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[King Zultan]

Can it even be called bird flu anymore if it can infect all kinds of things.


Hope to god that this isn't the start of another damned pandemic.

[ChairmanPoo]

Can it even be called bird flu anymore if it can infect all kinds of things.


Hope to god that this isn't the start of another damned pandemic.

🤷‍♂️

Never stopped wearing the mask in the first place so I'll roll with it.
Might avoid crowds again for a while just in case tho

[bloop_bleep]

Have we breached some critical mass of populatiom above which every virus epidemic explodes? Why has the number of outbreaks increased so quickly?

[hector13]

I think we’re better at detecting them, everything in the world is so interconnected in terms of communication, and we recently had a massive pandemic that is still causing some issues so anything remotely similar is latched onto as hugely worrying.

Put it altogether and you’ll get headlines everywhere along the lines of “Is This The Next Covid?”

[Starver]

I suspect that, though with Germ Theory and other advances with preventative/detecting/mitigating mechanisms for anything 'plague'-like, this is in uneasy balance with the Small-World Network that the planet has become.

The late-/post-WW1 influenza outbreak had exceptional 'networking' to help it, whilst the medical advances to deal with it (in all the ways described) were only a fraction of what we'd have today. So it spread, helped (in no small way) by mandated mass movements of men. But relatively few people globe-trotted, otherwise.

The rise in jet-setters in the modern age (leisure and business and everything in-between) then ramped up at te same time as we bacame profficient/lucky enough not to have quite so much a global pandemic threatening to break out at any one time. Until it did...  And so lockdowns. (Which, at least on the international level, wasn't something that would have been needed in the days before regular air-mile usage by almost anyone who fancied having a stag-do in Prague or trying to climb Machu Picchu or going over to do a deal with the sweatshop owners in some random African/Asian country or going over to visit the in-laws in Australia or...)

And now (having Been There, Done That, Got The "I've Been Vaccinated" Sticker) there's a mix of over-caution and under-caution for what we all should know is out there and (moreover) what we don't yet know anything solid about. Everyone's probably not much more than half a dozen handshakes from much of the rest of the world's population, but as not everyone is licking their hands after doing so (or Eskimo-greeting each other) then it's probably not as bad as it could be, but not as safe as it might be.  Say two-dozen (unlucky and unwise) handshakes between Patient Zero for WhateverComesNext-23, whether it be SARS-like, an influenza, an ebola, a far more agile monkeypox, whichsoever is the one fated to arise next.

[JoshuaFH]

I would say there's a modern phobia against vaccinations which didn't exist in people of prior decades. Also, over time, I'd also say people are uniformly more overworked due to late stage capitalism; fed a poorer diet due to late stage capitalism; poisoned through pollution more due to late stage capitalism; and getting less exercise due to car-centric city planning (which is caused by late stage capitalism). All that comes together to make people less healthy overall, and therefore more likely to contract and transmit any odd infection they pick up.

And to put on my tinfoil hat, I'd say governments have an incentive to accelerate the late-stage capitalism doomsday, that's in order to keep their populations sickly and weak: they know that the masses are getting fed up with their shit, and so for the ruling class to stay the ruling class, they better keep the subjugated class too sick, poor, stupid, and isolated to realistically overthrow them.

[Stench Guzman]

The vaccines are like Pringles.  Once you clot, you can't stop.

[Lord Shonus]

Physical ability to resist infection has never been higher than it is in modern developed nations. That's a big part of why even most diseases there's no vaccine for don't spread as readily in the US and Europe as they do in underdeveloped nations. Vaccine avoidance also isn't nearly the problem it once was - mandatory public vaccination was a huge political fight when it first became a possibility, much worse than the Covid specific one. The biggest hazard is that extremely severe infectious disease was extremely rare in the developed world - everything but the flu was something where the smallest outbreak would Make The News, and even the flu wasn't particularly feared even among the people who actually knew what the flu was. That severely degraded the ability of most places to take things seriously when a virus infectious enough to overcome all the extant barriers came along.

[Bumber]

Demonstration of mask effectiveness on a cold day.

[Starver]

Related: the other day I was sitting eating some sandwiches, in the middle of nowhere, and I got a scent of something familiar. Stood up, looked around, and a hundred yards away (not directly upwind!) I spotted someone vaping like a bloomin' steam-train. Though the vape-cloud didn't reach me, I was getting a smell of the 'flavour' (caramel?).

(Really, as far as vaping is concerned, if some people aren't just wasting 99% of their 'liquid' (and making the rest of us 'passively vape') for the sake of turning their devices up way beyond what they need, I clearly don't understand these things.)

As far as mask effectiveness, you're going to have breath breathed by others unless you use closed-cycle rebreather tech, but even the most basic mask mitigates the bigger and more dangerous drops (or spittle, flem, etc) and increases the time that drifting pathogen has to spend airborne (and susceptible to degredation) to get between two people in most circumstances.

Also, rather puts paid to the "breathing too much CO₂" scares, unless you made a plastic bag your go-to mask material...

edited for a coupla obvious tyops

[ChairmanPoo]

I think there are legitimate reasons to worry about bird flu... but at this point still no reports of human cases (🤞🤞). So its mostly on the hands of health agencies.
Which were notoriously not sensible during covid so yeah mask up just in case

[Bumber]

bigger and more dangerous drops

[Citation needed]

[Starver]

bigger and more dangerous drops

[Citation needed]

Depends on the situation.
 
Large droplets survive longer, with payload, to settle on surfaces (including faces) for further contact transmission. Smaller ones evaporate (hence I had the smell, possibly some drifting nicotine... not sure... from the vaper) leaving carrier pathogens more vulnerable to denaturing in various anhydric ways.

Now, if smaller aerosols can get to the lungs, they can reach deeper down into them. But the larger ones have potential to infect through the nose and throat mucuses where viruses already are known to try to take hold. And (by mass, therefore volume) droplets tend to be predominantly of the upper scale. You're at least shifting the odds against the usually unfettered large amounts of infective material getting to you.

[Ziusudra]

The bird flu outbreak has taken an ominous turn

To be clear, this does not yet include people.

After death of girl yesterday, 12 more detected with H5N1 bird flu in Cambodia
Well, there's one.
Edit: the body of that seems to say that there are not yet results from the tests, so they be testing 12 while 4 show symptoms.
Edit: and sounds like they were all in contact with the birds, so even if more hav it, it might not be human-human transmission

[alway]

Have we breached some critical mass of populatiom above which every virus epidemic explodes? Why has the number of outbreaks increased so quickly?

It's because of covid. One of its numerous effects is to suppress the immune system in the long term, particularly your body's ability to recognize diseases it has already encountered. So we got the tripledemic from that, as we see a wave of infections of several diseases simultaneously among the newly immunocompromised majority of the US population.

As for new things, it's also because of covid, in that covid breached the sense of normality and now you pay attention. Ebola, swine flu, bird flu, etc, have been other outbreaks in the past, but they probably didn't breach normal daily life where ever you live, so you neither paid attention nor cared to remember them at the time. Now, everyone has seen the safeguards fail and be further eroded, and no one trusts that it won't happen again. Because it probably will.