▲ 48 points
back
30 comments
I've seen at least 10 different articles about this and not one of them names the company involved. Every article just calls it "a Weld County egg-laying facility" or an "egg-laying operation in Weld County"
It's kind of disturbing that information about where our food comes from is being kept hidden from us. The same thing happens whenever there are major food recalls. The names of the companies where the contaminated food came from are rarely revealed to the public.
In this instance, a few articles say the name of the facility is being kept secret due to something called the "Livestock Information Protection Act". Googling "Livestock Information Protection Act" only returns articles about this incident. Assuming that the Livestock Information Protection Act is a real thing that actually exists, I'd be interested in learning why it exists.
These folks are so scared of transparency they've convinced representatives to make recording information about livestock production illegal. It's absolutely mind boggling that this isn't considered a big problem.
If you've seen documentaries like Earthings [1] its easy to tell why they want those video's to be illegal.
I saw a thing a few months ago where someone was trying to get some milk tested and the testing facility refused to do it without permission of the producer.
No law demanded this, it was just a business on one side of the industry looking out for the interests of one on another, to all of our detriment.
I think I found what you saw:
> You're right, Ailsa, it would really help to know if and how much virus is out there in the raw milk supply being sold now to people. But testing doesn't seem to be happening regularly, and that data is really hard to come by. That's why we tried to find our own. But when I brought raw milk that I bought from those four Texas farms to one of the few labs authorized by the USDA to test milk for bird flu, the lab insisted on calling each of the four farms first for permission, though the USDA has confirmed the agency doesn't require permission from farms to perform the test.
> None of the farms gave the lab permission to run the tests. They told the lab they were aware of what a non-negative result would do for their business. So the lab refused to test our samples. That means we weren't able to find out how much virus was in the raw milk being sold now in Texas, and probably it's very difficult for other members of the public to do that, too.
https://www.npr.org/2024/05/15/1251647612/a-bird-flu-outbrea...
reminds me of how the Seattle Flu Study blew the whistle on covid community transmission, during the start of the pandemic in the US.
at the time, the CDC only allowed testing for known exposures and travel to China. their lab wasn't authorized to test for covid. but they broke the rules and did so anyway, and when they saw positive cases they raised the alarm.
the CDC had the actual gall to threaten them, but the cat was out of the bag. the country couldn't bury its head in the sand anymore.
hopefully some USDA-unauthorized labs will test for bird flu, even if the official labs are too chicken.
That's it, thank you!
https://leg.colorado.gov/sites/default/files/images/olls/200... - Livestock Information Security Act, probably what's being referred to and was the first link returned by Google when I searched for your phrase of "Livestock Information Protection Act".
I'm guessing that is the act. Interesting that googling "Livestock Information Security Act" doesn't bring up any articles about this incident (at least not for me). The governor's office must have given the wrong name to the press at some point and everyone just ran with it without checking to see if it even existed.
It doesn't look like there's been any real discussion about that act online either.
Well... lazily scanning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weld_County,_Colorado and from there to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Greeley,_Colorado... leads to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=JBS_USA&oldid=123...
No other 'suitable' corporation is listed under any other place in Weld County.
While Wikipedia is possibly very incomplete, this still gives high confidence because of the sheer size, which lists JBS Greely as largest employer with 5,141 employees as of May 1, 2023.
That sounds like a lot of chicken, densely packed. And thus higher probability of such things happening.
Of course it could be some other, smaller farm, but how likely is that?
edit: changed into permanent links, just to be safe from edit wars, white-washing, whatever.
Doesn’t the anonymity reduce the incentive companies would otherwise have to hide or underplay infections?
It also keeps the public from learning about which companies have repeated problems. If we were allowed to know where our food comes from, and where contaminated or infected food comes from, we could avoid buying products from those places and reward the facilities that are cleaner, inspect themselves well enough to protect the public, and don't have a long history of making people sick. We could also pressure the government to do more about the facilities that have the most problems.
More incentive to buy from local farmers who you know where possible.
Given the name of the egg-laying facility is there a reasonable way for an egg buying consumer to figure out which brands of eggs at their local supermarket might contain eggs from that facility?
Not reasonably enough. I decided to stop buying eggs from Cal-Maine Foods after they were repeatedly caught price gouging/fixing. At one point early in the pandemic their profits were up 718% from last quarter. Their supply chain wasn't impacted and at the time there hadn't been a single positive test for avian flu at any of their facilities. (https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/California-lawsuit-al...) Their profits soared at a time when a lot of Americans were unable to work and were having trouble just paying rent and keeping bills paid.
It took some searching, including through their financial statements over the years, but I managed to get pretty long list of brands they supply and/or distribute for. I've got a list of brands to avoid, but I still can't be confident that other brands seen in stores are totally unaffiliated. As consumers we can only do our best though. If you can find a local farm with chickens, that's probably your best bet.
This is why I don't eat meat anymore.
I know H5N1 had a high fatality rate before the current streak of diagnoses. If I'm reading (1) correctly, the death rate since 2022, for all known cases worldwide, is ~27%. Still bad, but a massive reduction from the 50%+ it had before. Current cases in the US are mild, according to (1).
