Like colds or heart attacks, this or that bird flu will be with us forever, and we will have to learn to live with it. There is simply no way to stop a virus spread by migratory birds.
People will be infected here or there. We've spent $1.5 billion on culling. Where is the research on treatment????
https://www.wesa.fm/health-science-tech/2025-03-05/pennsylvania-migratory-birds-flu
Louise Moncla, assistant professor of pathobiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, was part of a panel of experts who testified last week to a joint hearing of the state House committees on agriculture and health.
Moncla’s lab is tracking the avian flu virus. She said the virus causing the outbreak that started three years ago is harder to contain than viruses from previous outbreaks. In 2015, she said the U.S. culled about 50 million domestic birds and halted a bird flu outbreak. This time around, more than 160 million birds have been euthanized, and the virus is still spreading.
Moncla said past avian flu outbreaks were mainly spread by birds on farms. But now, it’s wild birds that are responsible for the spread of the flu.
“Because these wild birds are migratory, these viruses can be spread very far geographic distances very rapidly when these birds migrate,” she said.
… There are many low-severity varieties of avian flu circulating in wild birds, Moncla said. Different viruses can get mixed together, making new viruses that can increase the risks for agriculture and for humans.
If the virus reaches cattle, which it has in other states, it’s hard to stop it from spreading, Moncla said. That leads to human exposure risk. She said Pennsylvania is doing well in monitoring for bird flu in cattle and milk.
According to the USDA, “Since late 2021, six separate introductions of Eurasian HPAI H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b have been documented into the migratory wild birds in the North American flyways…“
So they will keep on coming. They will mutate. They will kill some animals and maybe some people. And if we were not looking for them in people, we might never even know they infected people. They seem to be most harmful in domestic chickens and cats and some wild birds.
Many herbs and several drugs have been suggested as being possibly effective.
When COVID hit, the powers that be claimed no drugs worked against SARS-CoV-2. They hid from us what they knew, and failed to do the obvious experiments to find additional effective treatments.
Here is what we need to do:
- Do selective breeding experiments to see if we can breed resistant poultry
- Test all those herbs (or this other collection) and drugs to see which have activity against avian flu. Find out why it was not already done.
- Properly investigate how the infection is being transmitted to cows, especially non grazing cows in winter, and then come up with potential preventive e measures. Right now we recommend various preventives that so far have not worked, while throwing up our hands, saying we don’t know the mechanism(s) of transmission. Putting the cart before the horse again.
- See what happens to a chicken house that isn’t culled after a detection. Feed infected chicken meat to animals (raw and cooked) and see if the virus is transmitted. If not, humans can safely eat the meat too. We probably have been already.
- Basically, we do everything we can to manage this—and then we LET IT GO. We explain to the public what we can and can’t do. We can’t eradicate it.
- We stop the GOF research before some deadly strain escapes the lab and we have a real problem on our hands.