this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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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.

(page 3) 50 comments
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[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (12 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (4 children)

They'd probably raise the price of alternative milk as well to match, just to price gauge people

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I wish oat milk didn’t tear my guts up, because it’s easily the best plant milk I’ve had.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I've heard that pea milk tastes pretty neutral

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[–] [email protected] 198 points 2 months ago (6 children)

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...

[–] [email protected] 68 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I hope it will be called "Trump plague" or something this time around.

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[–] [email protected] 78 points 2 months ago (6 children)

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 ...

[–] [email protected] 47 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 months ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

It reminds me a lot of the Herman Cain Awards.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (6 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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].

https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/html

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

MOST humans are not gonna ever be vegan/vegetarian unless forced.

Maybe. What about you, though?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You're curious how beans and rice scales to 350 million people?

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

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%.

https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago
[–] [email protected] 45 points 2 months ago (1 children)

See, if you bury your head in the sand, the virus can't get you

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 2 months ago

The price of beef is about to go the way of the price of eggs.

Down, right?

Down, right?

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