Bird flu has now jumped to cows - and their milk. Could humans be next?
Bird flu has now jumped to cows - and their milk. Could humans be next?
Avian flu is infecting cows across the US via cow-to-cow transmission. Here's what you need to know about the bird flu spread.
A strain of bird flu known as H5N1 or highly pathogenic avian influenza has made a worrying leap to cattle herds across the US over the past month. This development has sparked "enormous concern" among health experts, including the World Health Organization's (WHO) chief scientist, who warned of the virus' "extremely high" mortality rate in humans.
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Feels pretty cool to know the future before it happens, less cool to know it'll be horrible though.
To be fair, avian flu jumping to humans happens constantly. It's just that this strain is particularly bad.
Avian flu does regularly jump to humans yes, but usually it’s directly from the birds. The big risk this time is the fact that it’s already spreading between mammals meaning that it’s more likely for it to mutate to allow for human to human transmission.
And we're still drinking cow juice, because who knows, maybe it goes away
It's not going to magically go away just if people stop drinking milk. That's not how things work.
It would take away breeding ground for human transmittable mutations. With literally billions of animals, mainly in filthy conditions, we just keep rolling the dice every day for a strain that starts a pandemic. We can either try to abolish factory farming, or just hope that the next pandemic won't be much worse than covid.
Doing that tomorrow would not stop this virus from making the jump to humans at this point. If that was the point, it was poorly made.
This one isn't human to human transmittable. It jumped to one human, but can't infect other humans from there, so unless it mutates in a bad way it won't start a pandemic. That's very unlikely with one infection, but there will be more if it stays on animal farms.