• 0 Posts
  • 67 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
Cake day: March 28th, 2024
  • SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoNews@lemmy.world•Why Conservatives Are Now Obsesses with Raw Milk
    1·
    3 days ago

    Yep, you and I are 100% on the same page.

    We also have a bit of land and a full-face respirator is the best for working with anything dusty, spraying weeds, or even just burn piles. Smoke in my face? Zero fucks given now.

    If I may, I recommend the Scott AV-3000. They’re a bit pricey but you can beat the hell out of them for years, can replace individual components, and they work with canisters, cartridges, SCBA, and supplied air, all of which use a bog-standard connector. If there’s any question on sizing, you’re probably a medium. 80+% of the adult population is medium, around 15% large, and less than 5% small. Large is barely larger, small is way smaller.

    I may or may not have had a job related to respiratory protection for awhile. Science is fun!

    If you ever have any questions, feel free to hit me up! Us friendly “reasonably prepared” types gotta stick together.

  • SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoNews@lemmy.world•Why Conservatives Are Now Obsesses with Raw Milk
    2·
    4 days ago

    It’s really hard to say - estimating with any certainly would be like estimating the likelihood of the lottery being won without knowing how many people are playing.

    What makes it tricky is the mutation that changes to human specificity may change specificity away from cows/birds. In that case, if there’s no opportunity for it to infect any humans, it just stops there. This may have happened multiple times already.

    I’d say it’s possible, incoming political idiots will make it more likely, and given how poorly they handled the last pandemic, it wouldn’t be unwise to make reasonable preparations in advance: respiratory protection, soap/sanitizer (it needn’t be antibiotic), maybe a bit of backup food and other daily supplies in case the shit hits the fan and supply chains get squirrely.

    I used to make fun of preppers before COVID (and still think many of them are a bit too paranoid, you don’t need a buried shipping container full of weapons), but we now have full-face respirators and a few months of dried food supplies.

  • SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoNews@lemmy.world•Why Conservatives Are Now Obsesses with Raw Milk
    11·
    8 days ago

    This goes beyond “show you sources” to “you need classes in genetics, microbiology, organic evolution, and maybe statistics”. For what it’s worth, I’m an educated and experienced microbiologist with experience in public health. I’m not sure how to cite what’s effectively a semester of college education and four textbooks into one comment. I can explain the basics and you can verify details if you’d like. I am more than happy to answer questions and point you towards where you might find more information on specific topics but citations for all of this would be a huge endeavor.

    There are two main reasons H5N1 isn’t human-to-human: specificity and, by its effect, low transmission. I’ll try to keep this super high level.

    Regarding specificity, viruses don’t infect cells at random. Instead, there’s basically a “lock and key” effect where the virus attaches to an external component (receptor) of the soon-to-be infected cell, then it releases its genetic payload. Much like how it’s pretty easy to pick most locks, it doesn’t need to be a perfect match, just close enough to get the job done.

    This is how you get some splash over between species, as there’s variation in both the virus and potential receptors due to mutation, and through random chance you might get a good enough match. The more exposure a virus has to potential receptors, the more likely it is that this will happen. If it happens, the particular mutation making this possible will be selected for in that individual or population, creating many more copies of a mutation that otherwise may have just died out. This is exactly what happens when a human gets infected with a zoonotic virus.

    Next we have transmission. Not all cells in the human body have the same receptors, so viruses can infect different parts of the body. This is partly why people get “head colds” and “stomach bugs” - that’s the region with the most cells with the target receptor. H5N1 isn’t particularly good at infecting human airway cells, so infected humans are fairly well dead ends as this blocks airborne transmission, its primary mode of spread.

    Currently, H5N1 is one point mutation, vastly the most common type of mutation, away from switching specificity to humans and infecting our airways. This is incredibly small and viruses churn out point mutations like crazy. Every time some dingus swills down raw milk, we’re rolling evolution’s random chance mutation dice. If just one virion has that single mutation and successfully infects that moron’s airway, it’s game on for a potential new pandemic. Evolution is just a numbers game and the more chances you give it, the more likely it is to happen.