Posted on 05/20/2024 1:24:29 PM PDT by Red Badger
New findings show that a strain of the H5N1 influenza virus has developed only a minimal capacity for airborne transmission. In March, the United States reported its first detection of the highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza in dairy cattle, with outbreaks spreading to nine states by May. The transmission method among cattle remains unclear. However, a study published in Nature Communications revealed that a similar H5N1 strain, subtype clade 2.3.4.4b, which previously caused an outbreak in farmed mink in 2022, was capable of airborne transmission to a small group of ferrets.
This is the first time that a member of the group of H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b viruses has been shown to exhibit this ability. According to the Penn State researchers who led the study, the findings suggest these viruses are evolving to infect mammals and with potentially increased risk to humans.
“While there is no evidence that the strain of H5N1 that is presently affecting dairy cattle is capable of airborne transmission, our study suggests that another member of this family of viruses has evolved some degree of airborne transmissibility,” said Troy Sutton, associate professor of veterinary and biomedical sciences, Penn State, and corresponding author on the paper. “This finding underscores the importance of continued surveillance to monitor the evolution of these viruses and their spillover into other mammals, including humans.”
Methodology of Virus Assessment According to the researchers, assessing a virus’s potential for airborne transmission in mammals could inform the understanding of its potential risk to humans. Since virus samples could not be readily obtained after the outbreak in mink had been controlled, the team reconstructed the virus using publicly available genetic sequences.
Next, the researchers evaluated the ability of the virus to transmit in ferrets, which have respiratory tracts that are more similar to humans in their susceptibility to viral infection and transmission than other model organisms, such as mice. The team measured both direct transmission of the virus by placing infected ferrets in cages with uninfected ferrets and indirect airborne transmission by placing infected and uninfected ferrets in cages that enabled shared airspace but prevented physical contact. To assess disease severity, the team examined the ferrets’ weight loss and signs of clinical illness.
Findings on Virus Transmission The researchers found that the virus was transmitted by direct contact to 75% of exposed ferrets and by respiratory droplets to 37.5% of exposed ferrets after about nine days of exposure. The team also found that the virus had a low infectious dose, meaning that even small amounts of virus caused an infection.
Sutton noted that the mink strain of the virus contained a mutation, called PB2 T271A. To test the influence of this mutation on viral transmission and disease severity, the team engineered the virus without the mutation and found that mortality and airborne transmission in the ferrets infected with this version of the virus were reduced.
“These findings suggest that the PB2 T271A mutation is enhancing viral replication of the virus, contributing to both virulence and transmission in ferrets,” Sutton said. “Understanding the role that this mutation plays means we can monitor for it or for similar mutations to arise in the currently circulating strains of H5N1.”
Implications for Human Health Sutton added that the ferrets that the team used in its studies had no preexisting immunity to influenza, whereas the majority of humans have been exposed to H1N1 and H3N2 seasonal influenza viruses.
“This exposure would likely offer some degree of cross-protection against H5N1 if humans are exposed to another H5N1 variant,” he said.
Furthermore, he said that the transmission rate the team observed in the mink virus is lower than is typical for pandemic influenza viruses.
“Pandemic influenza viruses typically transmit via the airborne route to 75% to 100% of contacts within three to five days, whereas the mink virus we studied transmitted to fewer than 40% of contacts after nine days,” Sutton said. “The transmission observed in our studies is indicative of increased pandemic potential relative to previously characterized strains of H5N1; however, the mink virus does not exhibit the same attributes as pandemic strains. The H5N1 strain affecting cattle also has not caused severe disease in cattle or humans, but the longer the virus circulates, and the more exposure humans have to it, the greater the chances that it will evolve to infect humans.”
Reference: “Risk assessment of a highly pathogenic H5N1 influenza virus from mink” by Katherine H. Restori, Kayla M. Septer, Cassandra J. Field, Devanshi R. Patel, David VanInsberghe, Vedhika Raghunathan, Anice C. Lowen and Troy C. Sutton, 15 May 2024, Nature Communications. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-48475-y
This research was conducted in Penn State’s Eva J. Pell Advanced Biological Laboratory, a high-containment biosafety level 3 enhanced laboratory that is regularly inspected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the United States Department of Agriculture.
