Also that the deaths and suffering were largely invisible on TV news
— BeijingPalmer (@beijingpalmer.bsky.social) March 24, 2025 at 7:31 PM
Not an auspicious date: 1 year ago today #USDA confirmed #H5N1 #birdflu in dairy cows in Texas, a first.
Since then nearly 1000 infected herds have been confirmed; lord knows how many others missed detection. 70 human cases were confirmed in the past year; again the true number is likely higher.— Helen Branswell (@helenbranswell.bsky.social) March 25, 2025 at 3:11 PM
#H5N1: About 150 hens & other birds in a New York City live poultry market have died of #birdflu. This is the 1st NYC #birdflu outbreak since Feb when >1000 live poultry market birds died. The latest involved 2 markets, which were detected during routine inspections abc7ny.com/post/nyc-bir…
.— Delthia Ricks (@dricks.bsky.social) March 24, 2025 at 12:41 PM
#USDA confirmed another California dairy herd has been infected with #H5N1 #birdflu. That brings CA's total to 756. The CA Dept of Ag. says 422 of those herds have recovered & cleared quarantine.
Cumulative national total = 990 herds in 17 states. This doesn't include the herd MN reported y'day.— Helen Branswell (@helenbranswell.bsky.social) March 25, 2025 at 9:57 AM
I missed this y'day about the new report from Minnesota of an #H5N1 #birdflu infected herd: The herd in question was previously infected. As such it's not going to be counted again.
Just guessing, but I'd wonder if the bulk milk testing showed they never managed to clear the earlier infection.— Helen Branswell (@helenbranswell.bsky.social) March 25, 2025 at 10:36 AM
Though I didn't have sheep on my #H5N1 #birdflu bingo card, by this point nothing should surprise me or us about this tricky, tricky virus.
The UK has found an infected sheep. Where there's one, there certainly could be more. www.gov.uk/government/n…— Helen Branswell (@helenbranswell.bsky.social) March 24, 2025 at 11:02 AM
— Medical Xpress – medical research advances and health news (@medicalxpress.com.web.brid.gy) March 25, 2025 at 11:45 PM
A different strain of #birdflu has wiped out a Mississippi poultry farm. H7N9 has been detected elsewhere in the world & hadn't been confirmed in the U.S. since 2017. The strain was found in Noxubee County & 46k birds either died or were euthanized after infection spread phys.org/news/2025-03…
— Delthia Ricks (@dricks.bsky.social) March 19, 2025 at 5:19 PM
Current antivirals—including Tamiflu—are ineffective against #H5N1 in raw cows’ milk. While human infections have been rare, more than 60 people infected at dairies were exposed to H5N1 via raw milk reaching their noses or eyes in splashes or aerosolized particles www.genengnews.com/topics/infec…
— Delthia Ricks (@dricks.bsky.social) March 19, 2025 at 7:22 AM
Cat food products have been recalled for #birdflu risk: Here are the latest ones👇
Savage Pet recalled 66 of its large 84 oz. chicken products & 74 of its smaller 21 oz size due to possible #H5N1 flu virus contamination. They join other recalled products: Wild Coast Raw, Northwest Naturals, & more— Delthia Ricks (@dricks.bsky.social) March 21, 2025 at 1:15 PM
Like it or not, we have entered 'a forever war' with #birdflu. The threat of an #H5N1 pandemic is here to stay www.theverge.com/science/6326…
— Delthia Ricks (@dricks.bsky.social) March 22, 2025 at 10:07 AM
Times are going to get hard — harder — for public health departments. www.nbcnews.com/health/healt…
— Helen Branswell (@helenbranswell.bsky.social) March 25, 2025 at 3:49 PM
In <24 hours, Covid funding is DOGEd across HHS, CDC, NIH as if it and Long Covid didn't exist and there is no worry for future pandemics
www.science.org/content/arti…
www.nbcnews.com/health/healt…
www.science.org/content/arti…— Eric Topol (@erictopol.bsky.social) March 25, 2025 at 6:30 PM
Last night's update: 136,257 new cases, nearly 1,000 new deaths https://t.co/obHAfa7XlX
— BNO News (@BNOFeed) March 24, 2025
March 21st update:
The decline has stuttered over the past couple weeks, and NWSS also re-adjusted a couple of the past values upwards. South and Midwest both at medium levels, W/NE are low. Latest WW estimates:
🔸328,000 new infections/day
🔸~1 in 100 currently infected— JPWeiland (@jpweiland.bsky.social) March 21, 2025 at 9:19 PM
======
The stark contrast between Rwanda’s handling of a deadly Marburg virus outbreak this year & the rest of the world’s chaotic response to #Covid provides textbook lessons in how to properly respond to a threat and how to make a threat worse www.telegraph.co.uk/global-healt…
— Delthia Ricks (@dricks.bsky.social) December 21, 2024 at 4:10 PM
======
Today's update. Sad to see. A pill vaccine would have been a positive step forward.
