[_heimdall]

> The CDC/FDA assumed culling was better, I’m not an expert.

You are taking an agency's assumption as a fact though, its functionally yours at that point. It doesn't matter if someone else says it, it matters if you agree with the logic of how they got there.

> And the point has always been to prevent a human outbreak, not reduce egg prices.

Human transmission has yet to be proven. Culling hundreds of millions of birds to avoid human transmission when we don't even know if that's possible seems idiotic at best, sadistic at worst.

[seanmcdirmid]

> Human transmission has yet to be proven.

Only the quacks say that, the science is firmly in the corner that not only is bird (or bat) to human transmission is possible, it has already happened a few times this season.

This is where having someone like Trump as president isn’t just annoying, but downright deadly.

[_heimdall]

> Only the quacks say that

Not long ago the CDC itself was saying that mammals couldn't catch this strain of avian flu and we had nothing to worry about. Then they found a few milk cows believed to be infected, but they assured us it couldn't kill cows and that the infection couldn't be transmitted through milk.

Where along the way did we go from scientific knowledge that it couldn't jump to humans to only quacks believing such nonsense? More importantly, where are the controlled studies proving transmission from infected birds to humans?

Proving transmissibility of such a pathogen would require something along the lines of Koch's postulates. Unless I missed something extremely important, we haven't done this type of study yet.

[orwin]

I'm not following what CDC said as I'm not from the US, but in my country we had early warning of a big flu season. Poultry farmers were advised to get the flu vaccine in October last year (it's decentralised in my country so it might only have been a local directive), so I doubt a scientific paper ever said 'mammals can't catch this strain'.

[_heimdall]

My point wasn't that transmission had been scientifically disproven though. My point was that the CDC itself was saying that this avian flu couldn't jump to humans - they no longer say this but the earlier commenter claimed that only a quack would say human transmission hasn't been proven.

Where I would expect a scientific paper to come in is to provide a controlled study show transmission from an infected bird to a healthy human. Maybe that has been done, but if so I haven't seen it or ever heard it mentioned anywhere.

[seanmcdirmid]

> My point was that the CDC itself was saying that this avian flu couldn't jump to humans - they no longer say this but the earlier commenter claimed that only a quack would say human transmission hasn't been proven.

Almost all medical research is in the field, and they don't do controlled studies on humans anymore to see if they can get bird flu or not by being in contact with infected birds (can't get it passed the ethics board). It feels like I'm arguing with someone on the spectrum, who states that "we didn't think it was this way before, but now we think it? Impossible!" It is an exhausting argument and I really don't think it is worth our time, except that guy is now president - sigh.

[_heimdall]

You're still missing the point of my raising that the CDC in recent history claimed that transmissibility isn't possible from birds to humans. They didn't claim we don't know if its possible, they claimed that it isn't which implies that scientific research has found that transmission didn't work.

Raising that here is important because in an earlier comment you said only a quack would claim that transmissibility hasn't been proven.

You even seem to acknowledge here that it hasn't been tested or proven yet, or that we even bother testing it today. Field research is all well and good, and it often is the best we can do in the moment, but that doesn't change what the research and data shows.

We don't do controlled studies to test transmissibility, meaning we don't test for transmissibility, meaning it has yet to be proven. I'm not sure how that chain of reasoning leaps to the realm of quackery.

> "we didn't think it was this way before, but now we think it? Impossible!"

There's a solid argument behind this view though (to be clear, I don't see that as an argument Trump has made).

Science is a well defined process. When we haven't studied transmissibility for whatever reason we simply can't say that transmission isn't possible.

As soon as the CDC gets out over their skis and makes that claim without scientific research to back it up they turned a scientific question into a political one. They can't say whether transmission is possible or not. By making this claim they're only trying to reassure the public of something they want people to believe but can't actually prove.