Look, this is my blog, so I get to decide what I want to write about. I don’t have a bunch of fat American MAGA boomers sending me 5 dollars a month in exchange for telling them that Joe Biden’s climate change hysteria is going to make our meat and eggs expensive.
I look at this website a bit like my legacy. I will die one day and then I’ll be able to take comfort in the fact that I sought to tell people the truth, instead of the popular lie that makes you money. I don’t have to administer you addictive brain-opioids, that lull you to sleep. I get to tell you what you don’t want to hear. I get to tell you, the truth. People don’t lie to you to deceive you. They lie to you because you prefer being lied to.
But this is the truth and you’re not going to like it. The bird flu, is not “flu”. Yes, it’s technically an influenza virus, in the same sense as a bat is technically a mammal. But when you think of a mammal, you think of an animal that lives on land, not an animal that flies in the sky.
How many influenza viruses can you think of, that kill an animal by destroying the blood vessels in its brain? That’s what the “bird flu” does to cats. It turns the brain to mush.
Why? Because it has a polybasic cleavage site. What does that mean in simple English? A protein is made of amino acids. There are 22 of those found in the genetic code of life. Three of those, Arginine, Lysine and Histidine are basic amino acids, the opposite of acidic.
When you put a whole bunch of those basic amino acids close together in a protein, you get a polybasic site. This allows enzymes our cells produce to attach there. Those enzymes can then cut up the protein at that particular site.
The effect this has, is that when a protein of a virus develops such a polybasic site in the exact right spot, it can start to infect different cell types, cell types that produce these particular enzymes, that would normally not be available for such a virus to infect. One of those enzymes is furin, but there are others too. That’s why you hear this term “polybasic furin cleavage site” thrown around a lot, about SARS-COV-2.
But the influenza virus, that we know for causing “the flu”, normally has no polybasic cleavage site. It only has been found to develop the polybasic cleavage site, under two conditions:
-Cell cultures in a lab.
-Massive factory farms full of birds
And we know why this is. With at least five of these basic amino acids in a row, you call the cleavage site “polybasic”. When you see three or four of these basic amino acids in a row, you call the cleavage site “multibasic”. Normal influenza, the type that infects us humans and other animals, has just one basic amino acid, that only allows enzymes found in our lungs to cleave it. We call this “monobasic”.
And the problem is as following: To get to the polybasic cleavage site variety as a virus, you first have to evolve the multibasic variety, out of the monobasic variety. But the multibasic variety, is just not very good at functioning as a virus. It’s bad at competing in the wild.
On the other hand, when such a virus emerges in a factory farm, where it faces no competition from other viruses, no pre-existing immunity against influenza and birds with poor health, it can easily spread there, mutate to add more basic amino acids and evolve into the polybasic cleavage site variety. And unlike the intermediary step, the multibasic variety, the polybasic variety does manage to survive in the wild, so now wild birds can start spreading it from one chicken broiler to another.
I’ll quote the study for you:
Low pathogenicity avian influenza viruses (LPAIVs) are generally asymptomatic in their natural avian hosts. LPAIVs can evolve into highly pathogenic forms, which can affect avian and human populations with devastating consequences. The switch to highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (HPAIV) from LPAIV precursors requires the acquisition of multiple basic amino acids in the haemagglutinin cleavage site (HACS) motif. Through reverse genetics of an H5N1 HPAIV, and experimental infection of chickens, we determined that viruses containing five or more basic amino acids in the HACS motif were preferentially selected over those with three to four basic amino acids, leading to rapid replacement with virus types containing extended HACS motifs. Conversely, viruses harbouring low pathogenicity motifs containing two basic amino acids did not readily evolve to extended forms, suggesting that a single insertion of a basic amino acid into the cleavage site motif of low-pathogenic viruses may lead to escalating selection for extended motifs. Our results may explain why mid-length forms are rarely detected in nature. The stability of the short motif suggests that pathogenicity switching may require specific conditions of intense selection pressure (such as with high host density) to boost selection of the initial mid-length HACS forms.
That last sentence I made bold, because this is the important thing to understand: These viruses are NOT natural! They’re a product of humans putting birds in these conditions:
When you put the birds in HELL, you give birth to a virus from HELL.
