Dicky birds: the next pandemic?

This episode explores the potential threat of the H5N1 bird flu evolving into a human-transmissible form, sparking a new pandemic.

1. H5N1 has been a concern for nearly three decades and has recently shown adaptations that could facilitate transmission to humans.
2. Despite existing vaccines and treatments, the uncertainty about their effectiveness against a novel pandemic strain remains.
3. Recent findings in mammals, including sea lions, seals, and dairy cows, indicate an increasing risk of the virus adapting to new hosts.
4. Public health strategies are crucial, yet current measures like farm lockdowns are hampered by regulatory and compliance challenges.
5. The potential for the virus to recombine genetically with human flu viruses in pigs poses a significant risk of sparking a pandemic.

1: Introduction to the Threat

This chapter introduces the potential of H5N1 bird flu turning into a human pandemic, with insights from healthcare correspondent Slovea Chankova. Key discussions include the virus's history and its deadly impact on poultry.

• Slovea Chankova: "We've been watching H5N1 because it's very deadly in poultry, occasionally infecting humans with a high fatality rate."

2: The Science Behind the Threat

Exploration of the scientific aspects of H5N1, including its adaptation in mammals and the implications for human transmission.

• Slovea Chankova: "The discovery of mammalian adaptations in the virus...facilitate transmission between mammals and possibly humans."

3: Public Health Responses

Discussion on the response strategies and challenges in controlling the spread of the virus in farm settings and among livestock.

• Rosie Blore: "Authorities in America don't have powers for strict lockdowns on farms, making it voluntary for farmers to report cases."

1. Stay informed about the latest developments and guidance from health authorities regarding bird flu.
2. Practice good hygiene and biosecurity measures if working with or around poultry.
3. Consider getting vaccinated against seasonal flu to potentially offer some level of immunity against related strains.
4. Support and advocate for stronger biosecurity measures in farms to prevent outbreaks.
5. Encourage transparency and quick reporting of potential cases by industries involved in poultry and livestock farming.

The scars of the covid pandemic are still raw, but now a virus spreading among farm animals could leap to humans. Could bird flu become the next pandemic? White women are sometimes absolved of blame in the crime of slavery in America (9:50). Research suggests they may have been culpable too. And meet the creator of Dateline, the Economist’s history quiz (17:25).

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Slovea Chankova, Rosie Blore

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The Economist
The Economist.

Rosie Blore
Hello and welcome to the intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Blore. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the event shaping your world.

White women are often assumed to have been innocent partners in the crisis of american slavery, but new research suggests that many of them were just as culpable, seeing the slave market as a ticket to their own economic freedom.

And are you into quizzes? If you're listening to this, I know you must be into the Economist. Well, now we have a quiz of our own based on us, and it turns out to be really quite fun.

First up, though.

Three years ago, Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered an inquiry into Britain's handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. The first damning conclusions were published yesterday. Former judge Heather Hallett chaired the investigation and said the government had let the british people down. In 2019, it was widely believed in the United Kingdom and abroad that the UK was not only properly prepared, but was one of the best prepared countries in the world to respond to a pandemic. This belief was dangerously mistaken.

Much of the report considered what could have been done differently. The UK prepared for the wrong pandemic. The significant risk of an influenza pandemic had long been considered, written about and planned for. However, that preparedness was inadequate for a global pandemic of the kind that struck. But the inquiry also cast an eye to the future.

It stressed that it's a case not if there will be another pandemic, but when. And right now, one particular virus is raising anxieties. Bird flu may or may not become the next pandemic, but it appears to be getting closer to making the leap into mammals, including humans. Slovea Chankova is the economist healthcare correspondent. New cases in humans have been found in America after the virus has spread.

Slovea Chankova
In theory, cows there in the last. Months, that's giving me the chills. It's sounding like the early days of COVID Should we be really concerned about this? Moderately, I would say. With COVID humanity started with a clean slate.

