Person is diagnosed with bird flu after being in contact with cows in Texas

Vegoon@feddit.de to World News@lemmy.world – 318 points –
Person is diagnosed with bird flu after being in contact with cows in Texas
apnews.com
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There are some dumb responses in this thread. Lots of misplaced vitriol at Texas and farmers.

You want to have people report this stuff? Don't act like dickheads when they do.

Stuff like this happens from time to time in agriculture. UK has issues with TB in dairy cows which requires them to cull herds. It's really shitty and unfortunate but this type of thing has happened for millenia.

It's better that they report it so we can address it and find ways to prevent it happening in the future.

And unless everyone is willing to go 100% vegan tomorrow, we need farmers, livestock, and the like to keep our meat and dairy supply flowing.

Edit:

I also want to point out that it doesn't seem like.they definitively determined it came from the cows but that he was "link" and "exposed" to infected cows.

"Genetic tests don’t suggest that the virus suddenly is spreading more easily or that it is causing more severe illness, Shah said. And current antiviral medications still seem to work, he added."

So this guy could have gotten it from the same bird the cows got it from as well. A dozen other people were tested and none came back positive.

All other cases we've seen have come from bird contact. So there is a reasonable chance this guy got it from an infected bird without realizing it.

Also, none of the cows have died (dunno if that's a good thing or bad thing).

And unless everyone is willing to go 100% vegan tomorrow

  • we do it until we get a new pandemic
  • we wait until climate change, 3°C from food production, destroys enough crops that agriculture collapses
  • we eat more of it to die sooner so we don't have to face the consequences of our actions.

And no, I don't belive 100% tommorow is the only way to avoid that, that was your wording. But it has to and will change.

And unless everyone is willing to go 100% vegan tomorrow, we need farmers

Safe to say vegans also need farmers. We just don’t need animal agriculture.

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Don't mess with Texas, also don't visit Texas or eat anything Texas produces.

Don't mess with Texas. Don't mess with anything Texas produces. Don't mess with things that have messed with Texas. Avoid Texas at all costs.

Don't mess with animals. This is not a Texas problem, outbreaks have been all over the world and the animal agriculture is the perfect breeding ground. The only question is where will it develop the human to human infection feature. When it happens you can only blame others if your state or country has no animal agriculture as it could happen anywhere.

I didn’t realise bird flu wasn’t transmitted between humans already tbh. I caught Swine flu (H1N1) from another human a decade or so ago.

It was already, but not from another mamal. Birds infecting individuals is not the problem, we kill a few millions (58 since 2022 in the states alone) birds to prevent the spread, a few hundred humans get sick, all is well. From mamal to another mamal is the problem, once it goes from human to human its over.

Good thing there's nothing astronomical happening in Texas next week that only happens once every decade or so in the US, which people might flock to Texas to stand in crowds to see before dispersing back home across the Southern US. 😅

The eclipse is happening in more places than Texas.

Right, but I think a lot of people in the Southwest are heading to Texas. Because driving another dozen hours makes a difference in the total trip time. I know I personally can't afford the time from AZ to go further north.

It's only got a 56% fatality rate, some of you will die but the economy must have it's workers pronto. I expect the COVID playbook will be used again, tell you it's droplets when it's airborne, push the vaccine as the solution and shove you back to work.

Buy toilet paper.

Yeah that's a good point actually how was that never a conspiracy theory? It's the most obvious one.

Covid was made up by Big Bog Role to sell more stock, no nanobots required

At least the housing crisis will be fixed

On the contrary, if another pandemic killed a bunch of people, many of their homes would be bought up by the same hungry corporations that created and perpetuate the housing crisis.

I suspect the point was that if there's more houses than people to live in them.... you do the math.

There's already more houses than people to live in them.....

Yeah but I don't feel like living in a burned down shell of a home in East Detroit.

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"Let's pack hundreds of animals together in a confined space, what's the worst that could happen?"

Whaaat? A disease stemming from our exploitation of animals?? Surely that is something new and never heard of before!

How is this vitrol adding to the discussion?

Maybe I'm wrong, but I see no problem in people sharing their reactions. It isn't necessary for every comment to advance a scholarly debate.

There is no discussion. This is going to happen again and again and people will suffer and die. Not as much and numerous as the exploited animals, but still too much.

I mean, people suffer and die from getting sick from eating produce, or from wheat or rice. I'm sure other non-animal foods too. Wasn't there deaths recently from eating cantaloupe.. and we get salmonella from wheat products.. and rice has that bacteria or something that can make you sick even if you cook it properly... There's no escaping food making us sick, even if we all went vegan.

