What you need to know about H5N1 bird flu
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On May 30, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that a Michigan dairy worker tested positive for H5N1 bird flu. It was the fourth person to test positive for H5N1 in the United States, following another recent case in Michigan, an April case in Texas, and an initial case in Colorado in 2022.
H5N1 bird flu has been spreading among bird species in the U.S. since 2021, killing millions of wild birds and poultry. In late March 2024, H5N1 bird flu was found in cows for the first time, causing an outbreak in dairy cows across several states.
U.S. public health officials and researchers are particularly concerned about this outbreak because the virus has infected cows and other mammals and has spread from a cow to a human for the first time.
This bird flu strain has shown to not only make wild mammals, including marine mammals and bears, very sick but to also cause high rates of death among species, says Jane Sykes, professor of small animal medicine at the University of California, Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine.
“And now that it has been found in cattle, [it] raises particular concern for spread to all the animal species, including people,” adds Sykes.
Even though the risk for human infection is low and there has never been human-to-human transmission of H5N1, there are several actions you can take to stay protected. Read on to learn more about H5N1 bird flu and the current outbreak.
What is H5N1?
H5N1 is a type of influenza virus that most commonly affects birds, causing them severe respiratory illness and death.
The H5N1 strain first emerged in China in the 1990s, and it has continued to spread around the world since then. In 1997, the virus spread from animals to humans in Hong Kong for the first time, infecting 18 people, six of whom died.
Since 2020, the H5N1 strain has caused “an unprecedented number of deaths in wild birds and poultry in many countries,” according to the World Health Organization.
Even though bird flu is rare in humans, an H5N1 infection can cause mild to severe illness and can be fatal in some cases. It can cause eye infection, upper respiratory symptoms, and pneumonia.
What do we know about the 2024 human cases of H5N1 in the U.S.?
The Michigan worker who tested positive for H5N1 in late May is a dairy worker who was exposed to infected livestock. They were the first to experience respiratory symptoms—including a cough without a fever—during the current outbreak. They were given an antiviral and the CDC says their symptoms are resolving.
The Michigan farm worker who tested positive earlier in May only experienced eye-related symptoms and has already recovered. And the dairy worker who tested positive for the virus in Texas in April only experienced eye redness as well, was treated with an antiviral medication for the flu, and is recovering.
Is H5N1 bird flu in the milk we consume?
The Food and Drug Administration has found traces of H5N1 bird flu virus in raw or unpasteurized milk. However, pasteurized milk is safe to drink.
Pasteurization, the process of heating milk to high temperatures to kill harmful bacteria (which the majority of commercially sold milk goes through), deactivates the virus. In 20 percent of pasteurized milk samples, the FDA found small, inactive (not live nor infectious) traces of the virus, but these fragments do not make pasteurized milk dangerous.
In a recent Infectious Diseases Society of America briefing, Dr. Maximo Brito, a professor at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, said that it’s important for people to avoid “drinking unpasteurized or raw milk [because] there are other diseases, not only influenza, that could be transmitted by drinking unpasteurized milk.”
What can I do to prevent bird flu?
While the risk of H5N1 infection in humans is low, people with exposure to infected animals (like farmworkers) are most at risk. But there are several actions you can take to stay protected.
One of the most important things, according to Sykes, is taking the usual precautions we’ve taken with COVID-19 and other respiratory viruses, including frequent handwashing, especially before eating.
“Handwashing and mask-wearing [are important], just as we learned from the pandemic,” Sykes adds. “And it’s not wearing a mask at all times, but thinking about high-risk situations, like when you’re indoors in a crowded environment, where transmission of respiratory viruses is much more likely to occur.”
There are other steps you can take to prevent H5N1, according to the CDC:
- Avoid direct contact with sick or dead animals, including wild birds and poultry.
- Don’t touch surfaces that may have been contaminated with animal poop, saliva, or mucus.
- Cook poultry and eggs to an internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit to kill any bacteria or virus, including H5N1. Generally, avoid eating undercooked food.
