Call it “Revenge of the Birds.”
No one knows exactly how many birds are killed by outdoor cats in a year. But most estimates range from 1.4 to 3 billion in the United States alone. That is a lot of murder!
So it seems appropriate that this terrifying bird flu that’s going around is extremely fatal to cats. Sorry, cat people! We like the little fur balls too. But perhaps they should have realized that they can’t keep committing genocide on America’s avian population forever. At some point the birds were bound to seek vengeance.
And boy are they ever. From The Guardian:
Twenty exotic cats, including a Bengal tiger, four cougars, a lynx and four bobcats, have died after contracting bird flu at an animal sanctuary in Shelton, Washington. [...]
“Cats are particularly vulnerable to this virus, which can cause subtle initial symptoms but progress rapidly, often resulting in death within 24 hours due to pneumonia-like conditions,” the statement said, adding the center was under quarantine and would remain closed to the public until further notice.
The virus in question is a strain of highly pathogenic animal influenza (HPAI) called H5N1 that has been tearing through poultry and dairy herds in America, mostly in the West, and led to the recall of a brand of cat food produced by Northwest Naturals in Portland after an indoor cat died from eating it.
This particular bird flu strain reportedly has a fatality rate of around 67 percent in cats, so, you know, yikes.
Now, bird flu is not as uncommon in the United States as you might think based on recent media coverage. Strains of it circulate through certain animal populations every year. Usually the outbreaks are pretty limited, and so unless you work for the Centers for Disease Control or something, you probably never know. When was the last time you read about lots of humans keeling over from eating poultry?
But two aspects of this outbreak are what brought it to our attention.
One, the flu has jumped to a small number of humans. Most of the symptoms have been limited to trouble breathing and pink eye, both of which can also be caused by a busy weekend in Vegas and clear up quickly.
The big outbreak so far is the 61 cases that have been reported in humans in Louisiana. Only one case has become critically ill enough to need hospitalization.
Nonetheless, the CDC has been pushing for more workers in America’s agricultural industry to get this year’s flu vaccine, which would offer some protection against H5N1. Except — and you’ll never guess this unless you read Wonkette yesterday — Louisiana has proscribed itself and its health officials from even mentioning “flu shot.” So that’s on-brand!
Some experts are also reportedly really worried that we may be looking at our next pandemic.
The second reason we are eyeing this bird flu outbreak with caution is that the United States is about to inaugurate convicted felon Donald Trump as president, and we know what kind of fuck-ups can happen when that bag of medical waste and his lickspittles are in charge of the government. After all, they were in charge a few years ago, and now every time we have the sniffles, our first thought is, Crap, we hope we don’t have a cold coming on, and our second thought is, Crap, have the COVID tests we keep under the sink in the bathroom expired yet?
Are we excited for Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to tell us that we can avoid the bird flu by sticking to a diet of the piquant juices we extract from a beached whale carcass? Who wouldn’t be excited for that?
We’re not really exaggerating either. Remember when we said bird flu has been tearing through dairy herds? Turns out that drinking raw milk, which is one of RFK Jr.’s keys to good health, is a great way to contract bird flu. Which, again, is why the CDC is trying to get America’s agricultural workers inoculated.
RFK Jr., meanwhile, is asking a raw milk advocate whose products were recalled for containing bird flu to apply for a job in the Trump administration, as an advisor on raw milk policy to the Food and Drug Administration:
Mr. Kennedy is understood to have asked Mr McAfee to apply for the role, despite his products being recalled 13 times since 2006 for containing bird flu and other pathogens.
The Fresno-based entrepreneur runs Raw Farm, a dairy producer that specialises in milk that has not been pasteurised.
Any raw milk policy that isn’t There is a reason pasteurization was invented and it was not that Louis Pasteur owned stock in Pfizer can probably be safely ignored, but somehow we don’t think that’s the policy we’re going to get from the Trump administration.
But let us end on a hopeful note, which is that scientists are hard at work studying bird shit to see if they can come up with a way of stopping bird flu. No, really.
CNN has a whole story about a team of scientists from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital who have spent decades collecting bird poop at a particular spot in New Jersey that is popular with a couple of dozen breeds of migrating birds:
By analyzing surveillance data like the kind collected by Webby and his team, the Penn team found that the H5N1 outbreak that began in 2021 in North America was driven by eight separate introductions of the virus by wild, migrating waterfowl and shorebirds along the Atlantic and Pacific flyways….
They conclude that wild birds are an emerging reservoir for the virus in North America, and that surveillance of migrating birds is critical to stopping future outbreaks.
This project has been ongoing for 40 years, and it gets some funding from the National Institute of Health. Unfortunately, our convicted felon/president-elect just nominated Jay Bhattacharya to head NIH. Bhattacharya is something of a COVID denialist who, during the pandemic, wanted to let the disease spread through healthy populations to build up herd immunity, a stance that public health officials found, well, batshit stupid.
Anyway, bird shit may be the key to saving humanity. If you needed another reason to keep your cats indoors, there is that.
[The Guardian / Yahoo / CNN / Scientific American]
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This virus has been evolving for hundreds of millions of years. Failing to panic now seems like a crude denial of everything H5N1 has been through to get to this point.
Why can't you liberals be happy for an entrepreneur?
Thanks for explaining this, Gary. I may have been a bit confused earlier his morning . . .
WIFE: *reading headline* Bird flu in America
ME: *struggling not to mansplain* Birds fly in every country, sweetheart.