We had no natural immunity, no drugs, no vaccines. Things are different now. We have all of these specifically for h five n one. We don't know how well, they will work, because there's never been a pandemic with that virus, or wide circulation in humans, for that matter. But the reality is that we do have these layers of protection ready to go.

Rosie Blore
But we've been hearing about the possibility of an h five n one flu pandemic for a long time. So what's different now? The virus has been around for, or at least has been watched for almost three decades, since it was first found in wild birds. It has been watched because it's very deadly in poultry. It has infected, occasionally, humans, about 900 human cases, and about half of them have been fatal.

Slovea Chankova
Of course, there may have been lots of asymptomatic infections, so the fatality rate may be lower. But because an h five virus has never circulated in human populations, there are concerns that should it adapt to spreading between humans, it may become the next pandemic. Now, few things have happened recently that they're making scientists concerned. One is the discovery of mammalian adaptations in the virus in sea lions and seals, in which some of the genetic changes are basically the ones that facilitate transmission between mammals and possibly humans. And then the second development is the virus showed up in dairy cows in America sometime in December.

That outbreak is not under control. America is not going very aggressively about stopping it. And the dangers are that a virus that can spread between humans evolves from that. In fact, there have been already nine infections in humans in America linked to that outbreak. Thankfully, they've been all mild.

None of them have required hospitalization. But that doesn't mean the strain of the virus, or however it mutates, if it becomes a pandemic, will necessarily be mild. As we know with COVID lots of people were asymptomatic. They had pretty mild cases. But even a small percentage of severe cases can overwhelm hospitals, and lots of people could die.

Rosie Blore
Do animals die when they get it? Some of them do. It really varies both in birds and mammalian species. Some, you almost wouldn't notice they have it. Others had very severe disease and die very quickly, such as poultry, for example.

Slovea Chankova
That's why it's such a big problem on poultry farms. In cows, it doesn't seem to be the case. They have some problems with milk production, but they don't really die in big numbers, which is why it has been a bit tricky to control in dairy farms, because farmers are not worried about their animals dying, and they're reluctant to report if they suspect there may be infections. And then it gets carried around when animals move across to other herds. And in some cases, even people or milking equipment are spreading the virus.

Rosie Blore
But theoretically, you should be able to put a lockdown on a farm, right, similar to the lockdowns that we had during COVID and be able to contain the virus in a farm. Well, that's what many public health people would like to see. But in practice, authorities in America don't have those powers. And right now, the way things are, it's pretty much voluntary about whether farmers would like to report or not. There are some regulations about testing some numbers of cows when you ship them across state lines.

Slovea Chankova
And the number of states reporting outbreaks keeps increasing. And many people think that it's widely underreported. Fascinating that you can lock down people, but it's hard to lock down farm animals. Is it just cows we're worrying about here, or other animals as well? You've already talked about the birds.

The really big worry are pigs, because they can be infected with both avian flu and human, regular, garden variety seasonal flu viruses. The thing with flu viruses is that when two of them happen to be in the same person or animal, they are very good at swapping genes. So the flu virus may acquire the genes that make the seasonal flu in humans highly transmissible. And then you got a virus which starts spreading between people easily, and that's your pandemic. And in fact, this kind of recombination of viruses happens a lot in pigs, and some of the past flu pandemics have begun that way.

For example, the 2009 swine flu pandemic came to us from pigs via birds. I feel like I need a drop of optimism here. We are a bit better placed, aren't we, to deal with a potential h five n one epidemic. We've known about it for a long time, and obviously we learned a lot during COVID We certainly are. Covid was such a big unknown, and the flu is something that we are more or less familiar with.

And unlike with COVID there may be some layers of immunity against h five n one resulting from past infections with the seasonal flu. We are also quite prepared for this one, because we've been watching h five n one for so long, and the human cases have kind of made people worried. So there have been investments in developing vaccines. There are stockpiles of them in many countries, amounts that could be used for first responders if there is a pandemic, or people at high risk. But also additional quantities can be made relatively quickly, I'd say.

