There's a new illness going around

[thewayne]

And they don't really know what it is. Doesn't test positive for flu or covid, symptoms similar to both and can turn into pneumonia. Seems to have a low mortality rate at the moment, which is not uncommon with pneumonia. It's shutting down schools and school districts in ten states from losing teachers, students, and bus drivers. Currently it's in Texas and east/north of there, but that means it has probably established itself well in the west, but the numbers haven't blown up yet.

I have no idea if it's spreading in Europe yet. If it's not yet identified, it's not easy to track. But with international air travel, with numbers like these, it's probably already around the world and possibly the next pandemic.

Time to start masking up again, which I'm starting today. Of course the big problem is that the Center for Disease Control is no longer trustworthy, and we're withdrawing from the World Health Organization - at least that process takes a year.

This write-up has a good summary of some of the symptoms and what it's doing in schools. She's a good follower of outbreaks and has a medical background.

https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1867959.html

Comments

[acelightning73]

Apparently some of the "swine flu" strains came about when pig farmers had a pond where they put all the pig shit, and random waterfowl landed on the pond and the virus migrated between birds and pigs, and eventually into the human who tended the pigs. And pigs are biologically a whole lot like humans - there are a couple of people who received pig kidneys as transplants, and the transplant took very well. And in med school they use pigs to teach anatomy, and they practice suturing on pigs feet from the meat market, because pig skin has a texture very much like human skin. So if bird flu infects pigs, it's going to jump to humans.

And chicken prices are going up - some news item about how much people were spending on Football Day snacks mentioned that chicken wings were a lot more expensive than they were last year.
And I found out that if a house cat eats a tweety bird that's infected with bird flu, the cat will get sick and die. I just hope my ferals don't eat any tweety birds in the yard.

[thewayne]

Brave new world.  Pity we can't reload the game back to some point before 2015.

[acelightning73]

I think the swine flu was before 2015 - I remember it was going around when I was in college, and I graduated in 1969. So people with pig farms had migrating ducks landing in their manure pools before that date. I just want to tell all my feral cats not to eat tweety birds.