Other Penn State authors of the paper include Katherine Restori, assistant research professor in veterinary and biomedical sciences, as well as Kayla Septer, Cassandra Field and Devanshi Patel, all graduate students in veterinary and biomedical sciences. David VanInsberghe, postdoctoral fellow; Vedhika Raghunathan, graduate student; and Anice Lowen, professor of microbiology and immunology, all at Emory University, also are authors of the paper.
The National Institutes of Health and National Institute of Food and Agriculture supported this research.
Why the constant posting of the scare/scamdemic media? I for one, do not believe any of the crap about new viral diseases coming our way. If they are new, they are likely man made at Ft Detrick.
Not to pick on the posting person, but this is just flooding the internet with more stories about another scam.
They evil NWO scientists developed and designed it that way. Kiss your a55 good buy!
The left is ramping up the fear porn in anticipation of the elections.
If they can *warn* everyone for months, then it gives them more credibility with the gullible sheeple.
Then anything that goes around can be labeled as *bird flu* whether it is or not and the lockdowns begin.
Bird flu may be an air borne virus. That’s funny right there 🤣🤣🤣
STILL don’t care.
Covid too so big fd!
Is ‘Avian Flu’ Anything to Fear?
BERT OLIVIER MAY 18, 2024
The very fact that, as Mercola indicates, avian flu has been ‘weaponized’ in various ways that make it far more likely for humans to be infected by it, is a smoking gun marking foul play by those who could not, and did not want to, leave well enough alone.
For one thing, given that before this superfluous research the avian flu virus was not airborne, and thus less likely to infect humans who were not in contact with infected animals, it requires no genius to infer that certain parties (known to us all) had every reason to want to increase its lethality.
They should be arrested on the basis of natural or common law, on grounds of having shown themselves to be inimical to the human species, of which they can hardly be said to be legitimate members.
https://brownstone.org/articles/is-avian-flu-anything-to-fear/
Well birds can fly.
There is nothing they can do to scare me into a shot.
Hardly a new one, h5n1 first appeared in humans almost 30 years ago.
On FOX8 News here, about 2 or 3 weeks ago, the news broke on the bird flu,in Texas, broke here. The main speculation was chicken farms were using straw or hay in the chicken barns, collecting it and the waste from the chickens and shipping it to dairy farms as cattle feed. The dairy cows got the bird flu. The milk had bird flu in it. Do you see the link, stop feeding cattle contaminated feed. I wonder if the FDA or EPA had something to do with this.
In the General/Chat forum, on a thread titled Pandemic Potential: New Research Shows H5N1 Bird Flu Can Transmit Through Air, metmom wrote: The left is ramping up the fear porn in anticipation of the elections.
If they can *warn* everyone for months, then it gives them more credibility with the gullible sheeple.
Then anything that goes around can be labeled as *bird flu* whether it is or not and the lockdowns begin.
Sadly, an influx of heavily vaxxed people are anticipated to become ill and be falsely diagnosed as a 'disease X' victim. How else can the Deep State hide the fallout from the Covid 'vaccines'?
Everyone died from the last bird flu scare.
That’s right.
Vax mortality will be passed off as bird flu mortality, thus reinforcing the fear porn and lockdowns and mandates.
h5n1 with a couple of gene tweaks would be the near perfect means of culling half to 80% of the population. It already has that high of a fatality rate in humans no need for any edit there. It also can infect, birds, pigs, cows, and marine mammals so the food supply vector is covered. All that’s needed is the protein coat to make it survivable in aerosol form for a few hours time so it can go truly airborne not droplets but like measles or smallpox carried on submicron particles that every mammal breathes out just living. Given that is exactly what was done to covid and covid then had the highest R0 ever recorded it’s well within human technical means to add that to H5N1 wouldn’t be that hard a college level lab with the protein sequences could do it. You couldn’t come up with a more effective way to halve the population than that.
LOL! There ya go! What are the odds?
A more perfect bioweapon than H5N1 would be hard to find only airborne Ebola would be better at 80 to 90% mortality rates. Given that the people the DS want to cull is exactly who should refuse the vaccine it’s a diabolical efficient plan. All they would need to do is tweek the outer protein coat so it can survive in the air for a few hours time and then the people they want dead will refuse to take the cure it’s genius actually. Added benefit is a 50% death rate would wreak the world economy for a generation they get socialism in spades as a bonus prize.
Bring it.
I volunteer to be ‘patient zero’.
Must be an election coming up
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