This thing was born in the 90’s in China. They tried vaccinating against it, but it didn’t work, it just accelerated its evolution and encouraged it to spill over into other animals.
The important thing to understand is as following: It’s the polybasic cleavage site, that allows influenza viruses to infect endothelial cells, in humans as well as in birds. Remove the polybasic cleavage site and it becomes like normal influenza, in that it can’t replicate in the endothelial cells anymore. I quote:
To test the permissiveness of pulmonary endothelial cells to virus infection, we compared the replication of selected seasonal, pandemic (2009 H1N1 and 1918), and potentially pandemic (H5N1) influenza virus strains. We observed that these cells support productive replication only of HPAI H5N1 viruses, which preferentially enter through and are released from the apical surface of polarized human endothelial monolayers. Furthermore, A/Thailand/16/2004 and A/Vietnam/1203/2004 (VN/1203) H5N1 viruses, which exhibit heightened virulence in mammalian models, replicated to higher titers than less virulent H5N1 strains. VN/1203 infection caused a significant decrease in endothelial cell proliferation compared to other subtype viruses. VN/1203 virus was also found to be a potent inducer of cytokines and adhesion molecules known to regulate inflammation during acute lung injury. Deletion of the H5 hemagglutinin (HA) multibasic cleavage site did not affect virus infectivity but resulted in decreased virus replication in endothelial cells.
The endothelial cells, are the cells that line all your blood vessels, including in your brain.
Different cell types, will have different machinery operating inside of them. When the virus develops the polybasic cleavage site that allows it to switch to the endothelial cells, that means it has to figure out how to make optimal use of those cells, rather than the cells in the lungs it would normally rely on.
So what happens next is that the internal genes start to change too, to enable efficient use of the new cell types it can infect. The polybasic cleavage site makes the virus deadlier, but it’s not enough on its own to get the results we now see in the chickens, where 90% of them die within 48 hours of infection. All sorts of other changes start to happen, once the virus has the polybasic cleavage site.
This is why it’s insanity, to expect that once the bird flu becomes a virus that jumps between humans, it will eventually evolve to become like the normal flu we’re used to.
Do you expect whales to crawl back on land again at some point? Do you expect bats to lose their wings one day and live like mice? When such a sudden dramatic shift happens in the cell types this virus uses to survive in, it becomes forced to adapt to those conditions. It can’t just lose the polybasic cleavage site and go back to being a normal influenza virus, because then without the polybasic cleavage site, it still has those other mutations. So then it’s just a poor influenza virus, unable to compete with other influenza viruses.
Some of those other mutations involve big deletions of twenty amino acids in a row. You don’t just reverse a mutation like that, that’s incredibly hard for natural selection to do.
Once this virus goes human-to-human, people imagine it will be like the 1918 influenza pandemic. First a whole bunch of people die, but then it mutates and starts behaving like a normal flu virus. That’s not going to happen.
To start with, we never see it grow milder when it’s given to animals. In such animal passage studies, it grows deadlier with every jump it makes. That’s what you’re seeing with the cows right now too, it was pretty mild in Texas when we first discovered it in cows, but now in California it’s killing huge numbers of them.
But second, it’s always going to behave like a fundamentally different virus from the influenza we know.
The 1918 H1N1 virus, did NOT have a polybasic cleavage site. The 1918 virus, can NOT infect endothelial cells. So it can’t offer you lessons for what’s going to happen now. The polybasic cleavage site, is a consequence of our factory farms. Those factory farms, are a new thing:
So we have never seen anything like this virus in our population before, because we never before created the conditions in which a virus like this can come into existence.
It’s not going to behave like any influenza viruses that we are used to.
And it’s not just going to return to behaving like a normal influenza virus after a few waves through our population.
I will readily admit, that I love a good horror story. But modern animal agriculture, is much better at creating horror stories, than I can ever hope to be.
This is the reality of what we’re dealing with.
When you hear about bird flu on the news, those people should be reminding you of these four points:
- It does not behave like a normal flu virus.
- It’s not natural, it could only come into existence in our giant chicken broilers.
- It’s not just going to turn into a normal flu again eventually.
- It damages the blood vessels in your brain.
Those are the facts. When they are not telling you those four points, then they’re just training you to say “it’s all bullshit”. You will say: “Oh the flu? I’ve had the flu before.”
