Posted on 06/23/2025 6:31:04 PM PDT by yesthatjallen
We have Walmart in Spokane.
https://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=Organic+Meat&find_loc=Spokane%2C+WA
Thanks. I can and do walk to Natural Grocers. And have to drive to Huckleberry’s but it’s not far.
May I suggest Maurice's Southern Gold BBQ sauce for the chicken?
It’s a mustard-based sauce that is an excellent tasty wonderful thing.
In fact, I need to add it to my shopping list.
If you can’t find it in any local store, Amazon has it.
I serioiusly mourn the loss of those poor chickens.
The PCR test is going to be similar in all countries. When you are looking for a specific genetic sequence, there is not a lot of variability.
There are other types of tests, but PCR is probably the most specific.
Mexico culled several million birds in 2024. They decided to go the vaccination route, which is highly controversial among poultry experts. This is because a vaccinated bird can still catch the disease and shed virus, even though its symptoms are mild or nonexistent. Other birds and people can get sick without even knowing they were in contact with an infected bird.
So, I should not have to explain to you that if nothing is present, you can't detect it.
And PCR does not "detect DNA at 1 part per quadrillion after 50 cycles." For one thing, "1 part per quadrillion" is meaningless in terms of describing PCR. For another, 50 or a quadrillion times nothing is still nothing.
You swerved into the problem.
You have no idea how much virus is in the animal, if it is in it at all. Positive result, kill a million chickens.
Doesn't matter if any of them are sick.
What an evil apparatchik you are.
Okay, I left out the part about all birds THAT CATCH HPAI die from it. I thought that was obvious. I guess I should have pointed out that we are speaking of domestic birds, since this is what the original discussion is about. My bad.
And, yes, I do have to understand disease processes in birds, as they often have direct impact on human health. Ditto for disease processes in insects, fish, and basically all animals that transmit diseases to humans.
sounds like you claim the immune system is mechanistic and deterministic. this is false.
I'm scared to even ask how you imagine the immune system functions. It is, in fact, a very "mechanistic" process. Living organisms are, literally, extremely mechanical with countless numbers of physical (in the sense of physics F=MA, E=MC2, PV=nRT, V=I2R, etc.) processes going on at any given moment. The response of the immune system to a foreign invader *is* physical and mechanistic.
simple counter example to prove you wrong: why people including myself get sick (say colds and flu) when they are physically weak stressed and not get sick when they are physical strong and not under stress?
I'm not sure how you think this "proves me wrong"? Proves me wrong about what, exactly?
When you are sick, you feel weak and stressed, so which actually came first--the sickness or the weakness?
Let's say you are stressed, which causes physical resources of your body to be depleted. If you aren't exposed to a pathogen during that time, you won't catch an infectious disease. If you are exposed to a pathogen, then the stress can affect how well the immune system works, since your energy is already depleted. So, yeah, you might feel worse if you are already stressed when you get sick. In any case, viruses don't care how stressed you are, they are physically interacting with cells in your body to make you sick. Those physical interactions aren't affected by your level of stress.
why do some individuals exposed the same way to an infections agent not get sick and others do, say on a Princess Cruise ship?
A couple of things are going on here. In order for someone to catch an infectious disease, they have to internalize a minimum number of pathogenic particles. Not everyone who is exposed gets a full infectious dose. The infectious dose is variable among different people, meaning that the number of pathogenic particles that makes one person sick doesn't affect a different person. Another factor is differences in individual immune systems. Some people's immune systems are more efficient at fighting an infectious agent than other people's. Finally, rarely, there can be differences in the cell surface receptors that the viruses use to enter cells. The viruses cannot physically infect people with variant receptors.
if there were no such thing as natural immunity, all life or bio-entities on earth would be extinct, including viri.
