[msandford]

Why we keep killing the birds that survive the infection is beyond me. It's an evolutionary pressure that we refuse to allow to work.

It's almost as if we want to give the flu as many opportunities as possible to spill over, instead of just letting the birds who have immunity survive and thus basically drive the virus to extinction.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Why we keep killing the birds that survive the infection is beyond me

We don’t know the reservoir capabilities of novel viruses, nor can we confidently rule when a previously-sick bird is well and non-infectious at scale.

> It's an evolutionary pressure that we refuse to allow to work

We’re selecting against birds that get infected in the first place. (Probably to no tangible effect. But the goal isn’t to have birds that can survive a plague, it’s to prevent it in the first place.)

[msandford]

Thanks for the response! I agree that it's not obvious the reservoir possibilities.

I don't agree that we're selecting against birds that get infected in the first place, or at least I don't think that's how it works. My understanding is that if any birds on a farm get sick, the whole house is killed. Maybe the whole farm.

To me that seems like selecting for lucky birds not selecting for populations that never get sick because lots of populations never get exposed.

I could be wrong on my understanding or how I interpret the impact, though, so I'm super open to learning more.

[tdeck]

Because it's cheaper to fill the whole farm with foam and suffocate all the birds to death, then shovel them out.

[tsimionescu]

The main idea behind culling is to prevent the virus itself from evolving inside the herd. Viruses evolve much more rapidly than birds.

Now sure, if there were a clear way to tell that some birds have been infected and survived and recovered, it could be a good idea not to sacrifice those birds, and even to specifically breed them. However, there is no good way to do so, especially not with any confidence. It's much more likely you'll end up infecting any population that you put these new birds in to.

So, the best and cheapest solution is to sacrifice the entire group, to prevent the disease from spreading to other populations, and to do so quickly, to prevent the virus from evolving or crossing a species boundary.

[MangoToupe]

> It's an evolutionary pressure that we refuse to allow to work.

We also refuse to allow it to fail....

[anonymouskimmer]

I believe the rationale is that during the process of infecting a flock of birds the virus would be exposed to pressure that would encourage its mutation, especially as these birds begin to successfully fight it off. The current avian H5N1 only needs a couple of mutations to spread human-to-human pretty well.

So the current culling of entire flocks is seen as a means of nipping any of these mutations in the bud.

[mikkupikku]

During the 20th century the American government (as well as others) put a lot of effort into finding ways to control people. Drugs, control of the media, MK Ultra and Mockingbird are just two examples of many. Everything more or less failed. Dosing unsuspecting civilians with LSD doesn't have much useful effect.

But one thing worked, and they should have known it all along. Fear. If you can make people afraid, you can control them. They want us to fear birds. They want us to fear our neighbors. They want us to fear other governments, and faceless terror organizations that are probably hiding in your bushes outside, if you see something, say something!

[BriggyDwiggs42]

“They want us to fear birds” is wild man

[jfengel]

They did know it all along. It's been used since time immemorial.

But mass media and social media have given it new opportunities. Ironically I think we all expected that having access to more information would have been a tool against that, but it turns out to be much less effective at explaining fear than conjuring it.

[engineer_22]

You're right!