- Avoid consuming unpasteurized or raw milk or products like cheeses made with raw milk.
- Avoid eating uncooked or undercooked food.
- Poultry and livestock farmers and workers and bird flock owners should wear masks and other personal protective equipment “when in direct or close physical contact with sick birds, livestock, or other animals; carcasses; feces; litter; raw milk; or surfaces and water that might be contaminated with animal excretions from potentially or confirmed infected birds, livestock, or other animals.” (The CDC has more recommendations for this population here.)
Is there a vaccine for H5N1?
The CDC said there are two candidate H5N1 vaccines ready to be made and distributed in case the virus starts to spread from person to person, and the country is now moving forward with plans to produce millions of vaccine doses.
The FDA has approved several bird flu vaccines since 2007. The U.S. has flu vaccines in stockpile through the National Pre-Pandemic Influenza Vaccine Stockpile program, which allows for quick response as strains of the flu virus evolve.
Could this outbreak become a pandemic?
Scientists and researchers are concerned about the possibility of H5N1 spreading among people and causing a pandemic. “Right now, the risk is low, but as time goes on, the potential for mutation to cause widespread human infection increases,” says Sykes.
“I think this virus jumping into cows has shown the urgency to keep tracking [H5N1] a lot more closely now,” Peter Halfmann, research associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Influenza Research Institute tells PGN. “We have our eyes on surveillance now. … We’re keeping a much closer eye, so it’s not going to take us by surprise.”
This article first appeared on Public Good News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Ginkgo Biloba, For Memory And, Uh, What Else Again?
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Ginkgo biloba, for memory and, uh, what else again?
Ginkgo biloba extract has enjoyed use for thousands of years for an assortment of uses, and has made its way from Traditional Chinese Medicine, to the world supplement market at large. See:
Ginkgo biloba: A Treasure of Functional Phytochemicals with Multimedicinal Applications
But what does the science say about the specific claims?
Antioxidant & anti-inflammatory
We’re going to lump these two qualities together for examination, since one invariably leads to the other.
A quick note: things that have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, often also help guard against cancer and aging. However, in this case, there are few good studies pertaining to anti-aging, and none that we could find pertaining to anti-cancer potential.
So, does it have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, first?
Yes, it has potent antioxidants that do fight inflammation; this is clear, from an abundance of in vitro and in vivo studies, including with human patients:
- Properties of Ginkgo biloba L.: incl. Antioxidant Characterization
- Anti-inflammatory effects of Ginkgo biloba extract against hippocampal neuronal injury
- Gingko biloba-derived lactone prevents osteoarthritis by activating anti-inflammatory signaling pathway
- The anti-inflammatory properties of Ginkgo biloba for the treatment of pulmonary diseases
In short: it helps, and there’s plenty of science for it.
What about anti-aging effects?
For this, there is science, but a lot of the science is not great. As one team of researchers concluded while doing a research review of their own:
❝Based on the reviewed information regarding EGb’s effects in vitro and in vivo, most have reported very positive outcomes with strong statistical analyses, indicating that EGb must have some sort of beneficial effect.
However, information from the reported clinical trials involving EGb are hardly conclusive since many do not include information such as the participant’s age and physical condition, drug doses administered, duration of drug administered as well as suitable control groups for comparison.
We therefore call on clinicians and clinician-scientists to establish a set of standard and reliable standard operating procedure for future clinical studies to properly evaluate EGb’s effects in the healthy and diseased person since it is highly possible it possesses beneficial effects.❞
Translation from sciencese: “These results are great, but come on, please, we are begging you to use more robust methodology”
If you’d like to read the review in question, here it is:
Advances in the Studies of Ginkgo Biloba Leaves Extract on Aging-Related Diseases
Does it have cognitive enhancement effects?
The claims here are generally that it helps:
- improve memory
- improve focus
- reduce cognitive decline
- reduce anxiety and depression
Let’s break these down:
Does it improve memory and cognition?
