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Kristi Noem Killed Her Dog—Then Ruined This GOP Fundraiser
Kristi Noem defends apparent threat against President Biden’s dog Commander: ‘Say hello to Cricket’
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Published May 5, 2024, 11:14 a.m. ET
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South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem stood by a passage in her upcoming book in which she chided that President Biden’s troubled dog Commander should “say hello to” Cricket, the 14-month-old dog that she recalled shooting.
Noem stressed that Commander, who was removed from the White House last fall following dozens of biting incidents, had presented safety issues to staffers and Secret Service agents.
“Joe Biden’s dog has attacked 24 Secret Service people. So how many people is enough people to be attacked and dangerously hurt before you make a decision on a dog,” Noem told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “That’s the question that the President should be held accountable to.”
The Republican governor ducked a question from moderator Margaret Brennan about whether she was saying “he should be shot.”
US health officials warn dairy workers are at risk from bird flu
There’s no question H5N1 bird flu has ‘pandemic potential.’ How likely is that worst-case scenario?
Unprecedented scale of outbreaks raises new concerns, scientists warn
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/h5n1-bird-flu-pandemic-1.7193384
Lauren Pelley · CBC News · Posted: May 04, 2024 1:00 AM PDT | Last Updated: May 4
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This story is part of CBC Health’s Second Opinion, a weekly analysis of health and medical science news emailed to subscribers on Saturday mornings. If you haven’t subscribed yet, you can do that by clicking here.
As early as 1997, just a year after H5N1 was first discovered, there were warning signs this form of avian flu was capable of wreaking havoc far beyond birds.
That year, poultry outbreaks in China and Hong Kong were linked to 18 human infections — and a third of those people later died.
In the decades that followed, alarm bells from the scientific community rang louder and louder. H5N1 began infecting dozens more species, from tens of millions of wild and farmed birds, to raccoons and foxes, to seals and sea lions to, most recently, U.S. dairy cattle. The virus eventually caused more than 800 human infections around the world with a stunning death rate — for known cases — of roughly 50 per cent.
“The increasing host range of the virus, [its] potential spread among mammals and between a mammal and a human, its wide geographical spread, and the unprecedented scale of the outbreaks in birds, raise concerns about the pandemic potential” of H5N1, warned a May editorial in leading medical journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
Given those factors, an avian flu pandemic may feel not just inevitable, but imminent.
Yet the reality is murkier. Though influenza viruses have a knack for rapid evolution, this one hasn’t managed to adapt to sustain human-to-human transmission, despite circulating for the last three decades.
“But that could still potentially happen,” said epidemiologist Timothy Sly, a longtime influenza researcher and professor emeritus with Toronto Metropolitan University’s school of public health.
“And if it ever did happen… it would be a global health catastrophe.”
‘Are we watching the beginning?’
So how likely is that kind of worst-case scenario? And if H5N1 does start spreading person to person — in a month, or a year, or a decade — what would its impacts really be?
CBC News talked to several researchers, including those studying H5N1 now and others who’ve followed influenza trends for decades, to help unpack the crucial unanswered questions around this virus’s capacity for sparking a possible pandemic.
“Are we watching the beginning? Is this where we’re seeing repeated spillovers that one day take off? Or is it like in COVID, where suddenly there’s a cluster of human cases and then it’s too late?” questioned Louise Moncla, an avian flu researcher and assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
There’s no way to know, she says.
That’s why scientists like Moncla are watching the virus closely to understand its transmission patterns and ongoing evolution, all to spot early signals that a storm may be brewing.
The spread of H5N1 among U.S. dairy cattle in recent months, and data trickling out from the department of agriculture, offered a treasure trove of genetic sequencing for scientists to sort through.
Several research teams, Moncla’s included, recently reached similar conclusions: The virus likely spilled from birds into cows as far back as late 2023, and spread undetected among cattle for months before the first cases were reported this March.
Moncla’s ongoing analysis of the sequences released to date also outlines how the currently circulating form of H5N1 — a lineage known as 2.3.4.4b — features some concerning mutations.
