#Hpay

[kedreeva]

Please please please PLEASE keep your cats indoors right now. H5N1 (HPAI, highly pathogenic avian influenza) is zoonotic to cats, and it is just as deadly for them. Additionally, if you have a way to keep your shoes away from your cat(s), or sanitize them after being out in the world (bleach footbath for example), a little biosecurity wouldn't hurt.

A sanctuary in Washington just lost 20 of their rescue big cats to this virus. It is not getting less dangerous for your cats this year than it was last.

It has ALWAYS been dangerous to let house cats free roam without supervision, but it's becoming dangerous right now to be taking them on leashes if they will have access to ground birds have recently been on, or water they have accessed. Catios might be okay, if they're covered and well-screened, but I would take a moment to subscribe to your local state ag department's email or phone alerts for HPAI in your area, and react accordingly even for covered outdoor areas.

Keep the Kitties Safe!

[cathartidae]

so, many of you have probably seen news about one of the first recorded severe case of HPAI (avian flu) in humans.

a lot of you who follow me are birders or inatters or adjacent. hence, a lot of you guys have birdfeeders.

from a rehab worker of almost 3 years: Disinfect your goddamn feeders. not only for HPAI but other diseases, such as avian pox, and for the safety of the birds

and of course, heres how!

now here at rehab we use rescue to disinfect, which is a big ol fancy thing that looks like this

for all our stuff. it's about 1-2tbsp rescue per 32oz water. however, most of you guys cant get a hold of it. so, heres some other things suggested by friends & coworkers that will work just as well

-diluted hydrogen peroxide

-bleach (diluted)

etc. in addition, it's best to use the hottest water you can handle in order to kill off more viruses (our industrial washer does up to 200°F, but whatever you can works just as well.)

the most important thing here is to USE GLOVES!!! PLEASE. pair of gloves to wash it and preferably when youre rinsing it use a DIFFERENT pair of gloves so it doesnt get dirty again.

lastly, if youre seeing visibly uninjured dead birds in your yard, lethargic birds at your feeder, red discolouration or growths on exposed skin, blood on your feeder, or anything else you might deem unusual, take down your feeder. the birds will get food elsewhere i promise, just leave it down for two weeks at least and sterilize it using any of the steps above.

also. please dont hand feed birds. yes even ducks. please please ignore what you see on instagram, it only creates more work for rehabbers. this includes trying to camouflage yourself and feed the birds from your hand when they dont know youre a person. it only hurts you and the birds, and yes this includes hummingbirds. do not try and feed birds off of yourself directly. please. thank you

be safe, clean your feeders, and happy birding!

in addition, below is an approximate of the procedure we use at my work to prevent outbreaks in our residents/patients.

changing aprons between birds, esp for personable birds (assimilated to people, like to fly onto you), switch gloves between birds, between touching hoses, etc. spray or dip + scrape shoes into rescue/accel solution before entering enclosures & or buildings. daily mopping w rescue solution, all dishes are hand washed with soap and hot water, then sent into an industrial washer @ 200°F.

[hedgepay]

Wishing you a harmonious Mid-Autumn Festival filled with love and happiness! 🌕🥮 #MidAutumn #HedgePay

[covid-safer-hotties]

Source

[fox-bright]

Minor H5N1 Note (We really gotta be better about the math than this)

Classically, H5N1 has a 56-53% lethality in humans.

This percentage is because the only people who were being tested for it were already very sick. It is really likely that people have been infected, had a sniffle and a sore throat for a week, and then gone about their lives and never known they hosted the virus for a while. As with covid's ultimate lethality of about 1-2% of infected people, when compared with the 30% of the early pandemic, an actual flu pandemic situation would almost certainly have a lower lethality than we currently have the numbers for.

The bird flu is serious and we need to treat it as such. But when I see people running around all chigginlil saying that a human-to-human, airborne HPAI-H5N1 pandemic means we'd lose 50% of humanity, and it would mean "the collapse of civilization," it makes me wonder if other countries aren't right about the state of US education. EVEN IF the virus retained its high lethality, in order to have 50% of the human population die of it, one hundred percent of humanity would have to be infected. Every single person on the fucking planet. That is profoundly not how infections work. A high death rate makes people avoid each other, and thus avoid infection.