I honestly really don’t care how many people it kills, it’s going to be a horror show either way. Your endothelial cells lining your blood vessels, are basically part of your immune system. Unlike most cells, they are able to produce huge amounts of Interferon alpha, a molecule basically designed by evolution to interfere in every step of a viral reproduction cycle.
That’s what we see in this virus, it causes the infected cells to produce huge amounts of it.
So you end up with this virus in the blood vessels in your brain. They produce huge amounts of Interferon Alpha. You can reliably induce depression in a person, by injecting them with interferon alpha, which is sometimes done to treat a viral infection. They suffer severe depression for weeks afterwards, often it recurs later on.
Even if you survive it, it’s a virus that’s going to screw with your mind, by putting your immune system in your brain on high alert, kind of similar to SARS-COV-2.
What we see in cows right now, is that it damages the immune system, they tend to succumb not to the direct effects of the virus itself, but to subsequent bacterial infections. Again, it’s not a normal flu virus. It is found to replicate much better in myeloid cells than normal influenza. What are those? Blood cells derived from bone marrow. It includes neutrophils, macrophages and other cells of your innate immune system.
They’re going to try to vaccinate against it, which will go about as well as you would expect. We have at least three separate strains now in the United States, including one jumping from chickens into humans and one jumping from cattle into humans.
The virus evolved in chickens who were being actively vaccinated against it. It’s inherently vaccine-resistant and humans already have adaptive immunity against it from exposure to regular influenza. So the vaccines are not going to do much against it. Vaccination just selects for neurovirulence, as the antibodies normally don’t pass the blood brain-barrier.
My hope is that at least some of the population will have protection from the natural killer cells and monocytes that migrate into the brain when you are infected by SARS-COV-2 without having been vaccinated. They don’t migrate into the brain when you’re infected while vaccinated, in which case your body just deploys antibodies that are not going to be neutralizing for influenza. The endothelial cells themselves should also have been trained by now.
It’s not looking good. But people just entirely don’t care, I’m accused of fear-mongering. The reality is: Twenty percent of your cows in California are dying from this. It killed 96% out of 17,000 of the elephant seal pups in South America.
It’s already causing ecological disasters around the world. But people don’t want to see it, the right wingers want to think Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab invented this to force them to eat bugs. But that’s honestly not half as stupid, as the “I believe in science” types, who think we’re going to solve this by vaccinating anything that moves.
We tried that in the 90’s, when it first showed up in our poultry. It didn’t work. It made it worse, by increasing the genetic diversity of these viruses, thereby allowing them to jump into more animal species. That’s why we are where we are now.
Sorry, but this is the story that’s going to dominate the remainder of your life. Resource depletion and climate change are big problems, but they ramp up slowly. This one, this one ramps up fast.
How do you expect to run a farm and produce milk, when half your cows die in a single month? That’s the reality some farmers in California now face.
Something like this just bankrupts farmers. And at first the government may try to prop up the farmers to keep business as usual going. But eventually you realize that it just no longer works. You can just no longer produce milk at an affordable price and your workers are bleeding from their eyeballs. That’s when entire villages in places like South Dakota, where milk is the only thing being produced, just become non-viable. Anyone who is not directly involved in producing milk there, is indirectly dependent on it.
We closed our eyes for a tragedy that happens on a constant basis:
So now we’ll face one of our own.
“Nature will always maintain her rights, and prevail in the end over any abstract reasoning whatsoever.” – David Hume.
There are mass extinctions every few thousand years. Previous ones killed off 95% of early humans. The next one is probably not too far off. I’ll leave anyone interested to research the why’s and how’s. It’s easy to find.
There are 8 billion people on the planet. They need lots of food. Humans have taken over the entire biome of the land. Whether it’s bird flu or something else, there will be a reboot of the earth. This is nothing to fear. It’s just how things work. The animals suffer too. But until humans grow unsustainably again, at least the animals will have room to thrive.
Which do you reckon is less painful, dying of bird flu or dying from how cows are normally killed in factory farms?
You’d probably need to consider the whole picture. for example, the slaughter method, plus all the suffering in the beast/s life caused by its life in the factory farm leading up to the point of slaughter.
On balance, it could be that factory/dairy cows currently dying of bird flu are getting an early mark.
