comment: >
  
  An optimist!
context: I'm a railroad worker, and finding bird smashed by trains alongside of rails is a everyday occurence, but finding dead bird not smashed on the floor wasn't, and since last year, it's a crazy the amount of them i've found and they don't even looks in bad shape, it just look like they were fine and dropped dead in an instant.
  ​
  It's been 10 years i'm doing this job and i've never seen anything like that. >
  
  When China had a bad bird flu outbreak \~15-20 years ago they blamed it on wild birds. But when they tracked the spread it followed highways, not flyways so that pointed toward commercial flocks. >
  
  ~~NEWMAN!!~~ CHINA!!!
  ​
  But in actuality all of us and our politicians and businesses which empower and enable and exploit such China for short-term personal profit. >
  
  How many Republicans or Democrats have investments in China? I’d like to know >
  
  China's cunning plan for not ending up like the USSR was to become a cornerstone of the world economy.
  Anyone who has investments has investments in China. >
  
  As cunning as a fox who’s just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University. >
  
  Foxford University >
  
  How long before some politician suggests we don't test the poultry as much in order to get the number of cases down? >
  
  Fox News ran a segment about how Democrats are trying to stop you from loving your chickens. Seriously. >
  
  Of course they did. 
  Biden could tell America not to shit on their dining table and Fox would frame it as an assault on our freedumbs. >
  
  BiDeN dOeSnT wAnT yOu SpEnDiNg TiMe WiTh YoUr FaMiLy!! >
  
  BIdEn hAtEs tHe ArIsToCrAtS ! >
  
  Last year Biden said he was 79
  This year he says 80
  Which is it, Biden ? >
  
  Cue tucker's stupid fucking face >
  
  “I’m just asking questions” -evil fucker carlson >
  
  Truly evil. I've only ever seen pictures until recently. Seth Meyers ran a short clip of the most outrageous shit I've ever heard and he made that signature dumb face. It was enraging and terrifying at the same time. >
  
  That face is the face of modern fascism in the US.  People mistakenly think Trump brought it on, but in actuality, tucker has been cultivating thos movement the entire time he's been on air, Trump just bumblingly benefited from it. >
  
  This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 93%. (I'm a bot)
  
  
  A lethal bird flu outbreak that has been circling the globe since 2021 peaked in Japan this week, as an agriculture ministry official said on Tuesday the country plans to cull more than 10 million chickens at risk of exposure to the virus.
  Europe is in the midst of its worst-ever spate of bird flu infections with 2,500 outbreaks on farms stretching across 37 countries from October 2021-September 2022.
  This outbreak marks the first time bird flu has been detected in Latin America with outbreaks in Columbia, Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and Ecuador, posing a potential risk to farmed and wild birds including the unique species that inhabit the Galapagos.
  
  
  Extended Summary | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: bird^#1 flu^#2 farm^#3 infection^#4 outbreak^#5 >
  
  People sometimes gloss over this as being "an animal disease" and fail to understand the massive ticking time bomb this is.  
  Influenza has the ability to share gene segments between different strains. This is called Antigenic Shift. The danger here is that the more this H5N1 strain spreads, the greater the chance it goes through an antigenic shift that drastically alters it, potentially for the worst. All it could take is for the wrong bird to infect the wrong pig, where one of the pigs cells already infected with a different strain of influenza and is also simultaneously infected with the avian H5N1 strain. What could emerge from that cell could be a virus that makes COVID-19 feel like a mild case of allergies. The good news is that we've seen outbreaks of H5N1 in the wild before without it mutating into the strain we all fear. Chances are this outbreak will be no different, but give the virus enough opportunities to spread and it can eventually turn into the nightmare pandemic we fear.  
  H5N1 is a virus that has shown the ability to cause high levels of lethality in humans (the highly pathogenic strains), easily sitting above 50% and climbing as high as 80% in some outbreaks. So far these infections have been through direct contact with infected birds and has shown very limited human to human transmission, so low it could not become a sustained epidemic. But the effects on its victims is merciless. They drown in a pool of their own liquified lungs as their bodies immune system goes haywire trying to fend off the attacking virus. Other non highly pathogenic strains of avian Influenza have fortunately been less severe, and we'll be very lucky if one of these strains becomes the one to cause an epidemic. Even then, a virus with a 15-20% fatality rate as opposed to 50% or 60% will still be devastating. And the lethality rate doesn't necessarily impact how transmissable the virus is as Influenza can spread before a person even shows any symptoms. Once it has spread, it doesn't really matter if the infected host survived or not, hence the lesser impact the fatality rate has on transmissability.  
  Two "gain-of-function" research studies deliberately modified H5N1 to be transmissable between ferrets (a very close animal analog to humans) and found what would need to happen for it to spread easily between humans. All it took was for a few key mutations in the right places and you could have a very lethal and highly contagious strain of human-to-human H5N1. This was in a lab done with extremely secure measures, but nature is the ultimate biolab. If given enough opportunities, these very same or very similar mutations will eventually emerge naturally.  
  For decades the one virus that has kept many epidemiologists up at night has been Influenza. Coronavirus did catch us by suprise on a number of times, with COVID being the one pandemic that wasn't exactly expected. That was because the expected and greatly feared super pandemic had been and will likely always be highly pathogenic avian Influenza. Advances in vaccine and treatment research has shortened the time it would take to respond to a pandemic, and this will save millions of lives should the worst come to pass, but until those vaccines are ready and available in mass, our world will be at the mercy of what could be the worst pandemic in human history. >
  
  what could be the worst pandemic in human history... so far!