The Bird-Influenza Link (and More About Cicadas)

[McCamy Taylor]

Still sick with flu so still Googling. Question of the day: why do cicadas emerge either every 13 or every 17 years? Those two number are 4x plus one. About 6-12 months before cicadas emerge bird populations go down, suggesting that cicadas take advantage of some natural phenomenon that will reduce the number of their biggest predatory threat and therefore increase their own chances of survival. But what happens to birds on an every 4 year basis?

I found one thing--avian influenza epidemics.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2660440/

Avian influenza virus (AIV) persists in North American wild waterfowl, exhibiting major outbreaks every 2–4 years.

Every 2-4 years. If you are an enterprising species and want to play it safe, you will assume every four years. Then, you will time your emergence for some multiple of four plus one. Can I call this a "bingo"? Cicadas are not responsible for the flu. They just benefit from it. Like Donald Rumsfeld whose company made a gazillion bucks off Tamiflu.

There is more:

Avian influenza viruses (AIVs) in wild waterfowl constitute the historic source of human influenza viruses, having a rich pool of genetic and antigenic diversity that often leads to cross-species transmission. Although the emergence of H5N1 avian influenza virus onto the international scene has captured the most attention, we do not as yet understand the mechanisms that underpin AIV persistence and dynamics in the wild. We developed a novel host–pathogen model intended to describe the epidemiology of low pathogenic AIV in temperate environments. Our model takes into account seasonality in migration and breeding together with multiple modes of transmission. AIVs have been detected in unconcentrated lake water, soil swabs, and mud samples. Laboratory experiments show that AIVs persist and remain infectious in water for extended periods. However, so far, the possibility of environmental transmission of AIV has been largely overlooked. Our work shows that environmental transmission provides a parsimonious explanation for the patterns of persistence and outbreaks of AIV documented in the literature. In addition to their scientific importance, our conclusions impact the design of control policies for avian influenza by emphasizing the dramatic and long-term role that environmental persistence of pathogens may play at the epidemic level.

[Dale Neiburg]

1. But the question I'm still looking for an answer to:

How do you count all those years underground?

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

2. Interesting.

But it's still true that most of the new strains of flu come straight from China, where they raise water fowl and pigs together, so the two species get to swap viruses back and forth quite merrily.

In fact, for a long time it was thought that the 1918 flu epidemic originated in Kansas, but further research once again puts it back to China. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/01/140123-spanish-flu-1918-china-origins-pandemic-science-health/

To me the most interesting sentence is this:

Historian Christopher Langford has shown that China suffered a lower mortality rate from the Spanish flu than other nations did, suggesting some immunity was at large in the population because of earlier exposure to the virus.

That's basically the same reason so few old people in this country (and probably the rest of the world) even got that flu, let alone died: some fifty years earlier they'd been through an epidemic of a similar type A flu. And if the Chinese are in general a lot more resistant to flu because of steady, ongoing exposure, that's a bad thing for the rest of the world because to them influenza is a relatively mild nuisance, not so much a potentially deadly disease.

If influenza viruses were mutating in North American wild waterfowl populations and then getting loose in humans, it would be very obvious by now. There would be lots of outbreaks of very different flu types in North America. We just need to hope that our farmers don't take up a form of animal husbandry that puts the wild waterfowl in close contact with domestic pigs.

I find epidemiology totally fascinating. If you haven't had a chance to read Spillover by David Quamen, do so. It's all about diseases moving from animals to humans, the conditions that allow that, and so on.

[McCamy Taylor]

3. Ask Google and you shall receive. Beringia.

http://jvi.asm.org/content/89/12/6521.full

Remember, birds can fly, so they can navigate a strait that would have stopped our earthbound ancestors in their tracks.

Since there is more human/bird interaction in Asia where people buy live birds at market and take them home to butcher, there is probably more bird to human spread in Asia, but that does not mean that the flu itself does not start in North America and go to Asia.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

4. Absolutely fascinating.

Thank you for posting that link.

First off, I had no idea that anyone was researching flu viruses in wild waterfowl, and that alone is amazing.

Fortunately, as the paper acknowledges, the movement of the influenza virus in those birds only affects them, not humans. And actually, the birds don't get sick, they simply harbor the virus and shed it.

Clearly if the rest of the world did certain things as is done in China, influenza would either be vastly more deadly or perhaps, as in China where they seem to have a strong resistance to flu, but it's good that

. . . Koreans and Japanese have a low cultural preference for live-poultry market systems, which in mainland Asia are the source of illegally moved poultry and poultry products, plus the added difficulty of smuggling live birds or uncooked product across the Pacific Ocean with current transportation security measures.

[lunasun]

7. + Rec Spillover also. In separated sections so do not have to read all at once

It's been out a long time so probably can find used or at the library

[MFM008]

5. Imteresting

Did anyone see the article in the past few days about another flu pandemic like 1918?
The death number were shocking.

[McCamy Taylor]

6. Its all over the tabloids, but that does not make it untrue.

If we get the proper antigenic shift (and note that flu does not just have random mutations, it has a process through which is actively changes so that it can do its nasty work more successfully) and a new strain emerges for which we do not have sufficient natural immunity, a whole lot of people will get very sick, particularly if it takes off during a high travel season. And it will affect lots of young and healthy people (less natural influenza immunity from past infections), meaning they will live longer before they die and more resources will be spent trying to save them--ICU beds etc.--straining medical resources.

That is why creating a working flu vaccine and some new working antiviral agents is so important. The flu vaccines are losing their effectiveness. Ten years ago, they worked. Now, even when they guess right on the virus, the vaccine only ameliorates the virus, it does not prevent it. And since it does not prevent infection, that means the infection can spread. Tamilfu worked great when it first came on the market but now it is like placebo. The flu virus must be adapting in some way, maybe because all those chicken farms use it. We need to catch up, before flu catches us unprepared.

My worry is that the pharmaceutical industry makes more money treating disease than eradicating or preventing it. That has always been the way with the U.S. healthcare system. And countries with single payer like the UK still make a ton of money selling drugs in the U.S. so they also have an incentive to keep lots of people sick and buying medication. So, I am afraid that all we will see is weak vaccines and newer versions of Tamiflu, each medication patent and increasingly expensive and priced out of the reach of the third world and widely administered to the world's domestic poultry flocks meaning that resistance will develop quickly.

Maybe China will save us. As far as I know, China still spends more taking care of their own sick people than they do selling meds abroad (they sell a lot of durable medical goods but I think their pharmaceutical industry is still pretty small) and since intellectual property rights are an iffy item in China, maybe they will save us. Come on China! You can do it!

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

8. What China needs to do is change its animal husbandry practices and shut down the

live animal markets. They may spend a lot of money taking care of their sick people, but the are at the very origin of flu epidemics. And they're doing nothing at this point to change that.

I also tend to cast a certain amount of skepticism on the periodic reports that we are going to have another influenza epidemic as terrible and deadly as the one in 1918. Some of the conditions that made that epidemic so bad were things like our country continuing to ship infected soldiers off to Europe to fight the War and crowding them together in less than sanitary troop ships. Also, many of those soldiers had come from farms where they'd had little lifetime contact with others, had rarely gotten ill, and so their immune systems just were not up to the challenge of the flu.

In addition, simple hand washing is the single best public health measure there is, and back then lots of homes did not even have running water. One reason the rule about washing your hands before a meal was so strong was that that might be the only time in the day you'd actually wash your hands. Today, even as badly as many people perform that task, they're still likely to be washing their hands many times during the day.