Ginkgo biloba was quite popular for memory 20+ years ago, and perhaps had an uptick in popularity in the wake of the 1999 movie “Analyze This” in which the protagonist psychiatrist mentions taking ginkgo biloba, because “it helps my memory, and I forget what else”.
Here are a couple of studies from not long after that:
- A double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized trial of Ginkgo biloba in cognitively intact older adults: neuropsychological findings
- Effects of Ginkgo biloba on mental functioning in healthy volunteers
In short:
- in the first study, it helped in standardized tests of memory and cognition (quite convincing)
- In the second study, it helped in subjective self-reports of mental wellness (also placebo-controlled)
On the other hand, here’s a more recent research review ten years later, that provides measures of memory, executive function and attention in 1132, 534 and 910 participants, respectively. That’s quite a few times more than the individual studies we cited above, by the way. They concluded:
❝We report that G. biloba had no ascertainable positive effects on a range of targeted cognitive functions in healthy individuals❞
Read: Is Ginkgo biloba a cognitive enhancer in healthy individuals? A meta-analysis
Our (10almonds) conclusion: we can’t say either way, on this one.
Does it have neuroprotective effects (i.e., against cognitive decline)?
Yes—probably by the same mechanism will discuss shortly.
- Ginkgo Biloba for Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer’s Disease: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials
- Treatment effects of Ginkgo biloba extract on symptoms of dementia: meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials
Can it help against depression and anxiety?
Yes—but probably indirectly by the mechanism we’ll get to in a moment:
- Role of Ginkgo biloba extract as an adjunctive treatment of elderly patients with depression
- Ginkgo biloba in generalized anxiety disorder and adjustment disorder with anxious mood
Likely this helps by improving blood flow, as illustrated better per:
Efficacy of ginkgo biloba extract as augmentation of venlafaxine in treating post-stroke depression
Which means…
Bonus: improved blood flow
This mechanism may support the other beneficial effects.
See: Ginkgo biloba extract improves coronary blood flow in healthy elderly adults
Is it safe?
Ginkgo biloba extract* is generally recognized as safe.
- However, as it improves blood flow, please don’t take it if you have a bleeding disorder.
- Additionally, it may interact badly with SSRIs, so you might want to avoid it if you’re taking such (despite it having been tested and found beneficial as an adjuvant to citalopram, an SSRI, in one of the studies above).
- No list of possible contraindications can be exhaustive, so please consult your own doctor/pharmacist before taking something new.
*Extract, specifically. The seeds and leaves of this plant are poisonous. Sometimes “all natural” is not better.
Where can I get it?
As ever, we don’t sell it (or anything else), but here’s an example product on Amazon
Enjoy!
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Celery vs Lettuce – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing celery to lettuce, we picked the lettuce.
Why?
Let us consider the macros first: lettuce has 2x the protein, but of course the numbers are tiny and probably nobody is eating this for the protein. Both of these salad items are roughly comparable in terms of carbs and fiber, being both mostly water with just enough other stuff to hold their shape. Nominally this section is a slight win for lettuce on account of the protein, but in realistic practical terms, it’s a tie.
In terms of vitamins, celery has more of vitamins B5 and E, while lettuce has more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B6, B7, B9, C, K, and choline. An easy win for lettuce here.
In the category of minerals, celery has more calcium, copper, and potassium, while lettuce has more iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc. So, a fair win for lettuce.
Adding up the sections makes for an overall win for lettuce; of course, enjoy both, though!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Why You’re Probably Not Getting Enough Fiber (And How To Fix It)
Take care!
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‘It’s okay to poo at work’: new health campaign highlights a common source of anxiety
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For most people, the daily or near-daily ritual of having a bowel motion is not something we give a great deal of thought to. But for some people, the need to do a “number two” in a public toilet or at work can be beset with significant stress and anxiety.
In recognition of the discomfort people may feel around passing a bowel motion at work, the Queensland Department of Health recently launched a social media campaign with the message “It’s okay to poo at work”.