Um, I said that ALL immunity is natural. It is only antivax scammers who claim that the natural process of developing immunity is somehow unnatural when it is induced as a result of exposure to an inactive part of a pathogen instead of to an active infecting pathogen. I'd much rather get that immunity from a fragment of pathogen and be ready for when I actually encounter a pathogen.
‘vaccines’ or ‘gene therapies’ are not ‘natural’. they are man made.
Vaccines are, in fact, one of the most natural drug types we have. Every vaccine is taken directly from a pathogen which is inactivated so that it cannot cause disease.
You bring up gene therapy, which is really not relevant to a discussion of infectious disease, but I'll mention that gene therapy is developed using natural enzymes and natural nucleic acids. When it comes to actually creating biological systems, we're pretty limited. The most we can do is to copy and use what is already there.
my rebuke to your points given here are for others watching that they don’t get sucked into your pseudo-scientific lies and half-truths
Ah, I see. Because I don't repeat the pseudoscientific lies of antivaxxers and other charlatans, I'm somehow a liar.
Unlike just about any antivaxxer you can name, I can back up everything I say with actual scientific/medical documentation. Mostly it's in the form of articles published in the medical science literature, articles in which scientists describe their actual research and the results of the research.
It is actually irrelevant how much of a viral load is in the animal because the virus is actively replicating at that point, if the animal is not already dead. If it has the virus, then that virus is readily detectable. It is NOT the case that "we'll just keep running the PCR until some spurious something shows up after 60 cycles." That's not how anyone does PCR, nor is that how PCR works.
There are a lot of factors going on when diagnosing a disease. First, does the animal have symptoms? You wouldn't bother testing a flock if none of the birds are symptomatic. You test the flock when birds start becoming ill and dying.
In order to run the PCR, you extract the RNA, kill all of the DNA in the sample (which would interfere with the reaction), run a "reverse transcriptase" reaction to make new DNA that has the same or opposite sequence of the RNA, kill the RNA, then run the reaction with the clean cDNA (complementary DNA). In order to properly interpret the reaction, you set up a standard curve with known quantities of the target cDNA--for example, 1 ng, 10 ng, 50 ng, and 100 ng., along with a negative control. So, as you run the reaction, you are comparing the samples to the standard curve. You aren't necessarily trying to quantitate; you're just watching to make sure the samples are within the range you defined with the standard curve.
Let's say that something spurious starts showing up around cycle 48. You're going to have doubts about that sample. First, you'll compare it to the negative control. Does the negative control also have a spurious product? Then you are probably seeing primer dimers. If the negative control is clear, then I'll look at the size of the product (as I describe below).
The last step I'm going to do in that PCR reaction is to run an agarose gel and determine the size of the PCR products. If my primers are designed to amplify an 859 nucleotide long fragment, then that gel will show me whether the PCR products are the expected size. If the products are not that size, then something went wrong with the PCR and we can't accept any results from it. If the products are the expected size, they are amplified from the source RNA (cDNA).
So, the interpretation of the result depends on:
1. Symptoms of the animals.
2. If the PCR reaction "emerged" at a point within the limits of the defined standard curve.
3. If the PCR products are the correct size when physically examined. (This step is optional in some forms of PCR, but I always do it.) A spurious PCR product will NOT be the correct size. It'll be maybe 30 or so nucleotides long.
If all of these are consistent with a positive diagnosis of avian influenza, I would have no trouble telling those in charge of culling that the flock is infected and to move forward with the cull.
Now, a word about avian influenza. It is not a respiratory disease in birds. It is an intestinal disease. The virus is shed in feces. Chickens and other poultry readily step in their own feces, so it spreads quickly. Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI, like H5N1) can wipe out an entire flock within 24 to 48 hours. The culling is both for humanitarian reasons (so the birds don't suffer needlessly by dying from a virus) and for preventive reasons (the quicker the affected flock is euthanized and the area disinfected, the less chance of the virus spreading to another flock). Would you rather cull 10,000 birds or allow the virus to keep spreading to eventually kill millions of birds?
