Experts say current US outbreak is unlikely to end without intervention with further mutation of virus likely

Summary

A new H5N1 bird flu variant has become “endemic in cows,” with cases detected in Nevada and Arizona, raising concerns about human transmission.

Experts warn that without intervention, the outbreak will continue, but Trump has cut CDC staff and halted flu vaccination campaigns.

The virus’s spread coincides with a severe flu season, increasing the risk of mutation.

The administration has also stopped sharing flu data with the WHO and shifted its containment strategy away from culling infected poultry, raising fears of inadequate response.

  • dmtalon@infosec.pub
    53·
    6 hours ago

    Curious about your diet, and where you get your food? Also curious how that scales to 350 million people (to feed the US)?

    I’m not remotely implying what we’re doing, as a society, is right or sustainable but it’s super easy to just say “Just stop doing bad things”.

    Solutions, at scale are quite complicated and nuanced. Private companies that grow our food at scale now will only participate if it’s profitable.

    Also, if you’re not sustainably growing your own food, are you not just like the rest of us (Part of the problem)? I know I don’t have the land, or time to grow my own food.

    Sticking our head in the sand (current administration) is definitely not gonna turn out well, so I’m guessing there’s some fun times ahead! <sigh>

    • throwback3090@lemmy.nzEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      Mostly beans, wheat, and oats, in different form factors. More salads.

      Your body only requires a tiny amount of protein and that’s also the easiest thing to replace.

    • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml
      91·
      4 hours ago

      It scales far better than animal-agriculture. Eating plants directly is massively more efficient compared to growing crops feed where most of the energy is lost in the process

      The research suggests that it’s possible to feed everyone in the world a nutritious diet on existing croplands, but only if we saw a widespread shift towards plant-based diets.

      […]

      If everyone shifted to a plant-based diet we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops.

      https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

      Transitioning to plant-based diets (PBDs) has the potential to reduce diet-related land use by 76%, diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by 49%, eutrophication by 49%, and green and blue water use by 21% and 14%, respectively, whilst garnering substantial health co-benefits

      […]

      Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].

      https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/html

    • lumpybag@reddthat.comEnglish
      111·
      5 hours ago

      You think scaling plant based food is harder than scaling a meat industry? I’m a meat eater but come on… It is not hard to get to place mentally that humans could easily live on plant based foods. People choose to eat meat because it’s what they believe to be is delicious and what their parents raised them on.

      Maybe DOGE should cut all the subsidies the meat industry gets, upwards of $40 billion and we can see what the real price of meat should cost.

      • throwback3090@lemmy.nzEnglish
        2·
        2 hours ago

        Lol they aren’t trying to actually reduce expenses. If they did there’s clear places to go (we don’t seem to want to use our military, why do we spend 1/3 of our national budget on it?).

        The goal is to inject confusion and uncertainty into everyone’s lives and to pwn the libs who think government is capable of doing good.

      • dmtalon@infosec.pub
        1·
        2 hours ago

        That’s not at all what I said. The meat Industry already exists and is scaled profitable, even if it’s terrible for our planet.

        I said to get any scale of another version, it’s going to have to be as equally profitable or corporations are not going to go for it.

        Sustainable, scalable and profitable.

    • aeternum@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      9·
      5 hours ago

      I try to buy local fruit and veg only. Fun fact: if we all went vegan, we could free up 70-80% of the land currently being used for animal ag. We could rewild that land and still have excess food. We currently grow enough plants to feed 15B people, but we feed that to the animals instead.

      • NSRXN@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        62·
        5 hours ago

        We currently grow enough plants to feed 15B people, but we feed that to the animals instead.

        a lot of the plant matter fed to animals is parts of plants we can’t or won’t eat.

        and a lot of the land used isn’t crop land, but grazing land

        and they’re is no reason to believe the land would ever be rewilded.

        • tree_frog@lemm.eeEnglish
          9·
          5 hours ago

          It’s mostly corn.

          Granted, it’s not processed in a way to be fit for human consumption.

          But still, most of it is corn. Some of it is corn cobs and stalks but most of it is kernels.

          Outside of that, other grains are very common. Oats for example.

          So, they are right. Raising plants to feed animals so we can eat the animals is less efficient than raising plants for us to eat. Especially in regards to cattle. Which is one of the most inefficient things in the US food system. The only reason it’s so cheap is because of subsidation, both of the cattle and the corn that’s grown to feed them.

