Experts say current US outbreak is unlikely to end without intervention with further mutation of virus likely

Summary

A new H5N1 bird flu variant has become “endemic in cows,” with cases detected in Nevada and Arizona, raising concerns about human transmission.

Experts warn that without intervention, the outbreak will continue, but Trump has cut CDC staff and halted flu vaccination campaigns.

The virus’s spread coincides with a severe flu season, increasing the risk of mutation.

The administration has also stopped sharing flu data with the WHO and shifted its containment strategy away from culling infected poultry, raising fears of inadequate response.

  • NSRXN
    5•12 hours ago

    We currently grow enough plants to feed 15B people, but we feed that to the animals instead.

    a lot of the plant matter fed to animals is parts of plants we can’t or won’t eat.

    and a lot of the land used isn’t crop land, but grazing land

    and they’re is no reason to believe the land would ever be rewilded.

    • @[email protected]English
      10•11 hours ago

      It’s mostly corn.

      Granted, it’s not processed in a way to be fit for human consumption.

      But still, most of it is corn. Some of it is corn cobs and stalks but most of it is kernels.

      Outside of that, other grains are very common. Oats for example.

      So, they are right. Raising plants to feed animals so we can eat the animals is less efficient than raising plants for us to eat. Especially in regards to cattle. Which is one of the most inefficient things in the US food system. The only reason it’s so cheap is because of subsidation, both of the cattle and the corn that’s grown to feed them.

      And countries much larger than our own survive on rice and beans just fine. As queerminest eluded to in her comment.

      As far as local food, I have a co-op. So I buy local vegetables and fruits when I can.

      • NSRXN
        -2•11 hours ago

        Raising plants to feed animals so we can eat the animals is less efficient than raising plants for us to eat.

        if that were the situation, you might be right. but since we actually feed livestock mostly crop seconds and byproducts, it’s actually a conservation of resources in a lot of situations, with minimal competition with human food sources

        • @[email protected]
          6•10 hours ago

          1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics

          https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013

          we show that plant-based replacements for each of the major animal categories in the United States (beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs) can produce twofold to 20-fold more nutritionally similar food per unit cropland. Replacing all animal-based items with plant-based replacement diets can add enough food to feed 350 million additional people, more than the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food loss.

          https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1713820115

          • NSRXN
            -1•8 hours ago

            your shepon paper shows a great deal of spinach being fed to chickens. why would it be fed to chickens if it were suitable for human consumption? I don’t actually know, but my guess is that it is not suitable for human consumption, and that is why it is fed to chickens. that’s a conservation of resources. the potatoes fed to cattle are likely the same.

            this paper doesn’t discuss this discrepancy at all. I have to say I don’t find the analysis very compelling.

          • NSRXN
            -1•8 hours ago

            soybean cakes, which production can be considered as main driver or land-use, represent 4% of the global livestock feed intake.

            you clipped this out of the abstract, but it’s highly relevant to what I’ve been saying: this is a byproduct of pressing soybeans for oil. if we didn’t feed it to livestock, it would be industrial waste.

          • NSRXN
            0•8 hours ago

            do you have the full papers? I can’t really examine these claims from the links you provided.

      • NSRXN
        -2•11 hours ago

        beef cattle spend most of their life grazing.

        • @[email protected]
          5•10 hours ago

          Where they emit the most methane and still are given supplementary feed. There’s also not enough land to sustain a grazing only production system with the massive demand we have

          We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates

          […]

          Taken together, an exclusively grass-fed beef cattle herd would raise the United States’ total methane emissions by approximately 8%.

          https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401/pdf

          • NSRXN
            0•8 hours ago

            no one said they are exclusively grass fed, not that we should be doing that

      • NSRXN
        -1•11 hours ago

        it’s not mostly kernels. livestock are fed the entire plant, and the kernels are a slim minority of the weight.

        • @[email protected]
          2•5 hours ago

          Weight matters not even a little compared to the caloric content. If cows got more calories out of corn stalks than corn kernels, then they wouldn’t even finish growing the corn and would just feed them stalks. The fact you have to grow a corn stalk that weighs hundreds of times more than the kernels doesn’t mean the kernels aren’t what the farmers are after for livestock feed purposes. The stalk just gets tossed in for efficiency’s sake because the cows can also digest it.

          • NSRXN
            0•5 hours ago

            The stalk just gets tossed in for efficiency’s sake because the cows can also digest it.

            you literally don’t know anything about feeding cows. just stop.

          • NSRXN
            0•5 hours ago

            . If cows got more calories out of corn stalks than corn kernels, then they wouldn’t even finish growing the corn and would just feed them stalks.

            I don’t think so. they may get more calories from silage, but they prefer the kernels, which would help the feed go down easier.

            • @[email protected]
              2•4 hours ago

              You’re accusing me of not knowing how cows are fed when you’re inventing a world where farmers spend extra time growing crops to make it taste nicer to cows. Be real.

    • @[email protected]English
      6•11 hours ago

      Even just replacing 25-50% meat with plants in the US would have incredible outcomes for the people. I guarantee we would be a far healthier population. The cheap meat being served up to Americans is not good.

      • @[email protected]
        1•5 hours ago

        Maybe this is bias from 20ish years of not eating meat, but most of the time it just smells foul to me, like an overly sour smell that only goes away if you spice the fuck out of it. Beef and chicken are the main offenders for this for me.

    • @[email protected]
      1•10 hours ago

      Still results in overall reductions in arable-land usage. Even more than just eliminating 100% of food-waste

      we show that plant-based replacements for each of the major animal categories in the United States (beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs) can produce twofold to 20-fold more nutritionally similar food per unit cropland. Replacing all animal-based items with plant-based replacement diets can add enough food to feed 350 million additional people, more than the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food loss.

      https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1713820115

      Grazing usage isn’t free from harms either

      Livestock farmers often claim that their grazing systems “mimic nature”. If so, the mimicry is a crude caricature. A review of evidence from over 100 studies found that when livestock are removed from the land, the abundance and diversity of almost all groups of wild animals increases

      https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb

      • NSRXN
        1•8 hours ago

        in didn’t say it’s free from harms. I’m saying we aren’t using that land to grow crops.