“There’s no smoking guns,” she quickly said. “There are some mutations that have occurred that may enhance replication in mammals, but some of the mutations that we would be really worried about, we’re not seeing.”
LISTEN | The next pandemic?
The Current19:35Could H5N1 become the next pandemic?
Those include adaptations that would allow this virus to better bind to human-specific receptors in the upper airway, which would give it the ability to transmit easily between people. Without that kind of notable shift, H5N1 infections in humans usually end up hitting dead ends.
Take the recent instance of a worker infected in Texas. An overview of the case, published Friday in The New England Journal of Medicine, outlined how the worker was in close contact with sick dairy cattle, and developed eye inflammation and broken blood vessels as a result. The virus identified in the worker’s specimen also had a previously seen genetic change that’s associated with viral adaptation to mammalian hosts.
But the individual didn’t develop any respiratory symptoms — nor did any household contacts fall ill.
So what would it take for onward transmission to occur? Very little, evolutionarily speaking.
“Influenza is a virus that does mutate fairly easily,” said Dr. Jennifer Guthrie, an associate professor with Western University in London, Ont., who specializes in pathogen genomics and infectious diseases.
“The longer things circulate, there is always the possibility the situation could change.”
Scientists trying to confirm human cases
Despite those concerns, what’s particularly muddy right now is how a rising number of cattle infections are impacting farm workers, beyond the Texas case that occurred back in March.
Veterinarians and physicians in states with dairy cattle outbreaks told The Associated Press there are multiple reports of farm workers falling sick, but confirming cases is proving challenging for one key reason: Many workers are reluctant to get tested.
“You have groups of individuals that don’t have close contact with health care for various reasons,” said Guthrie. “Maybe they’re vulnerable populations like migrants, or language is a barrier.”
State health labs have also sent around 25 human test samples to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) so far, and another 100 or so workers are being monitored.
The risk of going from a few sporadic cases to “something of international concern” is “not insignificant,” CDC principal deputy director Nirav Shah said Wednesday, Politico reported.
“We’ve all seen how a virus can spread around the globe before public health has even had a chance to get its shoes on. That’s a risk and one that we have to be mindful of.”
WATCH | 2 known human cases:
Human bird flu case linked to U.S. dairy cattle outbreaks
1 month ago
Duration2:32A person in Texas who had close contact with infected dairy cattle has been diagnosed with bird flu. It’s the country’s second known human case after the virus was discovered circulating among dairy cows across at least four U.S. states for the first time.
Moncla also says the risks are real, but questions whether government data is being shared fast enough — and fully enough — to help scientists unpack what’s at stake. It’s not clear exactly how many people will be tested going forward, or how proactive officials are being to find potential new cases or clusters, she warns.
The full tally and severity of human infections could provide added insight, revealing whether there are high numbers of infected people with mild or no symptoms, or if there’s still a major evolutionary barrier — like scientists hope — that’s keeping this virus from striking humans on a regular basis.
There are also burning questions, Moncla says, about how exposure pathways play a role.
How different are these infections when someone, say, inhales large amounts of virus while slaughtering an infected chicken, compared to someone who gets sick after milking a cow? And what are the links to symptoms, from mild eye inflammation all the way to deadly respiratory illness?
“Filling in that missing gap is pretty important,” Moncla said.
Death rate remains hazy
Sly, in Toronto, also stresses the need to understand H5N1’s potential impacts, should it ever begin spreading person to person. In particular, determining its true death rate is a question the epidemiologist has been trying to answer since the early 2000s.
By that point, the World Health Organization had estimated that the case fatality rate for avian flu in humans was roughly 60 per cent. If such a death rate were to be sustained in a pandemic, Sly and other scientists wrote in a 2008 paper, H5N1 would represent a “truly dreadful scenario.”
But the team’s own analysis of surveillance data, along with blood test studies to determine prior exposure to the virus, concluded the virus’s case fatality rate in humans was likely closer to 14 to 33 per cent.
Far more human infections have been reported since then, including those that may be flying under the radar, suggesting the true death rate could be even lower still.