Despite the brutality of the system, the farmers mostly love their cows. This may seem impossible but it is true. This disease is causing great depression and considerations of suicide among farmers. So, they are trying to keep their cows alive, and it is not just for money reasons. Being tended and being around other cows while dying is a whole lot better than going through the slaughter process.
Dying with a bolt to the head instantly, or drowning in your own fluids?
yeah, I’ll take the former
Well, “TM” has certainly gotten his money’s worth.
> To get to the polybasic cleavage site variety as a virus, you first have to evolve the multibasic variety, out of the monobasic variety.
Interesting, so similar to how the FCS of SARS-CoV-2 has been steadily “improving” itself over the last several years. If we go with Daniel Sirotkin’s ultimate predictions, SARS-CoV-2 will eventually resemble “MERS on crack” (his words) once it has fully de-attenuated/reverted:
https://twitter.com/Harvard2H/status/1825882948874187023?t=Uc-fjSesSw-LNerRc-CsGw&s=19
Although I am personally skeptical of this hypothesis, and more inclined to believe you and Vanden Bossche (Dan A.K.A H2TBH seems to believe that EVERYONE is screwed from COVID, not just the vaccinated).
> the right wingers want to think Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab invented this to force them to eat bugs. But that’s honestly not half as stupid, as the “I believe in science” types, who think we’re going to solve this by vaccinating anything that moves.
That’s the REALLY terrifying part, that the public health authorities, academics and Big Pharma who caused the COVID catastrophe by deploying ineffective lockdowns and disastrous mass-vaccination campaigns will be put in charge AGAIN when they should all be rotting in prison right now!
The way I see it, H5/H7 and SARS-CoV-2 are in a “race” with each other. If the former wins, then the “I FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE” Reddit lunatics who worship the CDC/FDA/NIH/Fauci will cause havoc and mayhem with their CCP style policies. Whereas if the latter wins the race, many of these woke pronoun PhD ” TRUST THE SCIENCE™ ” control freaks (as well as the pharmaceutical scientists and engineers who manufacture the vaccines) will be “out of action” so to speak due to HIVICRON.
Civilization is going to collapse either way, but many would agree that the latter scenario is preferable to the former scenario. It would be the difference between 1/3 to 1/2 the population dying, vs. 90%+ of the population dying (because let’s be honest, if Big Pharma tried to vaccinate us against bird flu, it would probably “erase” our COVID-induced innate immunity in the brain that is cross-protective against bird flu, just like the mRNA COVID vaccines “disabled” the training of the innate immune system).
>Civilization is going to collapse either way
That’s the core of it all, isn’t it?
My friends spend their whole day at some shitjob they don’t like, with some bullshit promise about a “promotion” or a “PhD program”.
And then I just think to myself… look around you.
Look at this insanity you’re living in.
Why bother spending every day, doing something you don’t enjoy doing?
You’re an ape, you enjoy eating, fucking, climbing and teasing other animals.
You don’t enjoy stressing out about numbers in a spreadsheet all day long.
Just drop the bullshit and try to enjoy the time we have left.
Who is “Dan A.K.A H2TBH”?
I think “TM” was hoping for some helpful survival tips, haha.
Well, like him, I am in the epicenter of this. My helpful tip for him is that he should get an AirTamer for himself and his family members. Unlike masks, it also protects the eyes. I think they will be in short supply soon enough.
> Who is “Dan A.K.A H2TBH”?
Daniel Sirotkin also known as Harvard2TheBigHouse, he co-wrote a scientific paper alongside his father Karl titled “Might SARS‐CoV‐2 Have Arisen via Serial Passage through an Animal Host or Cell Culture?”. I linked to his Twitter, he also has a Substack.
My cousin is also in the epicentre, she moved to Oakland a few years ago. I was absolutely shocked when I read that comment you wrote on here a while ago about how in Santa Cruz they are STILL mandating up to date boosters for college students. Complete insanity. California, a beautiful state ruined by political nutjobs. I visited L.A. and San Francisco on a family holiday in 2006, I remember seeing the homeless people on Santa Monica beach. I also remember the Bubba Gump shrimp restaurant on Pier 39 in Fisherman’s Wharf. Fun times. Sad what’s happened to San Francisco in recent years.
Thanks. I had heard of him, but not by that abbreviation.