www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/vaxa…— Eric Topol (@erictopol.bsky.social) March 21, 2025 at 11:58 AM
— Medical Xpress – medical research advances and health news (@medicalxpress.com.web.brid.gy) March 25, 2025 at 11:42 AM
— Medical Xpress – medical research advances and health news (@medicalxpress.com.web.brid.gy) March 24, 2025 at 11:46 AM
Uncertainty about long COVID lingers years after the pandemic began
Nine percent of people who described themselves as permanently sick or disabled had long COVID.
www.cidrap.umn.edu/c…— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) March 18, 2025 at 5:07 PM
As more States attempt to enact mask bans & Trump continues to dismantle public health, it becomes increasingly clear that we’re on our own.
Masks should be mandatory in healthcare, yet you will often see more patients masking than healthcare workers.
My guide to avoiding hospital acquired COVID— Kelly (@broadwaybabyto.bsky.social) March 22, 2025 at 11:54 PM
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Seismic scoop from @lenasun.bsky.social: A long-time anti-vaxer who was disciplined for practising medicine without a license has been selected by #HHS to conduct the study RFK Jr. wants looking yet again at whether vaccines cause autism. www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/…
— Helen Branswell (@helenbranswell.bsky.social) March 25, 2025 at 7:15 PM
An antivax nightmare is about to unfold: The Texas measles epidemic could possibly continue for a year. Vaccination efforts have already faltered & many residents have turned to loony alternative treatments endorsed by RFK Jr. Dangerous times are ahead www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/h…
— Delthia Ricks (@dricks.bsky.social) March 22, 2025 at 9:11 AM
More states are reporting measles cases amid rising instances of vaccine misinformation. Ohio, Maryland & Alabama among states outside the Texas-New Mexico-Oklahoma epidemic to report cases. The TX-NM-OK epidemic has >350 cases. All other states bring the total to 378
— Delthia Ricks (@dricks.bsky.social) March 23, 2025 at 2:01 PM
The ultimate Gain of Function laboratory is Mother Nature.
Let a virus spread and spread, spill over again and again to mammals that share more genes with people, like cats and rats and cows, maybe a few mink and ferrets, and we end up with a problem much bigger than what we have now – for people.— Infectious Diseases (@infectiousdz.bsky.social) March 18, 2025 at 4:02 PM
Parents of the child who died of measles have joined RFK-founded Children's Health Defense. Anti-vaccine groups excel at swooping in for tragedy, offering parents a cause.
“Don’t do the shots,” her mother said, measles is “not as bad as they’re making it out to be.”
www.nbcnews.com/health/healt…— Brandy Zadrozny (@brandyzadrozny.bsky.social) March 20, 2025 at 9:42 AM
Parents of unvaccinated child who died of measles still tell other parents to be anti-vax.
Mother: "We would still say don't do the shots… It’s not as bad as they're making it out to be."