And there are currently clinical trials of mRNA vaccines. That's the technology that allows you to make large amount of vaccine very quickly, as we saw with COVID So hopefully we will have some of those for h five n one. Should that become a pandemic. And it may not, but who knows? I mean, there are so many flu viruses circulating, and with the density of farmed animals, there's always a danger that there may be another one at some point.

Rosie Blore
Slovea, thank you so much. And I should thank you for being here in person and us being able to be together. It's good to be reminded how special that once felt. Yes. Yes.

Slovea Chankova
In Covid times, it was such a treat to be able to get together with people in the same room. Let's hope we're not returning to those times. Thank you so much. Zoea. Thank you.

Rosie Blore
The centuries of slavery in America are among the worst crimes in the country's history. But for a long time, depictions of american slavery, such as Steve McQueen's twelve years a slave, have centered on the cruelty of white southern men.

The Economist
And that servant that don't obey his lord shall be beaten with many stripes. That's scripture. The condition of your laborers.

Rosie Blore
The abuses that white women committed were minimized. They weren't thought to be involved in the buying and selling of enslaved people or the running of plantations. Historians agreed that slavery was the business of men, but recent evidence has led to a reassessment. So for a long time, historians thought that women were basically absent from the entire slave trade. But it turns out new research shows that they had a real stake in it.

Rebecca Jackson is the economist's southern correspondent. From shipping slaves to buying and selling them at auction houses and setting up small businesses using their labor, white women were involved at every level of the american slave trade. That's incredibly surprising. Tell me more about this, Becca. So there's a new research paper that was published last month by economists at Ohio State University, and they analyze data from the New Orleans slave market, which was the biggest of the antebellum era.

Rebecca Jackson
And what they found is that women were buyers or sellers in 30% of all transactions and almost 40% that involved female slaves. By matching the names of those women to census records, they also found that it wasn't just single or widowed women who were buying and selling slaves because they didn't have husbands to do that for them. Married ones were doing it, too. Tell me more about the research on this. So this gets into some amazing research done by a historian called Stephanie Jones Rogers.

And these are the first quantitative numbers put to a huge body of qualitative work that she's done over the years, she looked into all sorts of historical documents, ranging from diaries of these white women to court records. Some of the most amazing accounts from the time were from tourists visiting America from abroad. They would often go to slave markets in the south to see it as a sort of oddity attraction. They actually recorded how active a role women played in them. Foreigners, if they came to the United States, one of the places that they wanted to kind of cross off their bucket list was the slave market.

That's Stephanie Jones Rogers of UC Berkeley. And those travel narratives, the books that they wrote to kind of detail those encounters, often document the presence of women in those spaces. One british abolitionist leaning visitor wrote about what he saw in the slave markets of New Orleans. He sees a row of white women dressed in silks and satins and jewels, observing the slave auction without any shame, without any qualms. Women are, like, passing by.

Stephanie Jones Rogers
They're going in, they're visiting, they're buying, they're taking enslaved people home. And so there are, you know, countless examples where this is the case. They're in the market. These accounts suggest that women were far from innocent by standards. In fact, they were co conspirators.

Rebecca Jackson
And what she found was that women invested really heavily in the slave market because it was actually their own ticket to economic freedom. Their own ticket to freedom. Explain that to me. Coverture laws of the mid 18 hundreds in the south made it so that when women got married, they had to relinquish their property and wealth to their husbands. But slaves were an exception to that.

What that meant was that women could actually accumulate wealth through slaves. And so fathers who wanted to secure their daughters economic freedom would give them slaves at baptisms, birthdays, and engagements. Women then would take their slaves to their new husbands estate, and some even built small businesses using those slaves, selling things like cakes or dresses or even selling these women's bodies in brothels. And then they would pocket that cash on their own. In a time when women had no real way to make money and no financial independence, slaves were a way that they could accumulate some kind of wealth, and that gave them both status and autonomy within their families and within society.

