Land of a Thousand Outbreaks

 

We've been looking at the avian flu situation for a few years, so I guess what I want people to know about what we are looking at with respects to future outbreaks or epidemic situations, what we have got is not a "plandemic" in the conspiracy-fueled mindset of people who feel like masks and vaccines and the like are social control mechanisms fueled by some Big Pharma control or whatever.  You know who has cared about avian flu? People who care about birds. We used to have a birdfeeder out back of Strangely Estates. Then, we realized it might not be a great idea to have random birds congregating together if we couldn't regularly ensure we were cleaning out old feed, rinsing off poo, etc. 

We still have the birdbath up. It's heated. We get starlings, cardinals, jays. I don't know if it's a good thing or not. I understand there's a lot of risk with avian flu re: waterfowl. I look forward to the seasonal influx of geese along the Delaware. I don't want to see what I think we will. There's a good chance H1N5 and H5N9 are everywhere. This is why there are higher egg prices and massive bird livestock culls--but we are also seeing H1N5 in dairy cattle herds. 

Zoonotic infections leaping from one species to another (as opposed to the outré conspiracy notion of "definitely gain of function fuckery") is a well-known pattern. For the most part, we don't have a "plandemic" situation so much as a "failure to plan" situation. So what will start with bird culls (a grisly process you want to read about at your own steeling of nerve) might be bovine culls later on. 

It's fuckery for food prices to be sure (my husband is a meatcutter, so I have a very specific bias about what this means for him.) But I've been a vegetarian before and know I can subsist on mushrooms and beans for a good long while.  

Unless we fail to plan for any kind of crop blight. Potato. Corn. Soybean. Wheat. Any massive crop. It's a risk you could foresee if there is a major climate issue like prolonged rain/flood conditions, or heat, It can create crop failures aplenty. You know, if there was a persistent threat like some kind of "climate change"--which would be worsened by people not recognizing it, or shutting down or failing to fund studies into anything like studies into crop fungi, or weather, etc.

Which is exactly what TrumpWorld is doing. They are cutting research into anything that helps us figure out how to continue feeding ourselves in the face of disaster. And they might fuck up how we source fertilizers and other necessary raw materials for agriculture via tariffs and the like, because they don't know how any of this works. Trump thinks groceries come from a supermarket and never really gets how farmers make his plates.  People actually touching land and working with animals and harvesting plants. 

But see, that isn't all. People are still dying of Covid-19, and we are having a very bad flu year.  We've got a bad measles outbreak in Texas. (And yes, a good part of the problem is under vaccination.)  And there's reports of TB in Kansas and Ohio.

In an authoritarian government, you can't count on reporting being accurate and can assume what looks bad might be worse. After all, in the first Trump term, he admitted to Bob Woodward that he "liked to keep the numbers down" regarding Covid testing.  The budget for testing and researching disease has been dramatically slashed by rosy-cheeked youngin's lead by a probably caliper-kook South African eugenicist.

And we might still see RFK, Jr. anti-vaccine kook, enter into this fray at the very exact worst time in history ever. 

I still have a stockpile of masks--how about you?