccine-...
- gerdesj 11mo agoThat'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.
- goalieca 11mo agoEveryone pops a Tylenol/advil when they get a fever. Can’t be that bad.
- anonymouskimmer 11mo agoImportantly everyone is popping a fever reducer only after the fever has already started. Here, with the avian flus, the fever effectively never gets a chance to start. And it's one thing to pop a fever reducer when you already have antibodies from prior exposure or immunization (which vulnerable groups tend to be in large enough numbers). It's another thing to pop it when you don't.
- chasil 11mo agoKurzgesagt's fever video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cRZOUcpiOxY 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.
- anonymouskimmer 11mo ago
- avadodin 11mo agoThe 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.
- valgor 11mo ago[flagged]
- Insanity 11mo agoIt’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.
- maxbond 11mo agoBut 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.
- Insanity 11mo agoWhich has been happening for centuries. I’m actually not arguing against this being a bad idea though lol, just giving some historic trivia.
- maxbond 11mo agoWe 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.
- TSiege 11mo agoPeople 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
- TacticalCoder 11mo agoMaybe 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?
- aussieguy1234 11mo agoI'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.
- more_corn 11mo agoBut the current administration is antivax so…
- caconym_ 11mo agoThe 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.
- qcnguy 11mo agoThe reason they said it wasn't possible wasn't that making a vaccine was physically impossible. They said a vaccine might never arrive because vaccines have such a poor track record against respiratory viruses. The assumption the (cough) experts were making was that nobody would roll out a useless vaccine. But they would! The COVID vaccine was advertised as 95% effective after two shots and done, and within months it was at negative effectiveness and people were being told to take infinity boosters. That's the exact scenario originally anticipated. The only mistake was assuming the regulators wouldn't sign off on a useless vaccine backed by dodgy trials. We were told to take our medicine anyway and then the vaccine boosters tried to gaslight everyone into thinking it was a great success even as millions of people saw friends and family who'd taken five shots come down with Omicron for the third time in six months. It doesn't work because respiratory viruses mutate very quickly. They evolve around both natural immunity and vaccines very fast, but vaccination triggers population lock so the effect is worse than just letting people fight it off naturally where you get more natural variability in defenses. That's why if you look carefully at the data for flu shots they don't work. They're reported as effective because the original specific virus goes away, but people still get flu and die at the same rate because "flu" is more than just one very specific virus. End effect on mortality is zero.
- binary132 11mo agoHuh. 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.
- kruffalon 11mo agoWell, 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.
- Dusseldorf 11mo agoI think what they're saying here is that you're not just suppressing a symptom, you're suppressing a sickness fighting mechanism.
- parineum 11mo agoHe said that.
- dboreham 11mo agoFever isn't just a symptom. It's a defense mechanism. The idea is that use of antipyretic drugs may make the infection worse.
- querez 11mo agoThe sentence is constructed, weirdly, but it's meant to say that fever is "killing off unknown foreign bodies"
- jibal 11mo agoPain being a way to let you know that something is damaged is close to true--close enough not to quibble with. But fever is not a way to let you know that foreign bodies are being killed off--that's his claim, and it's wrong.
- nikolay 11mo agoWell, most humans (unlike me) take Tylenol even with a "fever" of just 38°C/100.5°F, so what difference does it make?
- cpncrunch 11mo agoUnlike us, the virus will replicate much more quickly in their bodies. It wont kill them, but will likely make the infection last longer. Havent had a fever in many years, since taking flu and covid shots each year.
- nikolay 11mo agoWell, if you let your innate immune system do its job, fever can actually kill many pathogens and also ramp up your immune system response. It's fascinating that human cells can survive at slightly higher temperatures than most pathogens, giving us an advantage. It's not comfortable to have a high fever, and there's a slight chance of kids getting febrile seizures (although most are not actually that bad), but we do more harm ot ourselves for little comfort or a complete lack of soicism. I get headaches sometimes. I know 200mg of ibuprofen can help me, but I chose not to. Pain is part of reality. If we mask it, we have little incentive to address the root cause. I had COVID-19 in August this year. I had a 39.5°C fever for 2 days, then it subsided for 7-8 more days - I didn't take any antipyretic. You know, you can actually tolerate it if you accept it as something normal. And it's also a great experience to actually learn to know when you have a fever - you don't need a thermometer even.
- Tor3 11mo agoPyrotherapy. The idea of fighting untreatable (at the time) illnesses by inducing a fever in the patient. There's actually a Wikipedia article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrotherapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrotherapy As in deliberately infect a syphilis patient with malaria, which can give you a very high fever. The first time I heard about that one was in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, turns out it was one of the non-fictional parts of the books (which were a mix of historical facts and fiction). Quote: "In general, the body temperature was maintained at 41 °C (105 °F).[1] Many diseases were treated by this method in the first half of the 20th century." The malaria variant was not the common variant, that was saved for extreme cases, apparently (e.g. Syphilis). Mostly it was hot baths and the like. I, for one, will stick to my near-daily sauna sessions.
- p1dda 11mo ago[flagged]
- fredoliveira 11mo agoDidn't it literally take someone's life this week in Washington?
- dosbod 11mo agoI wonder if Tryptase affects Avian flu as well. Anyone know? I'd also argue my partner and I got Avian flu one Xmas from eating free range eggs when there was an Avian flu pandemic up the road from them in Norfolk and the British Govt ordered culls. Tryptase: "A striking finding was decreased tryptase content in mast cells with copper overload, whereas copper starvation increased tryptase content." [1] [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5728160/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5728160/ "Influenza A viruses are negative-stranded RNA viruses. Like many other enveloped viruses, they code for a surface glycoprotein that must be cleaved by cellular proteases for activation. HA, a major influenza surface glycoprotein, is translated as a single protein, HA0. For viral activation, HA0 (assembled as trimers) must be cleaved by a trypsin-like serine endoprotease at a specific site, normally coded for by a single basic amino acid (usually arginine) between the HA1 and HA2 domains of the protein. After cleavage, the two disulfide-bonded protein domains produce the mature form of the protein subunits as a prerequisite for the conformational change necessary for fusion and hence viral infectivity" [2] [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC33880/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC33880/ I also wonder, by virtue of being a single strand of RNA, how long does it take for mutations to make the virus no longer viable in the environment it resides in? In other words is a this a 3-4day process of replication and mutation which in effect kills itself off, rendering the need for immune system response and cough, cold, flu rememdies nothing more than containment effects?
- je00065 11mo agoTryptase: "A striking finding was decreased tryptase content in mast cells with copper overload, whereas copper starvation increased tryptase content." [1] Interesting copper-binding metalchaperone metal homeostasis project advertised at Durham. https://www.findaphd.com/phds/project/how-do-copper-binding-metallochaperones-break-the-rules-of-metal-homeostasis-in-cells/?p192377 https://www.findaphd.com/phds/project/how-do-copper-binding-... 'The wrong metal in the wrong enzyme is toxic.'
- je00065 11mo ago[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC33880/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC33880/ I also wonder, by virtue of being a single strand of RNA, how long does it take for mutations to make the virus no longer viable in the environment it resides in? Jul 13, 2021 Possible impact on hospitalisations from different R rate scenarios #TheDailyTelegraph