I was watching a television show yesterday and the premise of the episode was that a terrorist group had broken into an old abandoned USPHS lab and stole samples of the original strain to use as a biological weapon. It got me thinking, is that particular version of the flu virus still particularly dangerous? I know H1N1 strains are still dangerous and have been responsible for a few more pandemics since the Spanish flu but it seems that we should have some resistance to the strain that caused that pandemic. My reasoning is that it never went away. We didn’t beat the Spanish flu with vaccines and health measures rather it just killed pretty much everyone it could and we eventually developed a level of resistance to it that made its threat more in line with the seasonal flu. If my reasoning is correct then the terrorists releasing the virus in the subway shouldn’t be any more dangerous that someone with the flu taking the subway to work which is a common occurrence during flu season.
So, how does it actually work? Did we develop a resistance like I think or would a release of the original strain start a new pandemic?
That virus isn’t surviving getting cooked in an oven. Stop talking nonsense.
I’m not saying I agree with them, but I’ve heard the argument they’re trying to make before.
It’s not about eating the meat, it’s about the supply chain that results in meat on your table. That supply chain puts humans in close contact with large numbers of animals.
COVID supposedly came from a market where close contact was extremely common … basically street vendors selling a variety of animals (primarily for cooking).
If there wasn’t people going into a cave for food, there’d be people in there for another reason. Bats don’t give a huge amount of shits why you disturb them or even if it was by accident.
That ignores the issue of frequency. The chance of someone crashing their car (lifetime) is much higher than their chance that day will be tonight.
Here’s the thing though, COVID can linger for a long ass time, especially in a population. And it only needs one unwary cave explorer to disturb the bats and get bitten.
It needs one unwary cave explorer at just the right time.
They have a point, though obviously you won’t get infected by cooked meat.
Many diseases and plagues all throughout history have been the result of humans and lifestock living together. It is thought that this is the reason why Europeans brought disease to the Americas, but they did not bring much disease back.
Modern day animal farming is a breeding ground go diseases. You have countless animals all packed together, many of them chucked full of antibiotics and such. That’s not a problem for free-range animals that have a decent amount of space to move in, but the chicken factories that have chickens locked up in the tens or even hundreds of thousands, all in cages that are barely big enough to contain them, are probably the easiest way to develop new diseases without genetic manipulation.
In most cases, diseases don’t jump the animal gap, or aren’t as dangerous. However, bird flu is devastating to every bird it comes into contact with, and there’s a reason governments are forcing these lifestock farmers to kill and destroy countless chickens when an infection has been detected.
The SARS/Covid hotbeds of certain Chinese markets (packing many different kinds of animal close together) may not exist in many places elsewhere, but it doesn’t need to. We’re a few random mutations away from a bird flu pandemic, and this disease is mutating in countless birds all around the globe. If the bird flu, as is going around now, manages to infects humans, we’re going to be in for a couple of years of lockdown.
This isn’t an inherent problem with consuming animals or animal products. The more humanely we treat animals, the more hygienic we keep them, and the more space we give them, the less of a risk things become.
I expect the mega farms packing animals together will cause at least one major new disease in my lifetime, and it could be perfectly preventable if we would just treat these animals like living things. Unfortunately, that would raise the price of the bottom-of-the-barrel meats, and impose restrictions on farmers, neither of which go down well in the short term.
See my other comment here.
https://lemmy.world/comment/6902322