Even during the 1918-1921 HPAI pandemic, incorrectly and quite rudely called the "Spanish Flu," only about thirty percent of humanity was infected. Tens of millions of people died, it destabilized governments and upturned WWI. It was not a little deal. But neither did it mean the end of the fucking world, so people who are saying H5N1 will, need to knock it the fuck off!

Panicking now will make you useless when it matters.

And falling for misinfo makes you, like a plague rat, more likely to be the vector by which others die.

[disasterhimbo]

I’m not sure if anyone’s noticed, but if you’re wondering why I often go days without posting anything recently, it’s the long covid. Sometimes I’m too tired to even use my phone in bed.

Wear a respirator (KN95 or better, N95s tend to seal better but it depends on your face shape).

There’s a 10% chance of long covid every time you get infected, 59% of transmission is asymptomatic, you can get it outside (I did), and this shit sucks ass. Also, there’s gonna be a bird flu pandemic soon too if there isn’t already.

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

Infectious disease, captive animals, and the Endangered Species Act

There's been a really interesting development in how the Endangered Species Act relates to captive animals in the United States. I picked up on it last fall and spent most of the early part of this year writing a paper about what happened and what implications it might have in the future - but what I didn't expect was to proved right within a month!

Basically, two different lower court judges have ruled recently that exposing captive endangered animals to an increased risk of infectious disease is a violation of the Endangered Species Act. They don’t actually have to get sick - just the fact that the risk wasn’t prevented qualifies. This has super huge implications for zoos and sanctuaries and anywhere else with an endangered species collection. Both lawsuits (one about a lemur, and one about some of the tiger king lions) resulted in major consequences: the lemurs were seized, and since the lions had already been removed prior to that lawsuit, the guy involved got hit with major penalties and prohibitions for the future.

Where I think this potentially creates the most immediate issue is, of course, SARS-CoV-2. Most zoological facilities are ending their requirements for staff to mask and socially distance around susceptible species (and holy heck, I was not aware how many species can get sick from it). This is especially a huge concern for big cats, since they seem to be the most at risk. The ESA lawsuit from 2020, against Jeff Lowe for his treatment of lion cubs, specifically notes that it was a violation for him to not follow “generally accepted” risk mitigation procedures, specifically, not masking and not distancing. So does that mean that zoos and sanctuaries that are having staff stop masking around tigers and lions and snow leopards are violating the ESA? We don’t know for sure, but it’s entirely possible.

The reason we don’t know is that the scope of the ESA is being changed by the interpretation of the courts. Rather than getting amendments passed, or having FWS choose to consider certain things violations, these judges are basically ruling on what they see as a violation of their understanding of the law. And those precedents can have some pretty serious impacts. Other judges aren’t required to rule the same way on similar topics (as long as they’re not in the same district, and a lower court, than the original ruling) but they often take previous precedents on the topic into pretty serious consideration. So for example, the argument that not masking around the lions was based on a precedent from the previous case, where it was ruled that having a lemur living in a situation that made it more likely to get sick was also a violation. So in the next case, courts could choose to agree with the lion and lemur precedents - or not - and we don’t know for sure until it’s litigated. Sigh.

But here’s the thing: there’s plenty of other zoonotic diseases that captive animals have to be protected from. I wrote my paper originally about SARS-CoV-2, but noted at the end that “While SARS-CoV-2 was the zoonotic disease risk during the [lion] court case, it is important to recognize that the ESA violations identified by the courts in that lawsuit and in [the lemur court case] were on the topic of increased or unmitigated disease risk more generally. This new scope of the ESA captive take provision may be relevant to other circulating zoonotic pathogens; for instance, the H5N1 strain of avian influenza has recently proven to be fatal to tigers, mustelids, and some marine mammal species.” I realized after publication that it could be argued that EEHV - the really deadly elephant hemorrhagic herpes virus - might also fall under the scope of these rulings.