Father: "The measles are good for the body… in long run you won't get cancer as easily… pic.twitter.com/ICCwXGYmgE
— LongTime??FirstTime????? (@LongTimeHistory) March 20, 2025
War for Ukraine Day 1,125: As Expected, Putin & Russia Use “Negotiations” To Make Tactical Space for More Attacks on Civilian Targets
Viva BrisVegas
It’s easy to now see how the Spanish Flu pandemic fell into a memory hole.
I used to wonder why there were almost no mentions of it pre-covid, except in asides as a comparison to the casualties of WW1.
The covid pandemic is going the same way.
eclare
Those parents should be charged with a crime.
I hope you’re feeling better, Anne Laurie.
Martin
I don’t think it’s bad memory. I think it’s just we don’t give a shit. The time between a school shooting and someone calling for arming teachers is measured in hours. We’re just selfish fuckers as a nation.
Pretty much all collective action problems (problems that can only be solved if all or most parties cooperate) are currently failing pretty catastrophically, from economic ones, to climate change, to infectious disease, and so on. This is most manifest that when asking someone to wear a mask to prevent a million people from dying, their answer is no, they won’t do that. Even when the ask is free, has no material impact on your life, it’s still too much. Note, the pushback against Covid didn’t come years after covid due to people forgetting, or due to not seeing the impact, it came at the peak of the problem when there were still reports of hospitals being overwhelmed and dead bodies being stacked in hallways.
Prior to 2007, you at least had a marginal trust in government, and since then it has eroded and is now almost completely nonexistent, which means there’s effectively no mechanism through which to organize these solutions. As I told my bosses in early 2010 when my colleagues at US Dept of Ed told me they were not allowed to talk to me about Covid, and after my contacts in the State of California told me they were in the dark because the state never anticipated having to have a redundant agency to the CDC and NIH and were unequipped to answer these questions: ‘we’re on our own, nobody is going to save us’. And that’s where we are once again.
Ask your doctor if you should get an MMR booster, as a lot of older Americans only got one per the recommendation at the time, but was later changed to two. Continue wearing masks. Check the news and avoid areas that are having outbreaks, be it covid or measles or flu.
satby
I think almost everyone knows of someone who died of Covid or complications resulting from Covid. John Prine died from it, right off the top of my head. Plus several people who lived around here in South Bend.
The issue has always been a complete lack of honesty during the felon’s first administration: from the immanent danger, to the restrictions on supplies, to the denial that “white” people (esp. children) were potentially just as liable to get sick and die as others, finally culminating in people denying they were dying of covid as they took their last breath and coroners not listing covid as cause of death in red states. And now we’re heading back into the horror of those days again.
Matt McIrvin
I was also going to question the premise that most people don’t know anytime who died. My aunt died of COVID. I suspect most Americans similarly have an elderly relative who did, but that fact may have been suppressed by their own families since there was a concerted effort to deny that COVID deaths were of COVID.
Baud
It’s not that people don’t know anyone who died. It’s that people don’t know who was saved by the prevention methods we took. That’s unknowable.
Most of the stuff libs do is about preventing harm. By its nature, that’s invisible and statistical, not tangible.
JoyceH
Uh… the parents of a child who died from measles say, “it’s not as bad as they’re making it out to be”?!!! Like “my child is only a little bit dead”?
Rusty
@Martin: Our American culture of hyper-individualism is proving to be our undoing. It cuts us off from collective action problem solving, and it undermines our trust in institutions. When you we become so radically self focused, the compromise needed to work with others is severely eroded. Belonging to an organization, be it social, religious, or governmental requires means that you don’t always get your way, and that has become a compromise too far for many. I don’t know how to break the hold of extreme individualism that has tipped into a destructive selfishness that us in its grip. It’s being promoted by those that want to atomize us culturally because it makes all but the wealthy weaker and easier to exploit. It will take a generation to change.
