Replying to the Institute for Progress analysis you linked.
Looks like this was published Feb 2023 and doesn’t account for new developments since then? I don’t see any discussion of mice or cattle, mammals which have more human contact than mink.
This sentence seems to underpin much of the IFP’s optimism:
It is very difficult for R0 of a virus that is currently poorly adapted for human-to-human transmission to have a R0 that exceeds 1.0.
Spread of H5N1 bird flu viruses from mammal to mammal is thought to be rare, but possible.
I’m not sure how to reconcile this claim with H5N1 being present in 20% of grocery store milk samples. I suppose shared milking machines could be creating exceptional circumstances.
It does seem like mammal-to-mammal spread gets you most of the distance from “pure bird flu” to “human flu”, if I’m reading this article (from April 2023) correctly.
In any case, the IFP’s R0 point seems a bit reassuring. It suggests we may get “warning shots” in the form of small-scale human-to-human transmission. It also suggests that much of our focus should be on reassortment: either a cow gets human flu, or a human with the flu gets H5N1.
Raw milk could also be a huge deal. Apparently it can have up to a billion virus particles per mL. Imagine someone drinks a liter of raw milk and consumes a trillion virus particles. How many of those are destroyed during digestion? What are the odds that one of those trillion particles will be viable virus with mutations that happen to make it well-adapted for humans? What if the person drinking the milk has an ordinary seasonal flu, creating the possibility for reassortment?
Yeah I just want to reiterate that I think this is the most prescient pandemic risk that the world has right now and I agree we should be investing a lot more in it than we are right now.
It’s only the probabilities and as not of theory we disagree on I think, which probably doesn’t change much in what we think should happen in practice.
Replying to the Institute for Progress analysis you linked.
Looks like this was published Feb 2023 and doesn’t account for new developments since then? I don’t see any discussion of mice or cattle, mammals which have more human contact than mink.
This sentence seems to underpin much of the IFP’s optimism:
The CDC states:
I’m not sure how to reconcile this claim with H5N1 being present in 20% of grocery store milk samples. I suppose shared milking machines could be creating exceptional circumstances.
It does seem like mammal-to-mammal spread gets you most of the distance from “pure bird flu” to “human flu”, if I’m reading this article (from April 2023) correctly.
In any case, the IFP’s R0 point seems a bit reassuring. It suggests we may get “warning shots” in the form of small-scale human-to-human transmission. It also suggests that much of our focus should be on reassortment: either a cow gets human flu, or a human with the flu gets H5N1.
Raw milk could also be a huge deal. Apparently it can have up to a billion virus particles per mL. Imagine someone drinks a liter of raw milk and consumes a trillion virus particles. How many of those are destroyed during digestion? What are the odds that one of those trillion particles will be viable virus with mutations that happen to make it well-adapted for humans? What if the person drinking the milk has an ordinary seasonal flu, creating the possibility for reassortment?
Yeah I just want to reiterate that I think this is the most prescient pandemic risk that the world has right now and I agree we should be investing a lot more in it than we are right now.
It’s only the probabilities and as not of theory we disagree on I think, which probably doesn’t change much in what we think should happen in practice.