To understand how the bird flu got out of hand, KFF Health News interviewed nearly 70 government officials, farmers and farmworkers, and researchers with expertise in virology, pandemics, veterinary medicine, and more.
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Virologists around the world said they were flabbergasted by how poorly the United States was tracking the situation. “You are surrounded by highly pathogenic viruses in the wild and in farm animals,” said Marion Koopmans, head of virology at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands. “If three months from now we are at the start of the pandemic, it is nobody’s surprise.”
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As President-elect Donald Trump comes into office in January, farmworkers may be even less protected. Trump’s pledge of mass deportations will have repercussions whether they happen or not, said Tania Pacheco-Werner, director of the Central Valley Health Policy Institute in California.
Many dairy and poultry workers are living in the U.S. without authorization or on temporary visas linked to their employers. Such precarity made people less willing to see doctors about covid symptoms or complain about unsafe working conditions in 2020. Pacheco-Werner said, “Mass deportation is an astronomical challenge for public health.”
So we have a stockpile of vaccines we’re not using on farmworkers – which would be a prophylactic measure that could head off a pandemic – because they’re worth less than cattle.
At least nothing was learned from covid.
based on the data we have now, the expected value of “pandemics per Trump presidency” is 1. so the null hypothesis is that we should expect another pandemic sometime in the next 4 years.
4 years from now, the best-case scenario is that we can revise that estimate downwards to 0.5 pandemics per Trump presidency.
I’m…not terribly optimistic about that. both because of the gutting of infectious-disease public health under White House Brainworms Czar RFK Jr, but also the chilling effect that the article mentions on immigrants, especially migrant farmworkers, who are the most likely vector for a strain of H5N1 to develop human-to-human transmission capability.
There’s also mpox, so I predict 2 pandemics this time.
“How could the US fuck this up?”
Gee, I wonder.
country where half the population thinks that exposing yourself to more viruses with zero protection will make you healthier.
At least they’ll be dumb enough that they’ll believe it when Trump gets blamed for it… I wait, that won’t happen, he’ll never leave office.
Wheeeeeeeeeee!
Raw milk has its risks, that should be addressed before consumption… but an alternative of separated reformulated recombined “milk”, is not exactly great either.
Probiotics should be sold at pharmacies, and should be cheaper.