Among the doctors and scientists I’ve followed during the crazy COVID years, about the only one taking the bird flu seriously is you. I don’t know what GVB has said about it. Meryl Nass has been great crusading against the covid gene therapy injections and the tyranny of the WHO, now she is busy pooh-poohing the threat of bird flu as just a nothingburger they want to scare us with.
It’s worrying to me because it’s gotten into so many species with such a huge death rate. But so far it’s had little effect on humans. No human-to-human transmission and on the rare occasion somebody gets infected there is only mild illness with some pink eye.
If it does catch fire in the human population with a case fatality rate of 5% or more, the freakout is going to dwarf the hysteria of the covid pandemic.
>It’s worrying to me because it’s gotten into so many species with such a huge death rate.
Yup. We’re already in a disaster.
But it seems that when a problem is too massive, the psychological immune system kicks in and we just deny it.
It’s similar to guys with health problems who have to be dragged to the doctor by their wives: The denial is just the natural impulse of most people for big problems.
Well, the problem is massive, but frankly, its compliance fatigue.
The government burned all of its goodwill (what little there was) on Covid.
You can’t get people to do that shit again, even if you pinky promise, you really mean it this time. People that you screwed don’t feel like lining up to get screwed again.
The end of the covid pandemic would put an end to the asymptomatic spreading of many other viruses, would re-establish the equilibrium of the human created ecosystem. This seems logical.
This H5N1 problem has been building up since the 90’s. There isn’t even any evidence that birds are catching COVID.
It’s kind of magical thinking to expect this virus will just stop spreading once the covid pandemic ends.
The asympomatic spread by the human population (covid vaccinated farmers and flu vaccinated cows , particularly, in case of bird flu) of many viruses,is the cause. This is due to the acute action of the cytolitic T cells (CTL, with no memory), which cleanse the body of vaccinated people from the infected cells. Rhis would explain the proliferation of many viruses like monkey pox and others, which are typically well contained because never were spread, till now, asympomatically. This will end when cobid vaccinated people get rid of the cause of their hyper activation of CTLs. These CTL identify universal epitopes, this is why are cross reactive against bird flu, so they would protect covid vaccinated people from bird flu.
It’s a nice theory, but there’s no actual evidence for it.
We know there is immunodeficiency after people catch COVID. That may explain some viruses now spreading more in our population.
But monkeypox and H5N1 were brewing long before 2020.
Human milk is excellent in your morning coffee, according to the fully ripped boys at the gym.
The boys at the gym are all into human breast milk nowadays – natural supplements.
As for my care factor in relation to the upcoming mass human population reduction – I hate most people anyway:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulIOrQasR18
>As for my care factor in relation to the upcoming mass human population reduction – I hate most people anyway:
But you are not an atomized individual.
You are a sprocket in a Greater Chain you might not just be aware of yet.
The difference between what it’s doing to cows, cats, tigers, and sea lions and what it’s doing to people is extremely bizarre.
Are there other other mammals it’s infecting with mild consequences?
As Rintrah pointed out, the case mortality rate in cows was pretty low when the first cases appeared in places like Texas. It was just 1-5 percent. Now it is 15-20 percent of infected cows dying in CA. So, as Rintrah also pointed out, this mutates to become more lethal. We wouldn’t really know if wild animals were having mild cases. Actually we might not even know if wild animals were having severe cases, except ones that are out on beaches and easy to see dead, like sea lions, or highly observed, like big cats in zoos. There is so little testing going on.
Not sure if you knew, but it’s in the pigs now too:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/influenza-pig-bird-flu-us#:~:text=At%20least%20one%20pig%20has%20picked%20up%20bird,genetic%20mutations%20that%20can%20put%20people%20at%20risk.
No, it’s not.
Your article references one pig on one farm, among 75 million hogs and pigs in the US, and we don’t know how sick that one pig got.
Let’s not lie for the sake of sensationalism.
Well, we are in the realm of conjecture here.
If it’s in one pig, who is to say it isn’t in more?
Pigs are also intensively farmed, so there’s that as well.
What is the false positive rate for the test that was used for the pig?
And you called me a liar, so what part of what I said was a lie?
It is in the fucking pigs you dick.
We have patient zero in the pigs. It’s proven. No reasonable doubt there at all.
