• tal@lemmy.today
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    2 days ago

    your grandma lived a long life

    Hmm.

    So hypothetically, is a human avian flu pandemic expected to be like COVID-19, where mostly the elderly get killed?

    Or is it like the Spanish flu, which is believed to have killed by inducing cytokine storms, where the disease triggers the immune system to go into very high levels of activity that ultimately cause the human to kill itself? Because there, it was mostly the young and “healthy”, who had a strong immune response, that were killed.

    kagis

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mortality_from_H5N1

    Review of patient ages and outcomes reveals that H5N1 attacks are especially lethal in pre-adults and young adults, while older victims tend to have milder attacks and to survive.[37][38][39] This is consistent with the frequent development of a cytokine storm in the affected.[40] Few persons over 50 years of age seem to have become infected by H5N1, and very few have died following an H5N1 attack.[41] Instead, the age-fatality curve of H5N1 influenza attacks in humans resembles that of the 1918 Spanish pandemic flu, and is the opposite of the mortality curve of seasonal flu strains, since seasonal influenza preferentially kills the elderly and does not kill by cytokine storm.

    Welp. I guess that pretty explicitly answers that.

    Grandma may be the one burying people, not the one getting buried.

    • JesusSon@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      That’s the one you picked lol? Not the no such thing as viruses eh? Well, thanks for correcting part of it I guess.

      All sorts of shit could happen with H5N1. Maybe it plays out like H1N1 (Spanish Flu) as you said. Maybe the mutation that makes it transmissible between humans also makes it more like H3N2 or maybe it mutates on its own we get it just in time for the annual flu outbreak and we see a reassortment with H3N2. Or maybe the prevalence of H5N1 in farming communities gives it the chance for reassortment with H3N5 and that is what gives it the ability to transmit from human to human.

      H3N2 kills all sorts of old folks.

      Research showing the elderly are particularly vulnerable to severe outcomes during H3N2-dominant flu seasons: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7121031/

      A study demonstrating how reassortment between H5N1 and H3N2 can lead to highly pathogenic strains: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2842136/

      Anything can happen homie, it just needs time and inaction.

      Edit: structure

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Stop spamming for a for-profit search engine company. We don’t need to see your ads and they don’t need your help.

      So tired of seeing this daily “hail corporate” on Lemmy.

    • ubergeek@lemmy.today
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      2 days ago

      Grandma may be the one burying people, not the one getting buried

      Grandma will complain that kids don’t wanna work anymore, complain about her retirement fund vanishing before her eyes, and complain about shortages for a very specific soda she loves and her insulin in expensive.

      Because of leftists dei atheist mooslin nazis.