In Reply to: Does Trump want China to invade Taiwan? posted by mh on November 27, 2025 at 10:32:42
A nasty, highly contagious virus is spreading across the country ahead of the holiday season — and it’s not the flu or Covid.
Norovirus, also called the “winter vomiting disease,” has been rising across the nation since as early as mid-October, especially in states like Louisiana, Michigan and Indiana, according to data from WastewaterSCAN, an academic program through Stanford University in partnership with Emory University.
With data through Nov. 21, Amanda Bidwell, scientific program manager for the WastewaterSCAN program, said norovirus wastewater concentrations have increased nationwide by 69% since October.
“Right now, we’re in the high category for norovirus at the national level,” she said. Rates are high in the Northeast and Midwest region, according to wastewater data.
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The bird flu virus that has been spreading among wild birds, poultry and mammals could lead to a pandemic worse than COVID-19 if it mutates to transmit between humans, the head of France’s Institut Pasteur respiratory infections centre said.
The highly pathogenic avian influenza, commonly called bird flu, has led to the culling of hundreds of millions of birds in the past few years, disrupting food supplies and driving up prices, though human infections remain rare.
“What we fear is the virus adapting to mammals, and particularly to humans, becoming capable of human-to-human transmission, and that virus would be a pandemic virus,” Marie-Anne Rameix-Welti, medical director at the Institut Pasteur’s respiratory infections centre, told Reuters.
The Institut Pasteur was among the first European labs to develop and share COVID-19 detection tests, making protocols available to the World Health Organization and labs worldwide.
NO ANTIBODIES AGAINST H5 BIRD FLU
People have antibodies against common H1 and H3 seasonal flu, but none against the H5 bird flu affecting birds and mammals, like they had none against COVID-19, she said.
And unlike COVID-19, which mainly affects vulnerable people, flu viruses can also kill healthy individuals, including children, Rameix-Welti said.
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It’s been nearly six years now since the United States’ first reported cases of Covid-19, and the country is in a merciful lull when it comes to pandemic recriminations, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ongoing war on vaccine confidence now dominates the public health culture wars. But Bhattacharya, writing with his deputy Matthew Memoli in City Journal, returns with a bill of Covid complaints, arguing that to prepare for a future infectious disease threat, the country should toss out the longstanding “pandemic playbook” and focus instead on making the population “metabolically healthy” — what you might think of as being fit.
Forget social distancing, in other words; forget masks and forget even a next-generation equivalent of Operation Warp Speed to deliver a next-generation equivalent of miraculous Covid vaccines, which saved millions of American lives and tens of millions of lives abroad. The best way to fight off a novel infectious disease, Bhattacharya and Memoli write, is to get the country into better physical shape before the emergency arrives and bet that our fitter bodies will be capable of simply fending it off, whatever the pathogen, however quickly it might spread and however deadly it might be.
This is all fine as generic health advice, of course. But 38 million Americans have diabetes. More than 100 million have heart disease. More than 100 million are obese. Massively improve those numbers and there will still be tens of millions staring down a novel pathogen in ill health. And as a program of pandemic response? Like much of MAHA, it is magical thinking that has the secondary effect of laying responsibility for public health outcomes at the feet of the individual. Imagine sitting in the National Institutes of Health, contemplating the arrival of a disease like H.I.V./AIDS, which has killed 700,000 Americans, and advising the country that, as Bhattacharya and Memoli write, “the best pandemic preparedness playbook for the United States is making America healthy again.”