Rachel Bakes
The bad news: your child had measles and died.
the good news: they won’t get cancer!
because they’re dead!!! Didn’t like that child much?
Baud
@Rusty:
The ironic part is it’s the hyper individualists who are doing the best job engaging in collective action by reinforcing their culture through the Republican Party.
ETA: And through mechanisms like right wing churches and social media.
Matt McIrvin
@Rusty: I honestly don’t even know that it is hyper-individualism, though it claims to be. The same people who will make a big deal about how they have the right not to wear a mask will harass you if you do wear a mask, and in some cases even get them outlawed. It’s a strange kind of “individualism” that drives them to march straight into totalitarian measures.
I see it more as obedience to different masters. They’re big on dominance hierarchies, not so much on egalitarian collectives.
Gvg
@Matt McIrvin: I have relatives who got it and recovered who were not well before. They died later. As I said, they were in serious health status before Covid and we were surprised they lived but they weren’t in the early waves. I got it last year and it wasn’t too bad with the treatments then.
A lot of people had it earlier and lived or it was not as bad as the worst cases and they didn’t get long Covid, so that may be counteracting the stories about death. If you had it and 5 people you know did also and it was only twice as bad as the flu, say, maybe you would think it was an overreaction? Or forget faster than families that lost someone. And if the people who died had been near death anyway, would it make as much of an impact? Because when you have several years of family news of someone’s declining health and hospital stays, you mentally prepare for the loss, especially if you are older and experienced. You tend to think about how much pain they are in versus quality of life (depending on circumstances) and also how others will be impacted, spouse and dependents. Younger people will take a relatives death hard, but by middle age most people have a little practice. It’s not indifference always.
Now the measles parents I think are avoiding guilt and are in a cult, plus they really are demonstrating indifference to their children all along. Grounds for removing custody of any remaining children IMO.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Hyper-individualism has always been snowflakey.
Nelle
@JoyceH: They have taken their Mennonite culture right off the cliff into cultism. If Kent is around, he might speak to that. I grew up I’m a more liberal (still very conservative) branch of Mennonites. Still very strong mixture of religion and family (don’t marry out of this kind of Mennonites and a Sunday School teacher speculated that all of us were no further than fifth cousins apart).
Nelle
@satby: one of my older cousins died of Covid, according to a relative who is a doctor. But her lids insist that it wasn’t Covid that killed her.
New Deal democrat
The headline news as to COVID is that the number of deaths in the past 52 weeks declined another -600 to another new low of 38,400.
For the last final reporting week, February 22, there were 635 deaths, the lowest in two months. In the last preliminary week, March 15, 222 deaths were reported so far, suggesting a final tally of about 500.
BIobot’s last wastewater report for March 15 showed continued declines in all four census regions. The CDC’s latest report for the weeks ending March 15 showed increases in the South and Midwest, resulting in an unchanged national reading of 3.07 per mL. This is about a 60% decline from the Holiday peak towards last autumn’s low. The Northeast and West, by contrast, are close to their all-time lows.
As of last Friday, the latest variant analysis showed a new variant, LP.8.1, slowly taking over. There is no indication it is particularly virulent.
Jackie
@JoyceH:
“We still have four living children.”
The 5th was a throwaway… //
Professor Bigfoot
This.
It certainly SEEMS like conservatism is primarily about enforcing dominance hierarchies.
Another Scott
@Matt McIrvin: +1
If 30% of the population keeps getting their shots, that 100M people. But we instead hear about one person who says don’t get the vaccine.
Hot takes and “engagement” are destroying news and reliable information. It’s dangerous.
I’m not sure what can be done about it, other than trying to think and talk about the importance of norms and science over crazy feelings and so forth.
Thanks. And thanks AL!
Best wishes,
Scott.
Soprano2
My husband had measles as a child. Now he has multiple myeloma. That measles/cancer stuff is bullshit they tell themselves to justify what they already want to do.
lowtechcyclist
Fuck the Washington Post for calling that guy (that they’re putting in charge of the latest attempt to find a vaccines-autism link) a vaccine ‘skeptic.’