Just who is it that is doing the sensationalizing?
Or do you think it’s only in the pigs when there’s a mountain of stinking rotting pig corpses, like there is for the other intensively farmed species of chickens and cows?
It’s not in the pigs just because you heard one tested positive.
And Rintrah is not being honest when he says that 20% of dairy cattle are dying of bird flu. Not happening.
Let’s be more careful with our words.
It is in the pigs if one of them has positive!
Of course it is!
It is scientifically proven to be in the species of pigs.
I’m not saying it’s in every pig, but I am saying it is in pigs.
It is in humans, not in every human, but it is in humans.
“Let’s be more careful with our words”
How fucking precious.
You be more careful with your words Karen.
If it’s “in the pigs” then why hasn’t it transmitted to a million other pigs?
ONE tested positive in a backyard farm, so they say.
That to me doesn’t qualify.
A pig is probably capable of getting infected ok, but we’re a long ways away from “mountains of stinking rotting pig corpses,” being decimated by bird flu.
Sensationalism
Way to try to twist and misrepresent my words.
In the meantime, it’s in the pigs after an objective test, no matter what qualifies as being in the pigs in your subjective personal opinion.
Rada: The loa that represents the emotional stability and warmth of Africa, the hearth of the nation. Rada derived almost directly from the Dahomean deity is highly religious in nature; rite is never celebrated without the performance of Mahi dances and without honoring and invocation of Nago gods. The Rada drumming and dancing is on beat whereas the Petro is offbeat. Rada stands for light and the normal affairs of humanity.
Wombat, I’m feeling mellow and happy and uninhibited because I’m sipping on some primo bourbon. You should share a drink with me.
Thanks for the invite, but I’m on the wagon.
A bit of a health kick.
But, if/when the viral grim reaper starts swinging his scythe in a big way, I’ll crack a bottle of whisky and join you.
Pedantic arguing aside, to put it all into perspective, I doubt anyone cares what a bunch of random anonymous guys natter away about in this obscure nook of the internet.
And if they do, they’re doing a good job of hiding it.
I doubt anyone really cares what we say in reality either. Again, if they do, they hide it well.
On the whole, everything seems quite relaxed and calm in my remote corner of the world. Things are different post-covid, but there are no piles of corpses and most everyone seems to be getting by.
The covid is still there, but I don’t see any care factor.
So, you can stop worrying about causing a ‘sensation’ – it’s not gonna happen.
I doubt there will be any ‘sensation’ until the stink is in everyone’s nostrils.
I’d have more chance of causing a sensation by claiming to see Jesus on my toast.
Here in Slovakia some form of bird flu just hit a big factory farm leading to 40,000 chickens being slaughtered. You can’t get eggs in the supermarket right now, or maybe you can but they’re getting snapped up too quickly; just bare egg shelves the last few days.
GVB’s prediction on the bird flu / SarsCov2 interaction: https://open.substack.com/pub/voiceforscienceandsolidarity/p/is-the-bird-flu-panzootic-expediting?r=2iheu9&utm_medium=ios
>So you end up with this virus in the blood vessels in your brain. They produce huge amounts of Interferon Alpha. You can reliably induce depression in a person, by injecting them with interferon alpha, which is sometimes done to treat a viral infection. They suffer severe depression for weeks afterwards, often it recurs later on.
The depressed wont notice anything going on lol
I wonder if that is one of the reasons that farmers in CA are extremely depressed. Of course they are depressed about their sick and dead cows, but maybe this is causing them to be depressed, too.
What I don’t understand is where the Palo Alto wastewater H5 virus is coming from: https://data.wastewaterscan.org/tracker?charts=Ci4QASABSABSBjM3NDMwYVIGMjU0ODE5WgdJbmZBX0g1eKkBigEGZjhkNjc5wAEB&selectedChartId=f8d679
If you look at the bottom of the page you’ll see that it is something new. There was a tiny blip in October, and now there is an insanely huge surge (in September there was also a huge out of season Influenza A surge; it is not clear if that was bird flu; I’m not sure the were specifically testing for it then). Is it from birds pooping into the reservoirs? Is it somehow from the cows? How could it be from the cows???? Is it from people from who have consumed milk and yogurt? But people in Palo Alto wouldn’t be eating more than people elsewhere; if anything there would have more vegans (though not many). Could it have anything to do with covid vaccination (it’s almost unviversal here). It is crazy high in Turlock, too, but they have cows. It is so confusing.