And surprise! A couple days ago, it made the news that the Noah’s Ark Animal Sanctuary in Georgia was told to change their practices or be sued for violating the ESA. Some of the allegations? That the facility “failed to prevent tigers and a lion from exposure to the potentially deadly Avian Influenza virus.” I expected to see additional claims in ESA lawsuits about infectious disease risk - I just didn’t expect to see them so quickly after I published a big project warning about the possibility.

I don’t have a sense of where this issue will continue to go from here, as each additional court decisions changes how the precedent might have impacts. But I do think it’s going to be important to pay attention to, and might have pretty big impacts on how facilities handle zoonotic disease moving forwards.

A link to the full 13-page paper on the legal precedents - and my concerns about the impact of ending SARS-CoV-2 precautions around endangered animals - is below.

[rikaklassen]

Viral transmission through eyes is confirmed

So, not only dairy workers are coming down with severe conjunctivitis (pink eye), the ferret study confirms ocular transmission.

Better stock up on prescription snorkeling goggles (if you need glasses and cannot wear contact lenses) and firefighting goggles for smoke jumpers.

If you want to help me buy equipment to keep bestie safe from COVID, climate-induced wildfires and the bird flu, here is her PayPal: paypal.me/bglamours.

[grrlscientist]

H5N1 Avian Influenza Detected In New York City’s Wild Birds🪶 | Icahn School of Medicine, BioBus & the WildBirdFund, published by Journal of Virology

by @GrrlScientist 🦠 🔬 🛟 🧪

[quixoticanarchy]

“We plan for every agricultural health emergency, but all of our red teaming missed this” scenario: an agricultural outbreak that potentially imperils public health and leaves cows sick but mostly still standing, says David Stiefel, a former national security policy analyst for the USDA. With continued spread amongst cows, or to another “mixing-vessel” species like pigs, the virus “could mix and match, then you get a whole new genetic constellation,” says Jürgen Richt, regents and university distinguished professor at Kansas State University. Experts are hesitant to speculate about what could happen if the virus were to begin more widely infecting humans, for fear of spreading panic, but the toll could, in the worst case, dwarf that of COVID-19. If the virus “infects a person infected with a human flu strain, and something comes out that is reassorted and adapted to humans? I don’t even want to imagine,” Richt says. “Not good.” The Institute for Disease Modeling, a research institute within the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has estimated that a global flu pandemic could kill close to 33 million people within six months.

--

This should be a story of heroism, cooperation, and an all-hands effort to defeat a wily virus that many scientists warn could mutate into a pandemic threat. Instead, it is a story of intimidation and obfuscation. The vets who sounded the alarm have been silenced, some even fired, and won’t discuss their experiences on the record for fear of reprisals. And the federal agency that was supposed to help thwart the virus instead has allowed for an unspoken “don’t test, don’t tell” policy among dairy farmers. The USDA’s inaction, critics say, is attributable to its dual—and sometimes conflicting—mandates. It is responsible for the health and safety of the nation’s food animals, but it’s also in charge of promoting and protecting America’s $174.2 billion agriculture trade. And sick cows, with documented cases of a virus never before seen in cattle herds, could be very bad for business.

--

And H5N1 was not in the corporate playbook. Dairy farmers, afraid their cows would be quarantined or that they would not be able to sell their milk, simply opted not to test. Some forced veterinarians off their property. “Everyone is so scared shitless. That is what is going on in the background,” says the Western-state veterinarian. Meanwhile, the USDA was sitting on details about infected farms. Researchers rely on the international data-sharing platform GISAID to track the spread of worrisome viruses, and the USDA’s H5N1 submissions have been both late and frustratingly light on detail. The CDC submits H5N1 sequences and metadata within eight days. Countries like Vietnam and Cambodia move even faster. But the USDA has been sharing the genetic sequences of H5N1 samples an average of 24 days after collection, and those submissions don’t say on what date, or even in which state, each sample was collected. Only later, usually after three to six weeks, does the agency provide that additional information. As a result, the USDA’s data is effectively useless for monitoring in real time how the virus is mutating. “Why can the US CDC provide actionable information while the USDA cannot?” asks a GISAID staffer. “The withholding of such data by other nations would most certainly have triggered political outrage at the highest level in the US.”

