This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca!
This week is the fifth anniversary of the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. I mean, depending upon when you prefer to mark it, considering it was, of course, already circulating in late 2019, and the World Health Organization coined the name “COVID-19” on February 11, 2020, and they didn’t officially declare it a pandemic until March 11, 2020, but I think I put it on my calendar for this week because it’s the point where my friends and I saw the writing on the wall and started stocking up on toilet paper and learning how to make sourdough. Because I may not be an early adopter when it comes to shiny new tech toys but I AM when it comes to preparing for high likelihood emergencies, as do all the cool kids.
With that in mind, let’s talk about bird flu!
As I’m sure you all know by now, BirdFlu first appeared in 2006, at which point it was widely considered a solid bop that is only forgotten today because we learned that MIA is completely bonkers. Wait, sorry, wrong BirdFlu. I actually want to talk about “avian influenza,” which would be a really funny title for a cover of BirdFlu, in my opinion.
Anyway, the actual virus that is avian influenza has been documented since the late 19th century. The virus’s happy place is always in wild waterfowl, like ducks and swans, where it spreads easily without necessarily killing the host. But when those wild birds start hanging out with the domestic birds that we like to eat, there’s trouble. Some strains are very damaging to species like chickens, including killing them and spreading through flocks. If that were the end of the story, that would already be pretty bad because chickens are, for better or worse, a huge part of our food supply. We’re already seeing the impact of the current bird flu outbreak: I was at Costco the other day and they had hired a security guard to stand next to the eggs. A security guard! For eggs! I’d expect something like that at a Texas IVF facility but Costco?
Unfortunately for us, though, rising egg and chicken costs aren’t the worst case scenario when it comes to bird flu. For a long time, no strain seemed to cause any illness in humans, but in 1997, the subtype H5N1 infected at least 18 people, of whom six died. This was unusual because there are a number of differences between avian influenza and human influenza, which mean it’s hard for the avian version to gain a foothold in a human body. But clearly, some mutation had happened in that strain that led to it being harmful to people.
From then up until now, that’s where the strain has more or less remained: occasionally there are outbreaks, and humans who spend a lot of time around dead and diseased birds like farm workers sometimes contract it, and when they do, it tends to be pretty serious, with a mortality rate that seemed to fall between 43 to 77%. Those are scary numbers but it’s hard to say how many asymptomatic or unreported cases have been missed.
It also becomes less scary when you know that for the vast majority of cases, the people who got the virus had direct contact with the infected birds, which is relatively few people: there have been fewer than 1,000 cases in humans detected since 2003. When the transmission only goes from animal to human, it’s pretty simple to protect yourself: avoid that animal. It also becomes simple for governments to stop outbreaks: incentivize farmers to report sick and dead animals as quickly as possible, and enact a strict quarantine of the remaining animals.
That’s what the US has done in the past: chicken farmers are encouraged to immediately report a sick or dead animal, because if it has avian influenza, the government comes in, kills the rest of the flock, and pays the farmer for every chicken they had to cull. The farmer does NOT get paid for any chickens that died before they alerted the government. It’s a beautiful and simple way to socially engineer a commercial enterprise into protecting the greater good.
Because again: not only does an outbreak of avian influenza mean fewer eggs and chickens for consumers, but as we’ve seen very clearly with COVID-19, if you just let a virus circulate around a population unchecked, that virus will mutate. And we already know that H5N1 can infect humans. The next stage–the one that leads to another pandemic–is that virus mutating again to pass between humans. Because it’s pretty easy to avoid a chicken. It’s much harder to avoid a human. And every time it infects a human, the chance increases that it will adapt to survive just a little bit longer in that human.
The risks also increase every time bird flu is found in another species that is a little more closely related to humans. For instance, Maryn McKenna in the New York Times points out that last year, H5N1 was found in cows for the first time, and while it’s less severe in cows compared to birds, it provides the virus a better chance to adapt to our respiratory systems. And as she points out, there is no comparable program to fully reimburse dairy farmers for dead and infected cows like there is for poultry, meaning they have no incentive to report the virus when it’s found in their herd. If anything, they’re worried that reporting it will make the public scared to buy meat or milk from them, so they just stay quiet and deal with the lower milk production. McKenna points out that the government’s response to this threat is a “slow motion disaster.”
That’s why the WHO and CDC have been monitoring H5N1 so closely for the past 25 years, and why it’s devastating that Trump and Elon Musk are gutting the CDC. They’ve obliterated teams like the Epidemic Intelligence Service, which for 73 years has been the group doing hands on detective work to discover, study, and respond to public health crises like Legionnaires disease, West Nile virus, and anthrax. Trump’s response to COVID-19 was horrific enough, and he did that, he screwed up and let thousands of Americans die needlessly, with a CDC and pandemic response team that, while crippled by him and fellow Republicans, was at least still there in some form. Now there’s nobody even left to answer the phones.
So! What do we do?
Well, first off, like I say in every video about a potential emerging epidemic, don’t panic. As I’ve said many times in the past few months, they want you to panic. They want you to feel overwhelmed.
Second of all, there ARE still experts out there trying to help. Keep an eye on other countries’ health organizations: the World Health Organization and the Public Health Agency of Canada are still tracking the disease’s progress. There are also individuals: I’m a big fan of Angie Rasmussen, Maryn Mckenna, and Katelyn Jetelina, just to name two. Find the experts who are active on social media and follow them.
Third, avoid interacting with dead and sick birds, wild or otherwise. Right now experts suggest that the risk to songbirds is minimal, so you can leave your clean bird feeders up for the moment, but if you see a dead bird, do not touch it. Report it to your local animal control agency, and keep tabs on their alerts in case an outbreak means you should remove your feeder.
Fourth, if you must interact with birds, like for your job, practice good sanitation. Wash your hands. Don’t touch your face. Avoid poop and dead animals. Keep wild birds away from your flocks.
Fifth, get your flu vaccine. The (human) flu vaccine will not only decrease your chances of catching or dying from human influenza, but it will also stop you from starting the pandemic by mixing viruses up in your body so they can learn from each other and murder the planet.
Sixth, if you must consume eggs and milk, make sure they’re pasteurized! It kills influenza. If you must eat meat, make sure you cook it thoroughly! That also kills influenza. Sorry, raw chicken nuggie enthusiasts.
Finally, if a pandemic does happen, well, at least we have recent experience on how to deal with it. Honestly, you should still be masking in public anyway–everyone I know is sick right now, with COVID or flu. I continue to not be sick and I do not think that it’s a coincidence. Wearing a mask is great: in the grocery store, on the subway, at the movies, anywhere someone’s disgusting germs are being coughed into my space. And I wash my hands early and often, and avoid touching my face. Foolproof? Nope: I’ve had two colds since 2019. They both sucked. But neither was flu, COVID, or RSV, and all I gave up was a day or two of work each time. Germ theory: turns out it’s real!