I have little faith in pandemic response after COVID, but there are a few things to keep in mind:
1) We managed to shove a decade of viral research into 18 months due to COVID-19. We now have mRNA vaccines, which can be made far faster than other types and can be switched more easily in production. People (well, more people than before) are willing to mask if they're sick, at least in my anecdotal experience.
2) Flu has been the one that public health officials, doctors, virologists, etc. have been watching for years. If you had asked someone in those fields what their thoughts on COVID-19 were in 2015, they would have asked "what the hell's covid?", but would have been able to give you a fairly complete picture of what was happening with the different varieties of influenza. The enemy is known, to the point where rural villages in Southeast Asia can have people quarantined for the virus.
3) Again, recent cases in the Western world have been mild.
Disclaimer: I am not an MD, DO, MPH, PhD, or anything else of that nature. I have never claimed to be smart. I am a dude on the internet. Listen to smart people before you listen to me and my one source.
> "This is why I don't eat meat anymore."
This is just one reason (though I think slightly different from what you're saying) why I don't eat meat anymore (the main one being my gallbladder was giving me pain when I'd eat meat/dairy - the doc wanted to take it out, but I found that going vegan solved that problem): Factory farms are very conducive to disease spread given the tight quarters the animals are raised in and can be viral evolution factories. But unless you're eating raw meat and drinking raw milk there's no worry about getting h5n1 from meat/dairy.
> [..] my gallbladder was giving me pain when I'd eat meat/dairy - the doc wanted to take it out, but I found that going vegan solved that problem
Very interesting!
Out of "scientific" interest, did you manage to fully recover your gallbladder functionality through your diet change? And secondarily, although you chose to go vegan, did you ever occasionally try back quality dairy or meat, without pain?
My main criteria is lack of pain. If you've ever had a gallbladder issue it's quite painful and the pain lasts for several hours and there's not a lot you can do about it after it starts. I haven't had an episode like this since going vegan. I do eat sardines occasionally just to make sure I'm not missing anything and that seems fine (no pain). Other than that I'm not too inclined to experiment since things are working well as is.
I see, and I can understand your take conceptually. I was asking as I coincidentally know a few people around me that have been having gallbladder issues recently.
Thank you for your reply!
At least in the US we will simply not even attempt to mitigate the next pandemic. Things like mask requirements and limiting contact are extremely polarized political issues now, our leadership is too cowardly to even attempt it.
Plus we now have concrete data that the most affected by far are disabled, poor, elderly, and minorities. Groups we broadly consider acceptable to harm for the benefit of everyone else, as a matter of national policy.
If you asked the virologists etc about "coronaviruses" instead of "covid", they would know.
There we go again. We should expect to see more of these things. Many closely related animals confined in a small space, with humans around, is not a good recipe.
"Given the presence of bird flu on the premises, all 1.8 million birds need to be culled, aka "depopulated." "
Can you picture 1.8 million birds? Now picture them all being gassed. Now, I'm not vegan but that's grim.
"Workers are tasked with placing the birds in the chambers, which only hold a few dozen birds at a time. In all, the method requires workers to have a high degree of contact with the infected birds, going from bird to bird and batch to batch with the carts."
What a great idea.
The US slaughters ~25 million chickens per day (9 billion per year).
It’s grim, but its not that much of an outlier.
What’s grim? 9.4 billion chickens are killed every year in the US. That’s 25.7 million a day
https://www.nationalchickencouncil.org/statistic/broiler-ind...
Grim is the thought experiment of imagining 1.8 million chicken's being gassed to death. It's nearly psychopathic to think it's not just because human's kill exponentially more everyday. Not to disimiliar to brushing off someone's dying in a car accident because there's over 40,000 motor vehicle fatalities a year.
But that's what we do, don't we? You don't care about someone on the other side of the world dying on the road, or the next city over. It's not even newspaper-worthy. It's just another day.
At least we're finding the mortality rate isn't the 50% of early cases. That's a significant relief.
(Presumably because we've been having low/no symptom cases that went undetected for a while.)
Paul Offit (infectious disease physician and vaccine expert) doesn't think that this h5n1 is likely to become a human pandemic:
Humans express the alpha-2,3 sialic acid receptor on cells that line the surface of the eye (which explains why the dairy farm worker in Texas had severe conjunctivitis). The alpha-2,3 sialic acid receptor is also found on cells that line the lung. However, and most importantly, the alpha-2,3 sialic acid receptor is NOT found in cells that line the upper respiratory tract. This means that H5 viruses cannot reproduce themselves in the upper respiratory tract and thus be easily transmitted from one person to another. It also means that H5 viruses cannot amplify themselves in the upper respiratory tract, where hundreds of virus particles can become millions of virus particles.
https://pauloffit.substack.com/p/h5n1-influenza-virus-bird-f...
Paul’s great but this is a little outdated. The variant in Colorado has both alpha-2,3 and alpha-2,6[0]