[kedreeva]

Sometimes FB is okay

[nicolagriffith]

H5N1 Bird Flu updates

The latest news on H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza (bird flu) is a mix of good and bad. The bad: it transmits between ferrets (a good model for humans) and it is deadly. The good: some antivirals work well.

This a good new/bad news situation. The good news—excellent, actually—is that the Missouri case that might have been human-to-human transmission very probably was not. For one, the health care contacts were not infected with H5N1, and for another, the household contact was very likely infected at exactly the same time as the index patient and therefore exposed to the original source of the…

[plumbits]

i'm too tired to write a fully informational post right now, but as we're seeing more and more cases of H5N1 on the rise (in animals and humans): if you work closely with any species that have high potential to be infected, PLEASE wear proper PPE and take precautions when you get home (thorough hand washing, changing clothes when you get home from work, not wearing your work shoes inside).

as for the general public, if you come upon an injured or sick bird and can't find anyone who will take it, aside from very large hospitals, it's because of H5N1. during surges of the virus (like we're seeing now in the western US), rehabbers have to limit what they take in because of how dangerous the virus is to the other animals in their care and also in humans. a lot of rehabbers are home-based and only have themselves or a few other people to help them take on cases, and it's more than reasonable to not want to expose themselves, their animals, or their families to this virus.

as far as i know from the research being published, we haven't seen any human-human transmission of H5N1 yet, which is GREAT. we are seeing cases in humans from people who have interacted with wild birds, cattle, and swine*. H5N1 is also particularly deadly for house cats, especially those fed on a raw diet. all the more reason to keep your cats indoors and not feed them raw.

*people as in those who work on farms or those who are involved in culling infected flocks of birds.

i'm happy to answer any questions to the best of my ability, although i am NOT an epidemiologist.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Reference saved in our archive

"Drinking From a Fire Hose: Are We Drowning?" Dr. Osterholm and Chris Dall discuss recent actions taken by the Trump administration, most notably the decision to leave the World Health Organization. Dr. Osterholm also shares his thoughts on the developing H5N1 crisis and provides an update on respiratory virus transmission in the U.S. and around the world.

[fox-bright]

So the info is FINALLY out about the poor kid in Canada with H5N1.

She is thirteen, with a history of mild asthma and was overweight. She "presented to an emergency department in British Columbia with a 2-day history of conjunctivitis in both eyes and a 1-day history of fever. She was discharged home without treatment, but cough, vomiting, and diarrhea then developed, and she returned to the emergency department on November 7 in respiratory distress with hemodynamic instability. On November 8, she was transferred, while receiving bilevel positive airway pressure, to the pediatric intensive care unit at British Columbia Children’s Hospital with respiratory failure, pneumonia in the left lower lobe, acute kidney injury, thrombocytopenia, and leukopenia."

They threw everything at this kid. Intensive respiratory support (was intubated and put on ECMO), three different antivirals (oseltamavir, amantadine, baloxavir), renal replacement therapy as her kidneys failed, plasma exchanges every day for three days (in an attempt to lower the concentration of cytokines in her blood and prevent/lessen the storm). "No evidence of reduced susceptibility to any of the three antiviral agents used in treatment was observed" in samples which were cultured--and honestly, I'm not sufficiently-educated to understand what that means in this case. The drugs we have aren't any weaker against it, and it still took all three? Or did they just hit her with everything because it's Canada, she is a child, and this shit is scary? But what it sounds like to me is "the drugs we have are as strong against H5N1 as they were ever going to be, and it's not enough."

"It is notable that lower-respiratory specimens consistently yielded lower Ct values than upper-respiratory specimens, a finding that suggested higher viral levels in the lower-respiratory tract." So, strong samples from her lungs, weaker samples from throat and sinuses. Nnnnot great.

Notable, but not surprising, is that the virus in her body showed the HA mutation which makes it more adapted to humans. In the serious New Orleans case with a similar mutation, the sick birds he was exposed to didn't show it, meaning it happened inside his body; in this case we don't know where the exposure was, just that it was the same virus type as was present in local birds, but it's probable that it also happened after she was sickened rather than before.

Link to paper below:

[canisvesperus]

Raw milkers are cooked (no pun intended).