Change in focus and schedules

From now on I’m going to keep bird flu posts to every week or 10 days. There’s little I can do about any of it; none of my suggestions for appropriate precautions have changed; and there’s too much other stuff going on in the world that needs paying attention to.

So here are some snippets and then an overall assessment of where we’re at.

Another death from H5N1 in Cambodia, this time a two-year old boy. There’s no information on the clade. Some of Cambodia’s recent human cases have been linked to a new reassortant that includes internal genes from the newer 2.3.4.4b clade. The older 2.3.2.1c clade still circulates in Cambodian poultry, with sporadic infection reported in people.New Jersey Department of Health reports H5 avian flu cluster in cats. According to CIDRAP, the NJDH announced 28 February that H5 avian flu has been confirmed in a feral cat from Hunterdon County that had severe disease, including neurologic symptoms, and was humanely euthanized. Other cats at the same property were sick, and a second H5 infection was found in an indoor-outdoor cat. Clusters are Not Good.CIDRAP also reports on the WHO’s seasoal flu vaccine choices for the 25/26 season. The tl;dr version: they swap out the H3N2 components but keep the current 2009 H1N1 and influenza B strains the same. Different strains of eah are used in egg-based vaccines vs. cell culture-, recombinant protein- or nucleic acid-based vaccines. all the details are at the link.

So where do we stand? Well, if you consider that in any given year the underlying odds of some kind of viral pandemic hover around 2%, I think we are now approaching 10%, perhaps a little less.

Katelyn Jetalina, of Your Local Epidemiologist, suggests we’re at 8% probability—and that that will bump alarmingly higher when we see sustained transmission in pigs.

Image via YLE (Katelyn Jetelina) I hope she forgives me borrowing it in exchange for the link—her newsletters are very useful Go subscribe.

Sporadic pig infections are already happening, of course, and I’ve already explained why that is so worrisome. But here’s the refresher:

Pigs are an ideal recombination chamber for bird flu and human flu because the cell membranes in pig airways offer a particularly convenient route for the cell to be infected by both kinds of virus at the same time. (Human infection from animal sources seems so far to be via fomites—touching contaminated things.)If this happens at the same time, it leads to a hugely increased risk of recombinationRecombination is how viruses randomly mutate, increasing the possibility of finding a way to lead to human-to-human transmission via respiratory droplets—as human flu does now

And because I think there’s actually far more of this going on right now than is being reported due to lack of general and specific testing, and because of the lackadaisical vaccination of both animals and people, I’d put the risk a little higher than YLE does.

There again, as I’ve made clear many times, I’m not a professional; she is. Further, I freely admit I’m possibly using interest in bird flu and our government’s (lack of) response to it as a) a proxy for and b) to sublimate my anger and worry about the rest of the world.

That anger and worry and sheer sadness surfaced strongly on Friday when I watched the appalling display of bullying, bad manners, and brutal breakage of a world order that has helped to at least partially protect billions of people from the worst excesses of autocrats and dictators and to rein-in the revanchist tendencies of leaders such as Putin.

But because the worry has now burst its banks and overrun my best efforts to channel it productively, as it has now declared itself in no uncertain terms, it’s time to start facing it squarely and talking about it. Hence the new bird-flu reports schedule.

Stay safe, everyone—at least safe from foolish accidents. I suspect there’s a time coming when some of us might have to choose very deliberately not to stay safe because what is required of us might not be possible from a place of safety. But that’s for another time, and possibly a more private venue.

Meanwhile, to brighten your Sunday here’s a picture of George who was getting a bit fed up of being constantly asked to strike poses with his face in profil and his claws partially extended so I can figure out how to turn my cat drawings into Early Medieval-style illustrations for my on-going Patreon project.