Comment by trog
2 days ago
> But the culls are smaller, and so the impact lessened. The problem becomes more distributed.
Presumably the risk of spread of bird flu to humans increases though, due to the increased amount of contact. And then the increased risk of mutation leading to human to human transmission.
Bit wild to me that we don't seem to be taking this very seriously other than "o no my eggs" given we just had a pandemic a few years ago.
Arguably all the awful and crazy politics around COVID-19 has led directly to the scenario of people really not willing to take new pandemics seriously.
I think the way to think about H5N1 at the current time, for the hyper individualist types who don't care about no pandemic, is that it's like ebola. You really, really don't want to get it (~50% mortality) but you have to do quite specific things to put yourself at risk. One of those things is interacting with outdoor birds on a regular basis. Even in the absence of a pandemic it's just good sense not to expose yourself to that for the sake of questionably cheaper eggs.
This is true as long as we don't end up with a mutation that can go from people to people.
I saw this morning that we now have the first cases of rats with H5N1, so... things are going great