          And countries much larger than our own survive on rice and beans just fine. As queerminest eluded to in her comment.

          As far as local food, I have a co-op. So I buy local vegetables and fruits when I can.

          • NSRXN@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            12·
            5 hours ago

            Raising plants to feed animals so we can eat the animals is less efficient than raising plants for us to eat.

            if that were the situation, you might be right. but since we actually feed livestock mostly crop seconds and byproducts, it’s actually a conservation of resources in a lot of situations, with minimal competition with human food sources

            • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml
              4·
              4 hours ago

              Where they emit the most methane and still are given supplementary feed. There’s also not enough land to sustain a grazing only production system with the massive demand we have

              We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates

              […]

              Taken together, an exclusively grass-fed beef cattle herd would raise the United States’ total methane emissions by approximately 8%.

              https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401/pdf

          • NSRXN@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            22·
            5 hours ago

            it’s not mostly kernels. livestock are fed the entire plant, and the kernels are a slim minority of the weight.

        • lumpybag@reddthat.comEnglish
          5·
          4 hours ago

          Even just replacing 25-50% meat with plants in the US would have incredible outcomes for the people. I guarantee we would be a far healthier population. The cheap meat being served up to Americans is not good.

        • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml
          1·
          4 hours ago

          Still results in overall reductions in arable-land usage. Even more than just eliminating 100% of food-waste

          we show that plant-based replacements for each of the major animal categories in the United States (beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs) can produce twofold to 20-fold more nutritionally similar food per unit cropland. Replacing all animal-based items with plant-based replacement diets can add enough food to feed 350 million additional people, more than the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food loss.

          https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1713820115

          Grazing usage isn’t free from harms either

          Livestock farmers often claim that their grazing systems “mimic nature”. If so, the mimicry is a crude caricature. A review of evidence from over 100 studies found that when livestock are removed from the land, the abundance and diversity of almost all groups of wild animals increases

          https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb

      • dmtalon@infosec.pub
        12·
        5 hours ago

        My point is, you try to… I try to also, but in the dead of winter there’s no a local fruit and veggies. I’m also not vegan/vegetarian, I eat meat. Fish, and chicken primarily but I don’t raise either, so I have to rely on someone else to do that for me.

        We do actually get probably half our eggs from someone at my wife’s work, and some. fruits and vegetables at the farmers market down the street in the summer. But they’re closed now and have been most of winter.

        It’s harder than just saying “just stop” was my point. I’d love to be part of the solution where I can but there’s zero chance of me not eating meat if it’s available.

        • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml
          4·
          4 hours ago

          It’s worth noting that environmentally, where the food comes from matters far far less than what you eat. Production emissions are far larger than any transportation emissions

          Transport is a small contributor to emissions. For most food products, it accounts for less than 10%, and it’s much smaller for the largest GHG emitters. In beef from beef herds, it’s 0.5%.

          Not just transport, but all processes in the supply chain after the food left the farm – processing, transport, retail and packaging – mostly account for a small share of emissions.

          This data shows that this is the case when we look at individual food products. But studies also shows that this holds true for actual diets; here we show the results of a study which looked at the footprint of diets across the EU. Food transport was responsible for only 6% of emissions, whilst dairy, meat and eggs accounted for 83%.

          https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

    • infinitesunrise@slrpnk.netEnglish
      5·
      5 hours ago

      Vegan here. Sticking to the two questions you asked before you got lost in scope creep and logical fallacy: I get my food from the supermarket, mostly. And it scales way better than animal ag because farming plants requires radically less resources per calorie than farming animals.

      Just like most other positive decisions in the world, it’s not revolutionary on it’s own. Nor is it aiming to be, nor does it need to be.

      • dmtalon@infosec.pub
        2·
        5 hours ago

        I don’t disagree with your general sentiment, but what I see as responses here are often empty responses… Just the obvious “we should stop being terrible arbiters of our planet”. Like no shit, but it’s hard and MOST humans are not gonna ever be vegan/vegetarian unless forced.

        • throwback3090@lemmy.nzEnglish
          1·
          2 hours ago

          What a strange thought. How would you define the driving factor behind any food consumption other than forced?

          • dmtalon@infosec.pub
            1·
            3 hours ago

            I am 100% in that category. I have some aspirations to be in a lifestyle where I catch a lot of my own fish but zero desire to move off animal protein to a vegetarian lifestyle.