Palo Alto includes and is dominated by Stanford University, which is a town in itself, with a population skewed young, and in much closer contact than regular Americans. Also undergrads are away during summer. I would love to see wastewater data for other universities too.
I’ve been following all of the local watersheds for years. Stanford did its own testing of wastewater that was specific to the university until very recently. Their results for covid and RSV and flu were not all that different from the Palo Alto watershed results. However, Stanford did not even then test for H5. Palo Alto itself is has a young population; it is 35 percent Asian, so it is itself demographically distinctive. I guess the Stanford population could suddenly be affecting the overall results in a way that they haven’t in the past.
Why virologists are concerned about bird flu “”in pigs””:
https://theconversation.com/bird-flu-detected-in-pigs-heres-why-virologists-are-concerned-242623
Sensational.
Here is a brief article on a theory as to why humans and chimps share so many common features (which makes pigs a good mixing bowl for scary new viruses that can infect humans):
https://phys.org/news/2013-07-chimp-pig-hybrid-humans.html
Trigger warning!
On the one hand, many may find it sensational that our ancestors were pig fuckers, but on the other, if that’s where the evidence leads. . .
😛
I hope you don’t actually believe this.
Quiet Charlie, I am listening for a sensation among the pig fuckers. . .
The pig/chimp hybrid human origin theory must be hot on everyone’s lips by now.
You read about it here first!
They don’t even know if the one pig was infected or just “snuffled up some contaminated material.”
It’s meaningless.
Sorry, but it isn’t just meaningless.
If the virus starts spreading and mixing in pigs in a big way, we could be in all sorts of strife.
Watch this space. . .
Apologies if I missed a post where you’ve addressed my question…
Do you have any thoughts as to an estimated timeline in regards to progressive ‘steps’ such as, with Covid-19 for example:
December 2019 – widespread cases in China/info begins entering the awareness of certain Alt News & forum readers
January 2020 – Infection rises in Italy – awareness begins seeping from Alt news sites into more widely read (but not quite mainstream) media
February 2020 Europe/US gov’ts and mainstream media begin widespread reporting of Covid-19 and begin disseminating ‘plans’, ‘protocols’, etc..
End Feb/1st week March – cases growing in ‘western’ countries…
Mid March – lockdowns begin..
So, just wondering if you’ve conjectured that sort of timeline, in regard to stages of bird flu – from widely spaced & increased types & numbers of animals to significant infections among humans…
…then increasing virulence of infection in humans….etc., etc…you understand, I’m sure…
Sooooo, how long do you estimate before the situation has advanced to the degree that governments ‘have to’ admit there’s a problem?
And then how long do you think we’ll have before concern arises that my family are ‘actively’ in danger? Not that I could do anything about it, but I prefer getting a head start on worrying, as opposed to being struck ‘out of the blue’.
Thank you!! God Bless You (well, if He exists, may He bless you!)
Thank you for the detailed explanation and the links to other articles. This gives me something to think on. I’m glad it is not yet transmitting human to human, though if it gets enough circulation in other mammals, especially pigs, it’s only a matter of time till it achieves human to human transmission.
My understanding from other reading is that the vaccination of the farm animals has contributed to their vulnerability, by weakening innate immunity.
My takeaways so far are that strong innate immunity will be important, and that can be improved with vitamins,like Vitamin C, A, D and some minerals especially important to immunity, like selenium.
Also, lethality varies greatly by species. We are fortunate that it’s isn’t lethal in humans, at least not yet. The cats seem particularly unlucky in this regard.
The H5N1 flu adapting to humans will mean rising virulence, until it kills lots of humans.
After which it will seem mild, but only because the host changed, not because the virus changed.
Here are some links I’ll be doing some reading at as I noodle potential treatments.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5707683/
https://lpi.oregonstate.edu/mic/health-disease/immunity
https://www.doctorsformulas.com/en/category/newsposts/vitamin-c-strengthens-the-immune-system-in-20-different-ways.htm
https://academic.oup.com/jid/article-abstract/182/Supplement_1/S5/2191448?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false