This Week’s Science News from SWTG

Bird Flu & Quantum AI Consciousness

Countries sign up for human vaccines against bird flu. Have we learned the COVID lesson?

Image: Roee Shpernik/CC BY-SA 4.0

The bird flu pandemic in the United States is driving up egg prices, but on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, I worry much more that Americans are breeding the next human pandemic. A month ago, we saw a lot of scary headlines saying that we’re just one mutation away from that. It turns out that that wasn’t quite right. Today I have a brief update on the bird flu pandemic in the United States, and some thoughts on what we learned, or didn’t learn, from COVID.

The current bird flu, or avian flu virus is a variant of the type H5N1. It jumped over to cattle and other mammals in the United States one year ago. It also infected at least 60 people in the US, one of whom died in December, a 65-year old with preexisting conditions who contracted the illness directly from birds. There has also been one reported human case in Canada.

The cattle seem to not be all that bothered, but they’ve been spreading the virus across country and to various wild, domestic, and zoo animals. In December, a cheetah and a mountain lion were reported dead from the virus in a zoo in Phoenix. Foxes, bears, minks, cats, dogs, tigers and leopards have also all been found infected. Basically, the virus covering the entire US mainland.

According to the US center for disease control, there’s so far been no evidence for human-to-human transmission. But keep in mind that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

How dangerous is this virus? The reported cases in humans in the US have so far almost all been mild, except for the one person who died. But this virus has been around for about 20 years, and it has previously led to minor outbreaks of some hundreds of people, the biggest ones in Egypt and Indonesia.

In these earlier outbreaks, the case fatality rate has been roughly 50% and it was higher among young people.

The case fatality rate is the fraction of people who died among the infections on record and might miss those who were infected but had little to no symptoms. But still, it’s clearly a nasty virus and that it’s inching closer to humans isn’t comforting at all.