Bird flu and you

There was a post this morning on Facebook about a news article by a researcher from Sunshine Coast University with the headline “Poultry farmers urge backyard chicken owners to implement biosecurity measures, help curb bird flu”.

That would seem on the face of it to be duh!

You reckon there’s any chance at all that poultry farmers might not be urging everyone to do everything to curb bird flu? Given that Highly Pathenogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI, aka bird flu) has a mortality rate in their flocks of up to 100%?

But the post has had me wondering, all day, if we’re heading into a perfect storm.

Ducks, geese, quail, guinea fowl and backyard chooks too are all more likely in contact with wild birds than commercial flocks, and so even more at risk. And they die suddenly but not quickly – painfully, gasping for air. There’s no confirmed human to human transmission of bird flu so far, but plenty enough bird to human transmission, and it’s over 50% fatal to the humans. So no, you do not want to be nursing your sick chooks, or disposing of the bodies. Biosecurity would seem to be rather a good idea.

And wildlife. Bird flu has been around forever, but like all flus it mutates. (Which is why there’s a new flu vaccine every year). It’s only in the last four years that a mutated, highly pathenogenic, highly transmissible strain has taken off and is causing mass mortality in wild bird populations. “In the context of infectious diseases, scientists agree this is the worst ecological disaster yet.” “If we look at what’s happening around the world – this virus has arrived and left a trail of destruction, we’re talking species-level consequences”. “The scale of the mortalities is also something we’ve never seen before and there’s no evidence that it’s stopping any time soon.” (Link)

We have so many species of birdlife on the brink of extinction, and this.

What surprised me is not that we are being urged to implement biosecurity measures, but that anyone would disagree. That seems to me to be sociopathic. Why would you want a virus that causes mass mortality in birds, wild and domestic, to spread? But here we are with people putting “common good” and “pandemic” in quotation marks, and urging “Whatever people do, they should definitely NOT be compliant”. Oh dear.

There’s masses of information online about bird flu. You can drown in it. Here’s where I am with it all.

• Highly Pathenogenic Avian Influenza is a virus that is deadly to birds. It has mutated, no doubt a result of our intensive poultry husbandry techniques. New variants have arisen, just in the last few years, more transmissible and more virulent.
• It is out of the Pandora’s Box and won’t go back in. Eventually, like all viruses, susceptible hosts will die and natural selection will favour ones with some immunity but it will take a century or more for its rampage through susceptible species to end and there’ll be a lot of carnage on the way.
• It hasn’t really hit Australia yet – only a couple of outbreaks in Victoria of the relatively mild H7N5 variety so far – but it will. The more virulent H5N1 variety is in wild bird populations and there’s no stopping migratory birds.
• We’re likely due for mass extinctions of wildlife – here, Antarctica, global – no matter what we do. (We can take a lesson from it though, and think about how to stop the next pandemic arising out of the same practices).
• Eventually a vaccine for domestic poultry will be developed. Hopefully one that works despite the notorious ability of influenza to mutate fast and wide.
• A lot of poultry farm businesses are going to go broke meanwhile. Eggs are going to get expensive.
• It has in USA infected dairy cows. Milk products might get expensive too.
• It can infect cats and dogs. Even more of a reason to not let your cat eat wild birds.
• Your only real hope of keeping backyard poultry safe is to do all the biosecurity things, the main one being keep them from coming in contact with wild birds. And hope a vaccine that works becomes available quickly, because free range is otherwise going to be a thing of the past.
• Your backyard chooks aren’t likely to be confiscated – there would be no point – see above re wild bird transmission. Unless too many people let sick and dead chooks come into contact with birds, people, animals.
• You may though be required to euthanase sick birds and use biosecure methods to dispose of bodies. If you’d rather let your chooks die a painful and miserable death and their dead bodies transmit the virus to scavenger species, just cos no-one’s going to tell you what to do, join the queue outside the Principal’s office.
• Talking about mutation, there is one kind of Highly Pathenogenic Avian Influenza – H5N1 – that has mutated to allow mammal to mammal transmission. It has caused mass mortality in sea lions and seals so we’re looking at losing not just bird wildlife but also mammal wildlife.
• Humans are a mammal.
• Every single researcher I’ve come across is very confident that we are right at the pointy end of a mutation that allows human to human transmission, it’s near inevitable, and if we are not risk managing that we’re being dumb.
• The more humans interact with sick birds, the more chance there is of a human with ordinary flu meeting a bird with bird flu and the two flus having flu sex (not really a thing but you know what I mean) and creating that mutation. Just once. Somewhere in the world. Is all it takes.
• It’s guesswork what will happen then. In ferrets with ferret to ferret transmission, H5N1 is 100% fatal. In cows, not so much. In humans who have caught it from birds, the fatality rate is over 50%. How severe the disease might be in a human to human pandemic is unknown, but there’s a real chance it could be bad.
• The world’s transmissible disease experts are worried enough that there is lots of development going on for a human vaccine – difficult because H5N1 mutates (it is exactly because it it so prone to mutating that we are going to get human to human transmission in the first place). At first, there is likely to be only enough vaccine for essential service workers (eg paramedics), but they’re likely to gear up fairly fast.
• How effective the vaccine will be is anyone’s guess (and probably not even a good guess for a year or so). But the whole vaccine distrust thing is likely to get in the way of anyone getting decent information let alone doing decent risk maths.
• Meanwhile though, there will be a lot of confusion, contradictory information, best guesses from scientists being pressed to provide some kind of leadership, scammers, attention seekers, political campaigning, grifting, profiteering, and disinformation galore.

What I’m doing?

• Designing biosecurity for the chooks and quails.
• Having alcohol on hand – no, not that kind (or rather, that kind too). I mean alcohol for disinfecting surfaces, like we did in 2020 (there’s good data that bird flu might be more “formite” spread than covid). Might.
• Having KN95 / N95 / P2 masks on hand. There’s very good data they work.
• Ramping up my garden yet another level and having a decent pantry stock of staples – rice, flour, lentils, powdered milk etc – so I can stay out of markets as much as possible for a while.
• Seeking out and bookmarking good, reliable, informed, non-sensational sources of information from varied sources not in the same echo chamber.
• Grieving the extinctions this is going to cause.