H5N1 Bird Flu Isn’t a Human Pandemic—Yet
www.scientificamerican.com
Americans don’t like being told what to do, and many don’t trust government. These stubborn attitudes might turn H5N1 bird flu into a pandemic

When H5N1 avian influenza started spreading among dairy cattle across the U.S. this year, regulators warned against consuming unpasteurized milk. What happened? Raw milk sales went up.

Distributors of this unsafe-for-human-consumption product deny H5N1—which has the potential to sicken millions of people—is a danger. Dairy farmers decline to allow disease detectives onto their properties.

  • @[email protected]
    9•5 months ago

    the more we try to us/them our problems, the shittier our problems get.

    I agree to a point, but we also have to recognize that with eg. COVID and now H5Nx preparedness, the conservative mindset is a huge issue and purely driven by politics that they themselves purposefully try to polarize, by eg. outright lying about the effects of vaccines or even whether the disease was a real one or just some sort of communist plot to sap and impurify their precious bodily fluids.

    I’m not sure how something like this can be solved, when there’s a huge segment of the population who not only doesn’t believe in basic science but sees attempts at teaching it as attacks against their “values” and will sometimes react with literal violence

    • Optional
      2•5 months ago

      The solution is going to be that those groups self-select for infectious death. Taking some good people with them.

      Its just so unnecessary.

      • @[email protected]
        3•5 months ago

        Yeah, a H5Nx pandemic will have a good chance of having a fatality rate of something in the range of 10% to 50%. It’d end society as we know it, and conservatives are generally the ones who are doing their damndest to prevent sensible action being taken now to help at least slow the jump to humans.

        If (or, more likely when) we do see a HPAI pandemic, we know who we can thank for it. It’ll likely kill hundreds of millions of people, but at least by refusing vaccinations due to idiotic reasons, conservatives will have a higher mortality than people with functioning brains.