“Globally at least, we’re probably not catching many cases, so the denominator is, I suspect, an underestimate to some degree,” said Guthrie. “Someone having something really, really mild probably wouldn’t even know they have influenza.”
Even so, Sly warns the impact of a new flu virus sweeping through the population would grind society to a halt, causing high levels of death and illness.
The case fatality rates of prior influenza pandemics have ranged from less than one per cent, during the 1957 and 1968 pandemics, to an estimated 2.5 per cent in 1918, which studies suggest may have killed anywhere from 23 to 50 million people around the world in just a few years.
- Scientists warn Canada ‘way behind the virus’ as bird flu explodes among U.S. dairy cattle
- SECOND OPINIONWhy dangerous bird flu is spreading faster and farther than first thought in U.S. cattle
The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by a coronavirus rather than influenza, had a case fatality rate of up to 8.5 per cent in early 2020, according to one analysis, which later dropped to 0.27 per cent by late 2022.
If H5N1’s human death rate was any higher than those, Sly said, “that’s getting up there to absolutely catastrophic or disastrous terms.”
The problem, he says, is we simply don’t know exactly what’s going to happen “if this thing spreads into humans.”
Calls for enhanced surveillance, testing
Without swift intervention and active surveillance, the possibility of H5N1 infecting more humans — and gaining those fearsome adaptations allowing its onward spread — could start to rise dramatically, multiple scientists warn.
In a report published in early April, European health authorities outlined various necessary measures, including enhancing surveillance and data sharing, careful planning of poultry and fur animal farming, and preventive strategies such as the vaccination of poultry and at-risk people.
On Friday, federal officials said Canada is planning to expand its surveillance for avian flu amid the growing outbreak of H5N1 in U.S. dairy cattle, with monitoring efforts now set to include testing of milk being sold on store shelves.
But there’s concern in both the U.S. and Canada that actual government efforts aren’t going far enough.
- Person diagnosed with bird flu in Texas after contact with cows
- Pasteurized milk includes remnants of H5N1 bird flu, U.S. officials say
- 52 commercial and backyard flocks in B.C. have been infected with bird flu
“People working with cattle should have blood testing done, on a regular basis, to see if it’s popping up among that group,” said Sly. “Canada assumes the 49th parallel is a barrier against viruses, and it’s not.”
He says countries can’t afford to look the other way, given the possibility of this virus eventually making its last few evolutionary leaps.
“It doesn’t seem possible,” Sly said, “until suddenly it is possible.”
A
No One Knows How Far Bird Flu Has Spread
https://www.wired.com/story/bird-avian-flu-us-cattle-h5n1-human-infection-missed-cases
With little incentive for US farmers to test their cattle, and many undocumented laborers on dairy farms, the full scale of the outbreak is unclear.
IN LATE MARCH, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced it had detected cases of bird flu in dairy cattle. Initially discovered in dairy farms in Texas, Kansas, and New Mexico, there are now 36 confirmed outbreaks in dairy herds in nine states.
Although the H5N1 virus circulates widely in wild birds, it is now circulating among dairy cattle in the US. The USDA has confirmed transmission between cows in the same herd, from cows to birds, and between different dairy cattle herds.
But the reported outbreaks are likely to be a major underestimation of the true spread of the virus, says James Wood, head of veterinary medicine at the University of Cambridge. “It’s likely there is going to be a fair amount of underreporting and underdiagnosis,” he says.
Tests by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of retail milk samples might give some indication of how widespread the virus is. The agency found viral fragments in one in five samples of commercial milk, although this virus had been deactivated by pasteurization so was not infectious.
So far there is only one confirmed human infection in the outbreak: someone in Texas who had close contact with dairy cattle. Their only reported symptom was conjunctivitis, and the individual was told to isolate themselves and take an antiviral drug for flu. But anecdotal reports of illness on dairy farms hints that infections among humans may be more widespread than official data suggests. Although human infections have tended to be rare, the virus is dangerous—just over half of the human cases recorded by the World Health Organization over the past two decades have been fatal.
Dairy workers are most at risk of possible infection in the current outbreak, but understanding the extent of any infections is extremely tricky, says James Lawler, professor of infectious diseases at University of Nebraska Medical Center. More than half of workers in the US dairy industry are immigrants, and many of them are undocumented.