The campaign has gained significant traction on Instagram and Facebook. It has been praised by health and marketing experts for its humorous handling of a taboo topic.
A colourful Instagram post is accompanied by a caption warning of the health risks of “holding it in”, including haemorrhoids and other gastrointestinal problems. The caption also notes:
If you find it extremely difficult to poo around other people, you might have parcopresis.
Queensland Health/Instagram What is parcopresis?
Parcopresis, sometimes called “shy bowel”, occurs when people experience a difficulty or inability to poo in public toilets due to fear of perceived scrutiny by others.
People with parcopresis may find it difficult to go to the toilet in public places such as shopping centres, restaurants, at work or at school, or even at home when friends or family are around.
They may fear being judged by others about unpleasant smells or sounds when they have a bowel motion, or how long they take to go, for example.
Living with a gastrointestinal condition (at least four in ten Australians do) may contribute to parcopresis due to anxiety about the need to use a toilet frequently, and perceived judgment from others when doing so. Other factors, such as past negative experiences or accessibility challenges, may also play a role.
Some people may feel uncomfortable about using the toilet at work. Motortion Films/Shutterstock For sufferers, anxiety can present in the form of a faster heart rate, rapid breathing, sweating, muscle tension, blushing, nausea, trembling, or a combination of these symptoms. They may experience ongoing worry about situations where they may need to use a public toilet.
Living with parcopresis can affect multiple domains of life and quality of life overall. For example, sufferers may have difficulties relating to employment, relationships and social life. They might avoid travelling or attending certain events because of their symptoms.
How common is parcopresis?
We don’t really know how common parcopresis is, partly due to the difficulty of evaluating this behaviour. It’s not necessarily easy or appropriate to follow people around to track whether they use or avoid public toilets (and their reasons if they do). Also, observing individual bathroom activities may alter the person’s behaviour.
I conducted a study to try to better understand how common parcopresis is. The study involved 714 university students. I asked participants to respond to a series of vignettes, or scenarios.
In each vignette participants were advised they were at a local shopping centre and they needed to have a bowel motion. In the vignettes, the bathrooms (which had been recently cleaned) had configurations of either two or three toilet stalls. Each vignette differed by the configuration of stalls available.
The rate of avoidance was just over 14% overall. But participants were more likely to avoid using the toilet when the other stalls were occupied.
Around 10% avoided going when all toilets were available. This rose to around 25% when only the middle of three toilets was available. Men were significantly less likely to avoid going than women across all vignettes.
For those who avoided the toilet, many either said they would go home to poo, use an available disabled toilet, or come back when the bathroom was empty.
Parcopresis at work
In occupational settings, the rates of anxiety about using shared bathrooms may well be higher for a few reasons.
For example, people may feel more self-conscious about their bodily functions being heard or noticed by colleagues, compared to strangers in a public toilet.
People may also experience guilt, shame and fear about being judged by colleagues or supervisors if they need to make extended or frequent visits to the bathroom. This may particularly apply to people with a gastrointestinal condition.
Reducing restroom anxiety
Using a public toilet can understandably cause some anxiety or be unpleasant. But for a small minority of people it can be a real problem, causing severe distress and affecting their ability to engage in activities of daily living.
If doing a poo in a toilet at work or another public setting causes you anxiety, be kind to yourself. A number of strategies might help:
- identify and challenge negative thoughts about using public toilets and remind yourself that using the bathroom is normal, and that most people are not paying attention to others in the toilets
- try to manage stress through relaxation techniques such as deep breathing and progressive muscle relaxation, which involves tensing and relaxing different muscles around the body
- engaging in gradual exposure can be helpful, which means visiting public toilets at different times and locations, so you can develop greater confidence in using them
- use grounding or distraction techniques while going to the toilet. These might include listening to music, watching something on your phone, or focusing on your breathing.
If you feel parcopresis is having a significant impact on your life, talk to your GP or a psychologist who can help identify appropriate approaches to treatment. This might include cognitive behavioural therapy.
