Summary
A study reviewing 1,500 research papers found that 90% of pregnant women who contract bird flu (H5N1) die, with 87% of their unborn babies also dying.
Most surviving babies are born prematurely.
While human cases are rare and usually result from direct contact with infected birds, the findings highlight the vulnerability of pregnant women, who often face exclusion from vaccine trials and public health programs.
Experts stress the need for pandemic preparedness and ethical studies on vaccine safety in pregnant women as H5N1 continues to spread globally.
FML. I read this headline and during lunch, shared it with some coworkers. One was a pregnant mom. And I’m pretty sure I unlocked a new fear.
“While human cases are rare and usually result from direct contact with infected birds”
and currently, possibly by drinking raw milk
Yeah, but only raw chicken milk, and hardly anyone drinks that stuff.
wait, milk of raw chicken or raw milk of alive chicken?
phew we dodged a bullet there
That line needs to be in the fucking headline. They’re tricking people into clicking with headlines vaguely mentioning bird flus and viruses that sound dangerous, but don’t actually spread person to person. All they care about is money despite the fact that they’re adding miniscule amounts of stress and fear to many thousands of people’s lives.
Wow, so clearly the party who values the unborn will take strict and swift measures against H5N1 and advocate nation-wide for vaccination once it’s out…
… right?
Best I can do is bitch about masks
on the contrary. if the woman dies you no longer have to worry about her getting an abortion. so the bird-flu is pro-life in that way.
Steady on there with your blasé attitude to vaccines. We don’t need no herd immunity, and they cause 5g. /s
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Ah, shit, dude, you’re right, I forgot that talking about one of the most traveled-to and traveled-from countries with 330 million people whose government is going to be an anti-vaxx disinformation superspreader, is likely to restrict vaccinations, and is therefore liable to make an H5N1 pandemic substantially worse globally is off-limits for discussion as long as the study in the article was performed by an Australian doctor. Me and my US-centrism, grr.
Do you count blood samples and vaccination as some kind of sinister “medical experiments”?
Vaccine trials are in fact medical experiments. Not sure where you’re getting ‘sinister’ from
It’s implied by the previous posters’ word choice
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Vaccines are very well understood, the reason for those exceptions is the very high complexity and sensitivity of pregnancies, there’s no significant indicators of danger but they aren’t willing to risk missing some unknown.
women are enrolled in vaccine safety studies, sometimes those women will inadvertently become pregnant, and there’s an opportunity to ethically study what happens to those women.”
This is the point of the study, the point of the article, the interest being advocated here by Dr Rachael Purcell. Conducting vaccine trials on pregnant women.
This is essentially the exact opposite of what you’re saying. This is just collecting data on a group of women who only incidentally end up fitting the criteria. Nobody’s selecting pregnant women to expose them to anything.
As the vast majority of the population are not pregnant women
…there is no reason to try to change whatever bad is expected to happen to them. I can understand your point, but it doesn’t sound humane to me
Am I still half asleep and missing something? That 90% fatality rate is huge, why is this not bigger news?
Because eggs are like $4.50, so we’ve collectively decided that we need to detour through right wing populism and relitigate basic human rights and democratic principles before we can do anything else.
It’s not like it’s 90% of CEOs. Just their brood mares. COVID was less discriminate.
Probably because the number of infected is relatively low and human-to-human transmission isn’t confirmed yet. But I agree, that’s a scary % and I’m afraid no action will be taken until it’s a full blown pandemic and then it’s too late.
shhh, they’re saving the good part for later when we’re in pandemic 2.
I’m a bit confused about bird flu’s spread. I keep seeing that getting sick tends to happen with exposure to infected birds, but does that mean that it can still be transmitted from human to human as easy as other flus?
No, not yet. But it’s spreading between and among more and more mammal species, which shows that the virus is changing. The next mammal species it adapts to could be humans.
Or it humans could be the third or fourth mammal down the line, which could still be very soon if it spreads to pets.
Two of my childhood friends are both pregnant right now. Fuck.
The disease is still very rare, and human-to-human transmission has never been recorded. Right now, the main risks are infected birds or raw cows milk, (because apparently cows can also transmit it). The big concern right now is that transmission between different animals seems to be getting more common, which means the virus is changing. And it could 100% make the jump to human-to-human transmission at some point soon, especially as cases increase; Every new patient is a chance for the virus to mutate and begin spreading.