Kary Mullis, the guy who shared a Nobel Prize for inventing PCR, said it should never be used as a diagnostic test.
I didn’t bother reading your cut-and-paste garbage. You are obviously an administrative state bureucratic zombie.
bureaucratic
‘oh my.’ you’re still there. thanks for at least responding to my critique.
well. let’s pull out some of what you say. all of it is bunk, imho, but the leaven corrupts the whole lump as God says.
1. ‘all birds THAT CATCH HPAI die from it.’ ‘...speaking of domestic birds,...’
nonsense. i know of farmers and backyard owners whose flocks got the virus and didn’t cull. while a large portion died, enough domestic survived to continue farming.
also even the NIH has studies comparing bird mortality and say wild or semi-domesticated duck flocks hardly notice the bird-flu. also a lot of these studies cull chickens deemed fatally sick before they actually die.
so your initial statement is false. either you are lying or you are woefully ignorant.
ah well, that’s enough. why go on. you’re already ‘dead’ wrong, again. i could similarly attack all your other assertions as well. may God forgive you. given what you say and how you say it, you may indeed have a lot of innocent blood on your hands. turn to Him and he will set you on the path of wisdom.
“I didn’t bother reading your cut-and-paste garbage. You are obviously an administrative state bureucratic zombie.”
Lol! Do you think anybody but you believes that?
It’s like watching the Black Knight from The Life of Brian insist “’Tis but a scratch!”
Kary Mullis never said any such thing. In fact, what he said was that PCR should not be used to try to quantitate the viral load because that is irrelevant to the disease process. If you have an infection, does it seriously matter whether you have 1,000 or 1,000,000 virus particles per milliliter of serum?
I didn’t bother reading your cut-and-paste garbage. You are obviously an administrative state bureucratic zombie.
Cut and paste? If I cut and pasted anything, surely you can find the original source that I copied? Try again, if you really want to humiliate me, SHOW that I copy/pasted from some source. Since my description of PCR comes directly from my experience designing hundreds of PCR assays and running thousands of PCR reactions, I think you'll have a hard time finding that description anywhere. But if you were one of my students that I was teaching how to do PCR, I'd be verbally telling you all of that information. Much of scientific knowledge, the knowledge of how to do science, is not contained in any printed format, but is passed verbally from teacher to student. What I gave you was a very condensed form of what I would tell a student that I was teaching.
Let's be very clear: there are many different influenza viruses, each of which manifests differently.
HPAI means "highly pathogenic avian influenza" and is known to wipe out flocks within 24 to 48 hours. H5N1 is an HPAI.
There are also "low pathogenic avian influenzas" (LPAIs) which cause mild symptoms, if any symptoms appear at all. You may have known some backyard farmers whose birds got sick and recovered, but those birds certainly did not have HPAI. They had LPAI, or a mild coronavirus, or a mild adenovirus, or something... but it wasn't HPAI. And you don't know what they had since no testing was done.
What I am talking about in all of my posts is strictly HPAI. Although an LPAI can mutate to become an HPAI, the danger from an LPAI is remote. The danger of an HPAI is immediate. That's why public health officials take it so seriously.
also a lot of these studies cull chickens deemed fatally sick before they actually die.
That's because it is cruel to allow animals to die from a disease that is going to kill them. Whenever I have done animal studies, I had a list of symptoms to watch out for so that I knew when to euthanize an animal before it suffered too extremely. When they are debilitated, having difficulty moving, unable to groom themselves, losing a lot of weight--we don't stand back and wait for them to succumb to the disease. We euthanize them before their suffering becomes too great, according to the American Veterinary Association standards.
I will point out that there have been massive wild bird die-offs caused by HPAIs. They don't typically make the news, so most people are completely unaware of them. Any time massive numbers of wild birds die, though, it is a big public health concern both to domestic birds and to humans and pets, since we and our pets are susceptible to many bird diseases.
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