Simon Robert Knowles, Associate Professor and Clinical Psychologist, Swinburne University of Technology
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Is Air-Fried Food Really Healthier?
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Air-frying has a reputation for being healthy—and it generally is, provided it’s used carefully:
Just one thing to watch out for
An air-fryer is basically a small convection oven that uses circulating air rather than immersion in oil to cook food. The smallness of an air-fryer is a feature not a bug—if you get an air-fryer over a certain size, then congratulations, you just have a convection oven. The small size it what helps it to cook so efficiently. This is one reason that they’re not really used in industrial settings.
The documentary-makers from this video had their food (chicken, fish, and fries) lab-tested (for fat, cholesterol, and acrylamide), and found:
- Air-frying significantly reduced saturated fat (38–53%) and trans fats (up to 55%) in some foods.
- Cholesterol reduction varied depending on the food type.
- Acrylamide levels in air-fried potatoes were much higher due to cooking time and temperature.
About that acrylamide: acrylamide forms in starchy foods at high temperatures and may pose cancer risks (the research is as yet unclear, with conflicting evidence). Air-frying can cause higher acrylamide levels if cooking is prolonged or temperatures are too high.
Recommendations to reduce acrylamide:
- Soak potatoes before cooking.
- Use lower temperatures (e.g. 180℃/350℉) and shorter cooking times.
- Avoid over-browning food.
For more on all of this, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Unlock Your Air-Fryer’s Potential!
Take care!
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The Path to a Better Tuberculosis Vaccine Runs Through Montana
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A team of Montana researchers is playing a key role in the development of a more effective vaccine against tuberculosis, an infectious disease that has killed more people than any other.
The BCG (Bacille Calmette-Guérin) vaccine, created in 1921, remains the sole TB vaccine. While it is 40% to 80% effective in young children, its efficacy is very low in adolescents and adults, leading to a worldwide push to create a more powerful vaccine.
One effort is underway at the University of Montana Center for Translational Medicine. The center specializes in improving and creating vaccines by adding what are called novel adjuvants. An adjuvant is a substance included in the vaccine, such as fat molecules or aluminum salts, that enhances the immune response, and novel adjuvants are those that have not yet been used in humans. Scientists are finding that adjuvants make for stronger, more precise, and more durable immunity than antigens, which create antibodies, would alone.
Eliciting specific responses from the immune system and deepening and broadening the response with adjuvants is known as precision vaccination. “It’s not one-size-fits-all,” said Ofer Levy, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard University and the head of the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Children’s Hospital. “A vaccine might work differently in a newborn versus an older adult and a middle-aged person.”
The ultimate precision vaccine, said Levy, would be lifelong protection from a disease with one jab. “A single-shot protection against influenza or a single-shot protection against covid, that would be the holy grail,” Levy said.
Jay Evans, the director of the University of Montana center and the chief scientific and strategy officer and a co-founder of Inimmune, a privately held biotechnology company in Missoula, said his team has been working on a TB vaccine for 15 years. The private-public partnership is developing vaccines and trying to improve existing vaccines, and he said it’s still five years off before the TB vaccine might be distributed widely.
It has not gone unnoticed at the center that this state-of-the-art vaccine research and production is located in a state that passed one of the nation’s most extreme anti-vaccination laws during the pandemic in 2021. The law prohibits businesses and governments from discriminating against people who aren’t vaccinated against covid-19 or other diseases, effectively banning both public and private employers from requiring workers to get vaccinated against covid or any other disease. A federal judge later ruled that the law cannot be enforced in health care settings, such as hospitals and doctors’ offices.
In mid-March, the Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute announced it had begun the third and final phase of clinical trials for the new vaccine in seven countries. The trials should take about five years to complete. Research and production are being done in several places, including at a manufacturing facility in Hamilton owned by GSK, a giant pharmaceutical company.
