Hello Guys Welcome to this my blog today I am going to write a some The Deadly Spread of Mutant Virus: How to Protect Yourself Bird flu is a disease that is known to spread among birds. But earlier this week it was found in the possession of a dairy factory worker in Texas. No less strange is that the patient picked up the infection not from a sick chicken or wild bird, but from a cow. Mammals have rarely, if ever, infected humans with avian influenza.
The Texas patient has a mild form of the disease – the only symptoms are “red eyes”, and he is already recovering. However, this news is just the tip of the iceberg. The fact that bird flu poses a danger to humanity has been written more and more often lately.
Over the past few years, poultry populations have been decimated by the disease, with American farmers slaughtering “millions of chickens” to prevent its spread. This week, the virus was detected in production at the largest egg supplier in the United States and in dairy cows in a fifth American state. Avian flu also continues to decimate wild birds and many marine mammals, including seals and sea lions. The disease continues to spread and has even reached penguins in the Antarctic and at least one polar bear in the Arctic.
Who are we dealing with?
The virus currently sweeping the planet is the so-called highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (HPAI). It usually develops on farms, where a lot of birds are raised and kept in close quarters. There, ideal conditions have been created for the virus to quickly evolve and adapt, becoming more and more “deadly,” the online publication points out.
HPAI outbreaks have repeatedly caused the death of millions of poultry. What makes this new form of the virus so unusual is that it has learned to spread among wild birds and a growing number of mammals, and is severe in them. Previously, this was rare, Vox notes.
HPAI was first discovered in 1996 in Guangdong province in China, where it caused the death of about 40% of local goose farms and 6 of 18 sick employees. The United States first encountered the disease in 2014-2015, when bird flu killed millions of domestic birds and an untold number of wild birds. A new “modernized” strain of HPAI began to actively spread in the United States in 2022, the online publication reports.
The virus can change its registration
In early 2023, HPAI killed “thousands of sea lions,” and in the spring, U.S. authorities discovered avian flu in goats in Minnesota and in cow herds in Texas, Kansas, Michigan, Idaho and New Mexico. This is all troubling because humans are mammals too. If the disease “jumped” from birds to mammals, what prevents it from “jumping” to us, writes Vox? (The Deadly Spread of Mutant Virus: How to Protect Yourself)
As for the milk of sick cows, there are different points of view. On the one hand, writes Politico, there are experts who argue that if it is pasteurized before going on sale, it remains safe for consumers. On the other hand, the head of the Office of Advanced Biomedical Research and Development (a division of the US Department of Health), Rick Bright, does not agree with this. “They would have to do a lot of tests before I would drink milk from one of these farms,” he told Politico.
Over the past few years, only a couple dozen people around the world – most of them in different parts of Asia – have become ill with this particular type of bird flu. And all of them likely had close contact with infected animals. Symptoms can be mild or absent, such as mild flu or red eyes, or severe and fatal, such as fever and pneumonia. Thus, over the past two decades, HPAI infected 800 people worldwide, and more than half of them died, Vox notes. Disappointing statistics.
Two news: good and bad
Let’s start with the good news. The chances that you will become infected with bird flu in the near future are close to zero. Simply put, the virus simply does not currently have the appropriate biological tools to “easily invade” the human body, let alone circulate in the population. We have a completely different physiology than birds and other animals that are infected with HPAI, the online publication points out.
Now the bad news. Viruses like bird flu “evolve quickly and unpredictably.” They can not only mutate, but also replace entire sections of their genome with parts of other viruses, creating a kind of “Frankenstein”. Under certain conditions, as a result of this evolution, HPAI will have the tools to spread more widely among mammals, and its next iterations will become more dangerous to humans. Scientists are now “in a hurry” to try to determine what these conditions might be, writes Vox.
The Deadly Spread of Mutant Virus: How to Protect Yourself
But it’s too early to rejoice
“Every time it’s a little bit like Russian Roulette. You spin the drum a lot and at some point the disease will start spreading among people,” health expert Ashish Jha , who led the Biden administration’s Covid-19 response, told Politico .
Yes, on the one hand, a number of vaccines against HPAI have already been developed and approved for use. On the other hand, they are not very effective – the risk of contracting bird flu is reduced after vaccination by only 45%, says Dr. Luciana Bormio, a former employee of the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) . “I’m not so confident [ about these vaccines—ed. ],” she shared with Politico.
The overall picture now looks something like this: HPAI “continues to mutate.” And even more broadly, says Stacey Schultz-Cherry, a zoonotic influenza expert at Memphis Children’s Research Hospital, “We think we should expect cases that we never thought of before. “When diseases move from one animal species to another, there will be more,” Politico summarizes.
Read more: https://healthcust.com/
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