Skepticism is essential to good science, and can be satisfied by sufficient proof. This guy is a vaccine opponent.
No Nym
@satby:
@Matt McIrvin:
My mom died of COVID. The doctor insisted on putting “heart failure” as the cause of death on the death certificate, even though she was admitted to the ER, diagnosed with COVID, and moved to a room where COVID precaution protocols were posted on the door for the last week of her life. Her heart was fine, right up until it stopped because her other organs were failing and she could not breathe. By his logic, heart failure is the only cause of death for any of us.
bjacques
I had a good friend from the 1980s and 1990s who died of COVID just a few months before vaccines became available. A couple of years younger than me and relatively healthy as far as I knew. He went into the hospital and came out, but had to go in again and lever left. I still have his text on my phone telling me COVID is no joke. At least I could reassure him I was taking it very seriously.
Chetan Murthy
Measles protects you from getting cancer? Wuuuuut? Oh, I read online that researchers are repurposing measles viruses to kill cancers? Yeah, like they repurposes adenoviruses to deliver the COVID vaccine? Or (I read once) they repurposed herpes to kill cancers?
These fucking single-neuron-disease God-squadders. Why can’t God hurry up and do that Revelations thing where he calls ’em all back to his Kingdom, so we can have a decent world here on Earth?
Anne, I hope you’re feeling better! And thank you so much for this roundup, and for your tireless work of the last more than five years to keep us informed and healthy and alive! I know I’ve said it before, but it merits saying again: I’m sure you’ve saved lives, quite possibly including my own.
Miss Bianca
@Martin: I’m getting a titer draw tomorrow to check to see if I need an MMR booster. I was sort of surprised when my local public health agency wouldn’t just *give* me a booster, seeing as how it had to have been over 10 years since my last one. Had to get my doctor to authorize the titer before they would do anything.
Boy, was the public health nurse after me to get the flu shot tho’ – that’s something I skipped this year because all reports I was hearing was that this year’s model turned out to be relatively ineffective at controlling this year’s variants.
That’s another thing we’re going to have to get used to, as the evil bastards continue to take a sledge hammer to our public health system.
dc
How true, a dead person will definitely not be getting cancer.
WTFGhost
@JoyceH: Their other children had mild cases that responded to time, as do most cases of measles; their other children were also quacked over by a doctor who has RFKjr’s full support, which did nothing for them, but, that became the lede, “four of five children saved from measles death!”
During Covid-19, I read a report from a woman who sadly noted that her daughter didn’t manage her stress well, and that’s why she died of Covid-19, but, it wasn’t the fault of the pandemic, it was her fault, for not managing her stress better.
And of course, you get to hear parents who say “I know better than my child! My child doesn’t have gender dysphoria, because I forbid it! And if my child says they feel like dying, I’ll say that’s EMOTIONAL BLACKMAIL, which I also forbid,” which, for full effect, should be interrupted by a gunshot, just to see their reaction.
Don’t do this for real, of course. Human experimentation without full, informed, consent is not ethical! Not even if you provide them with a pair of Depends before the sound of the gunshot.
(I’m sorry – this is a serious thread. It’s just the “that’s EMOTIONAL BLACKMAIL” moment is my “that’s my secret, Cap’n. I’m always angry,” moment.)
@Matt McIrvin: I actually saw a conservative blog state that “we Republicans are more manly because we luuuurve them trappings of manhood like guns and killing and stuff.”
I was engaging in that time, and I gave the standard, mature gun-owners laugh. There’s nothing manly about liking guns; guns are tools, and it’s good to like ’em, if you need to use ’em, but most people have no use for them.
OMG, you never saw such a bunch of stuck male chauvinist piglets ever. Guns had to be manly, or, or, or, come on guys, you’re so close to getting it….
@lowtechcyclist: agreed.