The vast majority of those are caused by runoff contamination from animal agriculture, not from eating plants in general.

Even if you don't include farm workers urinating and defecating in the fields, or contamination from animal agriculture (a lot of North American farms don't farm animals along side their crops anymore) A lot of it is naturally on the plants or the grains. There's bacteria and viruses everywhere. I'm saying eliminating meat from your diet isn't going to stop us all getting sick. Birds, rodents, and bats and insects all still shit on our produce.

We were talking about diseases and pandemics. Which produce created a pandemic?

You were acting like the problem was eating meat, I was simply pointing out that wouldn't stop us getting sick from the food we eat.

So it would reduce the risk of antibiotic resistant diseases, the risk of the next zoonosis that turns into pandemic, the certainty that climate change will destroy agriculture, the risk of heart diseases and cancer but it will not eliminate the chance of a stomach flue so it is not worth perusing?

Always seemed kinda dumb to rear animals on agriculture. Why not cut out the middleman and eat the crops directly?

Many reasons but this could have been avoided if they culled the whole beef supply when it was first detected

genuine question, would you have signed to help with that?

Are you asking an ethical question or an employment one?

just asking if you'd volunteer to stand in blood, shit, and mud all day slashing throats. you just seem to suggest such a "solution" so readily.

So the same as a butcher, or were you disillusioned to them meeting the same fate regardless

However for a cull, slitting throats would take far too long. It’s not like we need them to be halal. For cows you would likely use poison feed (asphyxiation isn’t practical due to size) and then incinerate the bodies

For smaller animals heat suffocation has worked well, takes a few days but no extra work.

So you're against it on the basis that it's unpleasant.

That's not a logical position that's just an emotional one. Just because you don't like the answer doesn't mean that it isn't the correct answer. Also I don't think they need our help, they're perfectly capable of culling the animals on their own, since they already do, The cows are food stock after all.

you are so right, setting up these conditions all over the planet is the only logical way to feed a population, I'll try to be less hysterical.

Meat tastes good.

And it's a dense source of calories.

Plus, vitamin b12

You can get b12 elsewhere.

people rally against supplements without even realizing they inject B12 into the cows, which is kind of insane.

I did some googling before I commented. It doesn't have a significant caloric advantage. Triple tofu, but far less than nuts, and only a bit better than beans.

1 cup of beans can have a shit ton of salt increasing heart issues. Just be careful of how everything is prepared. No one source of food is a way to make a complete diet. For instance that 1 cup of beans can have more salt than 2 large fries from McDonald's.

How is that an argument.

You could also put salt on beef as well, if people prepare food inappropriately that isn't an indictment of the food itself, just the preparation of said food.

Never said it was an argument. Many people buy canned beans because they don't want to spend hours rehydrating and cooking them. (This time can be cut down using a pressure cooker and a few other methods) That doesn't change the fact that canned beans come with the salt and carbs.

Also since you are comparing to beef, beef has more than twice the protein per serving as common black beans. (Calories will be much higher in beef as well due to fat content). Which is why I said what I said originally, watch what you consume and how it prepared. A higher carb diet is what made America overweight to begin with, thankfully neither of these options have sugar in their raw forms

Surely it only contains what was put into it though. If the cow eats food then it must have metabolized that food. Then you eat the cow.

So basically cows are an inefficient way to turn grass into calories. But since there are other plant foods we can actually eat that isn't much of an argument.

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It sounds like they only have eye redness, for now. How long can we expect the transformation to take?

We need to nuke Texas from orbit...it's the only way to be sure we stop the spread.

"Batman accused of using drugs mule to solve monkey puzzle"

I wonder what all the headline could have said he’s been in contact with. His wife? Car? A BLT? 3 children in a trench coat?

Spitballin here, but maybe it'd even be called cow flu if it wasn't so bad for some rich people's business. That's probably just the cynicism talking, though.

The fact seems to be that many of these flu's are interspecies and the origin seems largely irrelevant. It's my understanding that covid-19 originated in pangolins, but "pangolin flu" didn't seem to stick, did it?

I'd be happy if someone with actual epidemiological knowledge could chime in here.

It's because they're infected with avian influenza and 'cow flu' doesn't exist afaik.

The pangolin transmission is still just a theory based on the fact that you’d have to eat way too much bat to infect yourself based on that.

The only certainty is that it was once transmitted by bats.

Influenza is a type of virus, completely unrelated to coronavirus. And COVID-19 originated in bats, not pangolins.