It’s one of the reason that the raw milk conspiracy theorists have become so dangerous recently. They’re quickly going to become the new COVID anti-masker super-spreaders if the virus mutates because they won’t stop drinking raw milk.
It’s still very rare in humans. The headlines make it sound a lot worse than it is currently. It could easily change and become bad, but it’s not there currently.
Unless they’re involved with factory farms, they’re unlikely to be in serious risk by the time they give birth.
ETA: 61 total reported cases in the US so far.
61 cases of an extemely virulent disease is actually a lot and should be concerning, but not a reason to panic. It is a good idea to be mentally ready for when it does start spreading between humans so we can quarantine without panic buying toilet paper.
Thanks for putting things into context.
There are two potential issues with the study mentioned. Small sample size and most cases with pregnant women were in developing countries. My guess is that death rates among pregnant women are probably higher than normal, but not as severe as 87%. That number will probably come down as more cases are recorded.
Sure, but imagine it’s only 20 percent. That’s still disastrous. On the other hand, I am sure in 3 generations the survivors will have excellent immunity against the bird flu.
Agreed, the message to pregnant women is stay far away from this. Even if the number drops drastically, it is higher than anyone would want it to be.
The issue of the developing nations is not as valid as one might think - if one looks up the case reports mentioned in the study(P.50&ff) some of them have been treated with the full scale of modern critical care, in one case including ECMO and treatment also often included the current antiviral protocols according to the current guidelines at the times of the infection. (Which often actually were not recommended at the times during pregnancy due to the high likelihood of fetal developed damage.
While of course it can be argued that the accessibility of care might have been worse in these countries and treatment might have been started later (some case reports are inconclusive on that) the same is often the case in US case reports for the very same reasons.
The small number of patients included is also a bit of an issue, but there are simply not many reports available - the author did even include chinese-only reports in her study, so it’s not for a lack of trying. This is sadly often a problem in emerging diseases, as they provide very low case numbers in the beginning or over their whole lifetime.
Additionally the scientists in the PRC since COVID are far more cautious what they publish, if they publish at all. And sadly most of the high quality papers on bird flu before COVID came from there.
Shitty situation and highly concerning.
90% in a small sample size isn’t going to magicslly become 10% in the general population, and even if it did 10% is still a very high death rate.
I fully agree with you, the number will still be terrible. But it will probably be lower than 90
Wow
Hey what about us straight white adult males?
I didn’t know this until recently, but pregnant women are kinda different than regular women because a fetus counts as a foreign body (since they are a combo of parental DNA), almost like getting a donor organ. Much like the meds you’d get if you got a donated organ, mother’s bodies shut down large parts of their immune systems in order to not reject the fetus, which puts them at high risk like organ recipients. I had no idea.
Oh dang, that sounds incredibly dangerous and just as hacky as I would expect from nature.
So is bird flu the next global pandemic? Are we going to learn anything from last time? Or are we gonna push the same authoritarian shit we did last time with no scientific backing.
“Wear masks and stay 6’ apart.”
Oh the humanity!
Which part is the authoritarian?
- Mask mandates
- Hygiene guilnes
- Testing requirements
- Social distancing
- Vaccinations
Or something else?
Conveniently forgets to include the most authoritarian thing in ur list. Id say the restriction of movement and forcing u to id urself at every place u go is pretty authoritarian. Also nothing against vaccines but forcing people to have it violates the concept of informed concent (thats what we charged the nazi docters with).
Only the future knows.
Hindsight is always 20-20, I don’t think it was malicious for us to require masks and such when we hadn’t dealt with a pandemic like COVID for literal decades.
Coordination between agencies internationally helped somewhat, masks helped somewhat, distancing helped somewhat. The sum of these contributions is what helped blunt the initial deadly edge of COVID-19.
We know more now. Let’s do our best and keep friends and family safe.
Requiring masks was the right thing for covid…
I agree. I’m going to reword what I’m saying a little, thanks.
It was only the old and those with existing conditions at risk denying the liberty of the majority who where not at risk is a little extreme. Security at the cost of liberty is tyrany. Why sacrifice the liberty of the 99% for the security of the 1%.
There’s an old saying, “one judges the merit of a society not by how it treats its strongest, but by how it treats its weakest”.
What do you think?
That thats a complete load of shit. Darwinian evolution foes bot favour those who favour the weak.
We can be more than our basic nature. With that simplistic reduction of individual people’s value comes a question, why even work on healthcare problems?
Do you contribute to society? And you have no health problems at all, and never will?
