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.
I’m back on the carnivore diet because it’s been really the only thing to help with my long-covid that has been on my ass ever since the pandemic started.
And now this is going to make that harder.
The same guy I hold responsible for my long-covid is going to get me fucked up yet again. How’s that for irony?
Aw shit, here we go again.
Calling it now: we have another pandemic during Trump’s current term.
Conspiracy theorists will go “isn’t it weird there’s always a pandemic while trump is president, must be the Democrats/Jews/Illuminati/“The Regime” controlling everything, Plandemic am a right?”
Couldn’t possibly be Trump removing all safeguards against pandemics…
I hope it will be called “Trump plague” or something this time around.
Can this be passed through milk? Maybe the Fascism problem will solve itself if Bobby Brainworm convinces all the fascists to drink more raw milk …
It seems so. I’ve been buying ultra-pasteurized which may be sufficient.
There are cases of a couple dairy workers getting mild cases of bird flu from getting raw milk splashed in their eye while working, so yes it’s not terribly unlikely.
Government told people to never drink raw milk. The sale and consumption of raw milk went up in ivermectin loving circles. It’s weird reverse psychology with raw milk.
I’m kind of ok with that.
It’d be fine if they were just endangering themselves, but the most likely way we get a more virulent bird flu strain is one of these idiots catching in while they also have the regular flu
It reminds me a lot of the Herman Cain Awards.
Maybe it will get people to start drinking plant based milk if the price of course milk skyrockets like it has with eggs. All the IGF-1 in dairy isn’t good for you and could even be part of the reason for the rise in colorectal cancer (the amount of dairy we consume nowadays in nuts).
Pumpkin seed milk is so good. Too bad it’s hard to come by. Harder still for zero sugar versions.
They’d probably raise the price of alternative milk as well to match, just to price gauge people
The price of alternative bean juices is pre-gouged. It does not take $8/gallon to blend oats. It does not take $8/gallon to blend soybeans. It costs far far far more than $4/gallon to raise a cow, keep the female cows pregnant, destroy the male calves that result, and feed the cows sufficiently to both raise another living cow (50% of which are immediately trashed) and produce viable milk.
It only costs $4/gal right now because we are paying for you with our tax dollars.
I usually have a little milk around the house for cooking sauces and things. Something like soy or almond milk don’t make good substitutes. I can’t remember the last time I just drank a glass of milk.
I haven’t had cows milk in years. Somehow all my sauces and things are still turning out delicious! Lots of plant milk is flavored or sweetened. Buying regular/unsweetened almond or oat milk will work for most cases. I am extremely partial to oat milk and I would honestly drink a glass of it
I wish oat milk didn’t tear my guts up, because it’s easily the best plant milk I’ve had.
I’ve heard that pea milk tastes pretty neutral
I’ll have to give it a try if I ever see some, I think all I’ve ever seen here are soy, almond, rice, and oat.
It drives me fucking nuts that in the US sweetened soy/almond milk is the default. Sometimes the unsweetened even costs a few cents more.
Haha corn subsidies go brrrrrrrr
Also was just found to be infecting rats for the first time ever documented.
RIP NYC
Meanwhile, in Michigan, there’s a case of two exclusively indoor cats catching it. One prominent theory is that the humans in the household passed it to them.
Yes, its being tracked in via fecal matter on your shoes.
See, if you bury your head in the sand, the virus can’t get you
Well, ya know, it’s primarily a respiratory disease among humans. You literally aren’t likely to catch if if your head is buried in sand. And once you suffocate or whatever, you won’t have to worry about the flu.
This is the kind of outside the box thinking that makes this nation great.
The price of beef is about to go the way of the price of eggs.
Down, right?
Down, right?
Just do this:
- stop testing,
- stick a lightbulb up their rear
- put some horse paste in their feed
- disinfectant in their water
- ???
- Profit
How about we… i dunno… not farm animals? It’s bad for health, it’s bad for the animals, it’s bad for the environment. Every pandemic we’ve ever had has been caused by animal ag. That’s COVID, SARS, MERS, AIDS, etc.
I agree with your first two sentences.
But at least with COVID and AIDS, neither of those are attributed to animal agriculture. They crossed into humans through exposure to animals, but in the case of AIDS that was non-human primates most likely. And in the case of COVID it was most likely bats. But in neither of those instances were those animals part of an agricultural system. In other words they weren’t being farmed
Swine flu, yes absolutely. Aids and COVID? Not so much.
HIV-1 virus exposure was most likely from bushmeat trade. COVID might have as well.
I was aware that COVID most likely came from wet markets. But that’s selling hunted meat.
Animal agriculture is raising animals to eat. Often in confinement.
With bird flu, animal agriculture is a major cause for concern. But that doesn’t mean animal agriculture was the cause of all pandemics.
I guess we could argue that eating meat might be. But I also don’t want to tell folks who are living in poverty in other parts of the world that they can’t hunt for food.
So I feel like the ethical arguments are different too.
Meat is a vector for all pandemics, so the goal should be to create a world where no one ever has to eat meat ever again.
Or where meat can be grown in a lab in controlled conditions.
this one. I know it’s a meme in vegan circles but meat really is fucking delicious.
Modern fake meat is not super distinguishable anymore. The stuff you buy at the market I mean, not the stuff that is sold at restaurants even when the brand is same (maybe restaurant cooks just don’t know?)
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Nope.
Agriculture is the raising of food. Rather that’s vegetables or animals.
Hunting animals and selling them in a market isn’t agriculture.
