It seems the closer it gets to election time, the more leftists attempt to create a brand new illness to try and usher in lockdowns 2.0. They’ve tried it with new strains of COVID, but it seems the vast majority of Americans aren’t taking the bait a second time. You know, “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me,” and all that.
That hasn’t stopped them from trying to utilize the strategy though. And it looks like they might be making some headway thanks to the hype building up around bird flu. A brand new report has come out that is ringing alarm bells everywhere concerning the evolution of the avian influenza virus, showing off a rather in-depth genome sequencing that reveals how the current strain of the illness is capable of multidirectional infections that stretch across species.
Still, human-to-human spreading of the virus is very low-risk. However, the evolution of the sickness does increase concern about how it could potentially, one day, move person-to-person.
“This is one of the first times that we are seeing evidence of efficient and sustained mammalian-to-mammalian transmission of highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1,” corresponding author of the study, Diego Diel, who also serves as the director of the Virology Laboratory at the Animal Health Diagnostic Center (AHDC) at Cornell University, went on to say.
via New Atlas:
Cornell scientists have uncovered more about the ‘spillover’ of the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPIA) H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b virus, which is characterized as a “significant increase in the intensity, frequency and geographic range” of the zoonotic disease and has killed hundreds of millions of wild and farmed birds since it took hold in 2021. It’s now reported in every state in the US, and every continent, except Australia and the rest of Oceania, has had outbreaks.
While it’s been observed that there has been likely transmission between mammals, the Cornell scientists have delivered evidence of this, with whole genomic sequencing clearly showing that the virus has passed between mammals, and not just in one direction as with many animal pathogens and hosts. On the plus side, the lab work did not turn up any evidence of any clade 2.3.4.4b mutations that would indicate it had worked out an easy path to jump to humans.
On that note, it can and has infected humans – HPAI, since it was first recorded in China in 1996, has infected just 889 people, however, it proved fatal in 463 of those cases. Yet infection so far is limited to contact with contaminated waste or cow milk, and despite it targeting the human respiratory system, there’s no evidence of airborne transmission yet.
“The concern is that potential mutations could arise that could lead adaptation to mammals, spillover into humans and potential efficient transmission in humans in the future,” Diel remarked.
Okay, I hope you’re all ready for some science-y stuff, because I’m about to try and share how this all works, and well, it’s a bit complicated.
So the team involved in the study performed an analysis of viral nucleic acid that was taken from milk, nasal swabs, whole blood, feces, urine, serum, and 608 tissue homogenate from dairy cows that were from nine different farms located throughout the country. What they found particularly scary was that there were otherwise healthy animals that were moved interstate were then able to pass the virus to cattle at their new farms, which means that trying to contain the spread of the disease is significantly more difficult than previous thought.
Now if this were to crossover to humans it means that even healthy people who didn’t show symptoms could potentially become carriers of the illness, leading to infections spreading like wildfire all over the country and eventually the globe. And with bird flu having an extremely high mortality rate, this is very bad news.
“Our epidemiological investigation combined with genome sequence and geographical dispersal analysis provides evidence of efficient intra- and inter-species transmission of HPAI H5N1 genotype B3.13,” the researchers pointed out. “Soon after apparently healthy lactating cattle were moved from Farm 1 to Farm 3, resident animals in Farm 3 developed clinical signs compatible with HPAI H5N1 providing evidence to suggest that non-clinical animals can spread the virus.”
This is concerning, given there is no way to ‘rapid test’ for the virus like there is for COVID-19; like for much of the pandemic, right now the go-to method is costly and time-consuming quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) testing.
“The bad news is that at present, there are currently no commercially available diagnostic tests to detect H5N1 specifically,” Ayoade Alakija, Special Envoy for the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator, said in a conversation with Al Jazeera in June. “Nucleic acid-based (molecular) tests are the current gold standard for the detection of influenza viruses, but they generally require lab infrastructure to support their use. And even when such infrastructure is available, it may not function fast enough.”
In this latest study, the team looked at the whole viral genome sequence in cows, birds, domestic cats and a raccoon, and the findings suggest H5N1 can spillover in more than just one direction (say, bird to mammal). The scientists believe that the birds infected – great-tailed grackles (Quiscalus mexicanus) and rock pigeons (Columbia livia) – most likely became infected not from other avian species but through environmental contamination or aerosols in the atmosphere through milking or cleaning on the dairy farms.
“It is a highly pathogenic strain,” Erin M. Sorrell, associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland said in his explanation of the situation. “It has the ability to replicate outside the traditional locations where low-pathogenic influenza does: the intestinal tract for poultry; the upper and lower respiratory tracts in humans. The virus becomes systemic in its infection.”
Another new study from scientists at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the Center for Computational Intelligence to Predict Health and Environmental Risks, known as CIPHER, found that this new strain of the bird flu is far better at getting around antibodies in its hosts, and yes that includes humans.
It looks like our second global pandemic could be starting to ramp up, ladies and gentlemen. Time to get prepared.