These undocumented workers are unlikely to want to put themselves at risk by coming for testing, Lawler says. “There’s an inherent disincentive that many of the workers, because of their status as undocumented immigrants, are not raising their hands.” The result, Lawler says, is that it’s difficult for scientists to track any possible spread of the virus through humans.
Another issue is incentivizing owners of dairy farms to report when their animals seem sick. The USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service specifically provides payments for poultry farmers who have to kill their livestock due to bird flu infections. Dairy farmers don’t get compensated for reporting infections, which incentivizes producers to keep quiet, upping the risk that outbreaks get out of hand and spread to other cattle or farm workers.
This presents a major problem for tracking the spread of the disease. “From the perspective of a producer, how is it going to benefit them to share or even test and understand if there’s a virus circulating in their herd?” Lawler says.
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On April 24, the USDA ordered that dairy cattle must receive a negative test for the H5N1 virus at an approved laboratory before they can be moved out of state. Owners of cattle herds in which dairy cattle test positive must also provide data about their cows’ movements and other information. Laboratories and state veterinarians also have to report positive H5N1 tests to the USDA.
At the moment, scientists are focusing on raw milk as a risk factor for transmission to humans. While H5N1 infections in poultry usually result in respiratory illnesses, in cattle the virus seems to mainly target mammary glands, which might explain the high amount of virus found in raw milk from infected cows. At least two cats that drank milk from infected cows on a Texas farm later died and their bodies tested positive for the infection.
A surprisingly large number of Americans also drink raw milk. According to one study, 4.4 percent of US adults reported consuming raw milk at least once in the past year, while 1.6 percent reported consuming raw milk once a month or more often. On TikTok, a whole community of raw milk drinkers espouse their enthusiasm for the unpasteurized white stuff.
Neither Lawler nor Wood recommend drinking raw milk. “I for one would not be drinking unpasteurized milk, not that I would anyway, knowing there are many other diseases it can transmit,” says Lawler. Raw milk can carry bacteria such as salmonella, E. coli, listeria, and campylobacter, and was associated with 1,909 illnesses between 1993 and 2012, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That number is likely to be a significant underestimate of the true number, as most cases of food poisoning go unreported.
The FDA recommends that people do not consume raw milk, and the sale of raw milk is already illegal in 24 states. In some states raw milk can be sold only on farms, while others permit sales in retailers. Tests conducted by the USDA indicate that pasteurization—a process of heating milk to kill contaminants—deactivates any infectious virus within the milk.
On May 1, the USDA reported that it had not found H5N1 virus in samples of raw ground beef taken from retail shelves in states where dairy cattle had tested positive for the virus. “These results reaffirm that the meat supply is safe,” the USDA said in a statement.
Natural Gas Is a Climate Scam — and Consumers Are Paying for It
South Dakota Governor Shot Her Dog and Goat—See PETA’s Response
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Published April 29, 2024 by Sara Oliver.2 min read
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem admits that she shot and killed her 14-month-old dog, Cricket, who attacked chickens, as well as a goat she says smelled “musky.” She reveals this in her soon-to-be-released book, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward.
PETA is making it clear that there is no reason to shoot animals—and points out that Noem should have found a humane dog trainer, kept the puppy away from chickens, or even found a different home for Cricket:
“Most Americans love their dogs, and we suspect that they’ll consider Gov. Noem a psychotic loony for letting this rambunctious puppy loose on chickens and then punishing her by deciding to personally blow her brains out rather than attempting to train her or find a more responsible guardian who could provide her with a proper home. Noem obviously fails to understand the vital political concepts of education, cooperation, compromise, and compassion.”—Colleen O’Brien, senior vice president of media relations at PETA
Kristi Noem Shot Her Dog and Goat—Here’s What You Can Do to Help Animals
Every animal is someone. It’s speciesist to believe that farmed and captive animals, like goats, don’t suffer or feel emotions to the same extent as the animals with whom we lovingly share our homes, like dogs.
Exposing the Big Game 