And if you had argued that killing animals and eating their meat is the source of diseases, well again that’s not how AIDS started. And folks are catching bird flu from their cats bringing it in the house.
So animal agriculture certainly is one vector of transmission. And factory farming especially is a big issue, because animals are often in confinement where disease spreads easily, and then transfers into people.
But no, all pandemics did not come from animal agriculture. Or even eating meat.
And if you had argued that killing animals and eating their meat is the source of diseases, well again that’s not how AIDS started
I was under the impression primate bush meat consumption was believed to be the origin of HIV, is that not the case anymore?
Curious about your diet, and where you get your food? Also curious how that scales to 350 million people (to feed the US)?
I’m not remotely implying what we’re doing, as a society, is right or sustainable but it’s super easy to just say “Just stop doing bad things”.
Solutions, at scale are quite complicated and nuanced. Private companies that grow our food at scale now will only participate if it’s profitable.
Also, if you’re not sustainably growing your own food, are you not just like the rest of us (Part of the problem)? I know I don’t have the land, or time to grow my own food.
Sticking our head in the sand (current administration) is definitely not gonna turn out well, so I’m guessing there’s some fun times ahead! <sigh>
Mostly beans, wheat, and oats, in different form factors. More salads.
Your body only requires a tiny amount of protein and that’s also the easiest thing to replace.
It scales far better than animal-agriculture. Eating plants directly is massively more efficient compared to growing crops feed where most of the energy is lost in the process
The research suggests that it’s possible to feed everyone in the world a nutritious diet on existing croplands, but only if we saw a widespread shift towards plant-based diets.
[…]
If everyone shifted to a plant-based diet we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
Transitioning to plant-based diets (PBDs) has the potential to reduce diet-related land use by 76%, diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by 49%, eutrophication by 49%, and green and blue water use by 21% and 14%, respectively, whilst garnering substantial health co-benefits
[…]
Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].
You think scaling plant based food is harder than scaling a meat industry? I’m a meat eater but come on… It is not hard to get to place mentally that humans could easily live on plant based foods. People choose to eat meat because it’s what they believe to be is delicious and what their parents raised them on.
Maybe DOGE should cut all the subsidies the meat industry gets, upwards of $40 billion and we can see what the real price of meat should cost.
Lol they aren’t trying to actually reduce expenses. If they did there’s clear places to go (we don’t seem to want to use our military, why do we spend 1/3 of our national budget on it?).
The goal is to inject confusion and uncertainty into everyone’s lives and to pwn the libs who think government is capable of doing good.
That’s not at all what I said. The meat Industry already exists and is scaled profitable, even if it’s terrible for our planet.
I said to get any scale of another version, it’s going to have to be as equally profitable or corporations are not going to go for it.
Sustainable, scalable and profitable.
You’re curious how beans and rice scales to 350 million people?
Apparently he’s confused by the idea that we can eat the stuff we used to feed to cows.
I try to buy local fruit and veg only. Fun fact: if we all went vegan, we could free up 70-80% of the land currently being used for animal ag. We could rewild that land and still have excess food. We currently grow enough plants to feed 15B people, but we feed that to the animals instead.
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.
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.
it’s not mostly kernels. livestock are fed the entire plant, and the kernels are a slim minority of the weight.
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
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.
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.
do you have the full papers? I can’t really examine these claims from the links you provided.
beef cattle spend most of their life grazing.
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
no one said they are exclusively grass fed, not that we should be doing that
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.
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
in didn’t say it’s free from harms. I’m saying we aren’t using that land to grow crops.
My point is, you try to… I try to also, but in the dead of winter there’s no a local fruit and veggies. I’m also not vegan/vegetarian, I eat meat. Fish, and chicken primarily but I don’t raise either, so I have to rely on someone else to do that for me.
We do actually get probably half our eggs from someone at my wife’s work, and some. fruits and vegetables at the farmers market down the street in the summer. But they’re closed now and have been most of winter.
It’s harder than just saying “just stop” was my point. I’d love to be part of the solution where I can but there’s zero chance of me not eating meat if it’s available.
It’s worth noting that environmentally, where the food comes from matters far far less than what you eat. Production emissions are far larger than any transportation emissions
Transport is a small contributor to emissions. For most food products, it accounts for less than 10%, and it’s much smaller for the largest GHG emitters. In beef from beef herds, it’s 0.5%.
Not just transport, but all processes in the supply chain after the food left the farm – processing, transport, retail and packaging – mostly account for a small share of emissions.
This data shows that this is the case when we look at individual food products. But studies also shows that this holds true for actual diets; here we show the results of a study which looked at the footprint of diets across the EU. Food transport was responsible for only 6% of emissions, whilst dairy, meat and eggs accounted for 83%.
Vegan here. Sticking to the two questions you asked before you got lost in scope creep and logical fallacy: I get my food from the supermarket, mostly. And it scales way better than animal ag because farming plants requires radically less resources per calorie than farming animals.
Just like most other positive decisions in the world, it’s not revolutionary on it’s own. Nor is it aiming to be, nor does it need to be.
I don’t disagree with your general sentiment, but what I see as responses here are often empty responses… Just the obvious “we should stop being terrible arbiters of our planet”. Like no shit, but it’s hard and MOST humans are not gonna ever be vegan/vegetarian unless forced.
What a strange thought. How would you define the driving factor behind any food consumption other than forced?
MOST humans are not gonna ever be vegan/vegetarian unless forced.
Maybe. What about you, though?
I am 100% in that category. I have some aspirations to be in a lifestyle where I catch a lot of my own fish but zero desire to move off animal protein to a vegetarian lifestyle.
