bird flu: maybe not a problem

here in Asia, for years we have reports of humans catching bird flu, usually from close contact with chickens or who ate chickens who had the disease (i.e. instead of slaughtering them and burying them they sold the meat). Wikipedia has a long article on bird flu.

The scary part is that some think bird flu via pigs was behind the Spanish flu epidemic.

The zoonotic and spatial origins of the influenza virus associated with the "Spanish flu" pandemic of 1918 have been debated for decades. Outbreaks of respiratory disease in US swine occurred concurrently with disease in humans, raising the possibility that the 1918 virus originated in pigs. Swine also were proposed as "mixing vessel" intermediary hosts between birds and humans during the 1957 Asian and 1968 Hong Kong pandemics. Swine have presented an attractive explanation for how avian viruses overcome the substantial evolutionary barriers presented by different cellular environments in humans and birds. However, key assumptions underpinning the swine mixing-vessel model of pandemic emergence have been challenged  

so what is the present report on humans caring for these animals in the USA?

CDC report:

The first known cluster of human influenza A(H5) cases in the United States associated with poultry exposure occurred in Colorado; 109 (16.4%) of 663 workers performing poultry depopulation reported symptoms and received testing, and nine (8.3%) of the workers who received testing for influenza A(H5) received a positive result. All nine cases were associated with mild illness, with conjunctivitis as the most common symptom.

translation: nine of the 663 people working with these infected animals got sick from bird flu.

remember: the high mortality in other countries might have been because most people who got sick never went to the doctor to be tested, only the very sick ones, and many rural workers eat low protein diets so have less ability to fight infections.

And remember: The high mortality of Spanish flu might have been because of civilian malnutrition due to the famines caused by food blockades in world war I: and the high death rate in military due to a high viral load transmitted in crowded barracks.

So I suspect the bird flu will not be worse than Asian flu or Hong Kong flu, and after the covid kerfuffle, where panic led to unnecessary prolonged shut downs etc that probably caused more deaths than the disease I suspect civilians will no longer trust doctors even if this does morph into a major cause of death in the near future.

My cynical take: That is why the powers seeking to boss the world around by health regulations are pushing hysteria on MPox...

As for MPox: the answer to that is keep your pants on, get treatment early, and don't touch your kid if you have open pox lesions.