Known as the forgotten pandemic, TB kills up to 1.6 million people a year, mostly in impoverished areas in Asia and Africa, despite its being both preventable and treatable. The U.S. has seen an increase in tuberculosis over the past decade, especially with the influx of migrants, and the number of cases rose by 16% from 2022 to 2023. Tuberculosis is the leading cause of death among people living with HIV, whose risk of contracting a TB infection is 20 times as great as people without HIV.
“TB is a complex pathogen that has been with human beings for ages,” said Alemnew Dagnew, who heads the program for the new vaccine for the Gates Medical Research Institute. “Because it has been with human beings for many years, it has evolved and has a mechanism to escape the immune system. And the immunology of TB is not fully understood.”
The University of Montana Center for Translational Medicine and Inimmune together have 80 employees who specialize in researching a range of adjuvants to understand the specifics of immune responses to different substances. “You have to tailor it like tools in a toolbox towards the pathogen you are vaccinating against,” Evans said. “We have a whole library of adjuvant molecules and formulations.”
Vaccines are made more precise largely by using adjuvants. There are three basic types of natural adjuvants: aluminum salts; squalene, which is made from shark liver; and some kinds of saponins, which are fat molecules. It’s not fully understood how they stimulate the immune system. The center in Missoula has also created and patented a synthetic adjuvant, UM-1098, that drives a specific type of immune response and will be added to new vaccines.
One of the most promising molecules being used to juice up the immune system response to vaccines is a saponin molecule from the bark of the quillay tree, gathered in Chile from trees at least 10 years old. Such molecules were used by Novavax in its covid vaccine and by GSK in its widely used shingles vaccine, Shingrix. These molecules are also a key component in the new tuberculosis vaccine, known as the M72 vaccine.
But there is room for improvement.
“The vaccine shows 50% efficacy, which doesn’t sound like much, but basically there is no effective vaccine currently, so 50% is better than what’s out there,” Evans said. “We’re looking to take what we learned from that vaccine development with additional adjuvants to try and make it even better and move 50% to 80% or more.”
By contrast, measles vaccines are 95% effective.
According to Medscape, around 15 vaccine candidates are being developed to replace the BCG vaccine, and three of them are in phase 3 clinical trials.
One approach Evans’ center is researching to improve the new vaccine’s efficacy is taking a piece of the bacterium that causes TB, synthesizing it, and combining it with the adjuvant QS-21, made from the quillay tree. “It stimulates the immune system in a way that is specific to TB and it drives an immune response that is even closer to what we get from natural infections,” Evans said.
The University of Montana center is researching the treatment of several problems not commonly thought of as treatable with vaccines. They are entering the first phase of clinical trials for a vaccine for allergies, for instance, and first-phase trials for a cancer vaccine. And later this year, clinical trials will begin for vaccines to block the effects of opioids like heroin and fentanyl. The University of Montana received the largest grant in its history, $33 million, for anti-opioid vaccine research. It works by creating an antibody that binds with the drug in the bloodstream, which keeps it from entering the brain and creating the high.
For now, though, the eyes of health care experts around the world are on the trials for the new TB vaccines, which, if they are successful, could help save countless lives in the world’s poorest places.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.
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Science of Pilates – by Tracy Ward
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We’ve reviewed other books in this series, “Science of Yoga” and “Science of HIIT” (they’re great too; check them out!). What does this one add to the mix?
Pilates is a top-tier “combination exercise” insofar as it checks a lot of boxes, e.g:
- Strength—especially core strength, but also limbs
- Mobility—range of motion and resultant reduction in injury risk
- Stability—impossible without the above two things, but Pilates trains this too
- Fitness—many dynamic Pilates exercises can be performed as cardio and/or HIIT.
The author, a physiotherapist, explains (as the title promises!) the science of Pilates, with:
- the beautifully clear diagrams we’ve come to expect of this series,
- equally clear explanations, with a great balance of simplicity of terms and depth where necessary, and
- plenty of citations for the claims made, linking to lots of the best up-to-date science.
Bottom line: if you are in a position to make a little time for Pilates (if you don’t already), then there is nobody who would not benefit from reading this book.
Click here to check out Science of Pilates, and keep your body well!
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