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How America Lost Control of the Bird Flu, Setting the Stage for Another Pandemic (kffhealthnews.org)

submitted 23 hours ago by spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org to c/usnews@beehaw.org

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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.

...

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.”

...

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.”

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[–] spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org 13 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] pearsaltchocolatebar 5 points 22 hours ago

There's also mpox, so I predict 2 pandemics this time.