Rosie Blore
So it's not just that women were aware of what was happening when we once thought they weren't, but they were really a driving force in the slave trade. Absolutely extraordinary. They certainly were. And, you know, I think we often think of women as the more empathetic gender. And I think it's interesting to see in Stephanie Jones Rogers work, she also shows that not only were they financially invested they were actually often just as brutal as the men.

Rebecca Jackson
There are these amazing interviews that the federal government did in the 1930s of former slaves talking about their experiences, and they talk about belonging to the misdis, as they put it. And they often talk about being treated pretty terribly by the women, you know, being hit by them with stinging nettles that would have lasting pain, or coming home and finding their children gone and the woman counting heaps of dolls bills. How do we know that that brutality was the norm and not the exception? It's not completely clear from the historical documents what was the norm and what was the exception. And there are certainly really striking examples of women being violent towards their slaves.

But there are also examples of women who were less harsh, you know, and even stopped their husbands from beating their slaves. But interestingly, Stephanie Jones Rogers argues that this was not because they were necessarily more empathetic or benevolent. It was because women realize that a slave with lots of scars from being beaten was actually worth less in the marketplace. And because this was the only form of wealth that women could hold on to, they wanted to protect their financial assets and make sure that they weren't devaluing them. And so it wasn't benevolence.

It was, in fact, this financial incentive that potentially led some women to treat their slaves better. Becca's absolutely shocking, horrifying stuff. How do you think this changes our overall understanding of the history of slavery? I think one thing that it shows is that nobody in southern society was oblivious to what was going on. There are accounts that are particularly shocking in Stephanie's book that talk about young girls who had asked their fathers to punish the slaves that had been assigned to them.

And I think it just goes to show that the inhumanity of it all ran really deep and that even little girls at the age of five who were getting given adult slaves to look after them really didn't see these people as human.

Rosie Blore
Thank you so much, Becca. Thanks for having me, Rosie.

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Kunau
Hi, Rosie. Ready to record? Hi. Kunau. Yeah, yeah, 1 second.

Rosie Blore
I just need to finish today's wordle. Are you still playing wordle? Yeah. You do know we've started making our own games, right? What yeah, give me your phone.

Kunau
So this is Dateline. Every week it gives you five excerpts from past editions of the Economist and you have to guess the year they were published. Hang on a minute. The earliest edition was 1843. Thats a very big range.

Yeah. And theyve run all the way from then up to the most recent magazine. Okay, Im going to try one. Okay. The sinking of the Lusitania.

Rosie Blore
I might be in luck. I was worried about this. Heres what the Economist the sinking of the Lusitania on Friday, May 7, was a deliberate act by which over 1100 non combatants were drowned. Well, I know the date of this one. At least I think I do.

Its 1916. Right. Well give it a guess. Okay, so Im moving my dial. Oh my God.

Its 1915. I was wrong. But I was only one year out, so I scored nine points. Alright, alright. I think that one was a bit easy.

Kunau
Lets try the next one. Okay. Money and brains. The way is at last clear for Angela Merkel, leader of the Christian Democrats, to become Germanys first ever female chancellor on November 22. Sadly, it's not clear that she will be a success in the job.

Rosie Blore
Wow. I think the economist has become a bit more positive since then about the prospects for female leaders. However, I don't know when the, since then is. I don't know when she was elected, actually. You know, this is actually quite fun.

Who came up with this? So the digital team, we've been working on this for a few months and it's been out since March and proving very, very popular. Adam Roberts is the economist digital editor and the creator of Dateline. We've been cooking up an ambition to have games in the Economist for quite a while. We've always had some sort of games.

The Economist
We've had Christmas games. We've had special issues, even in print, where we'd have a quiz or a crossword. The Economist can be a bit playful, we're sort of intelligent, but we also have a bit of humor and a bit of playfulness. And I'd been wanting to get a daily or a weekly game into the Economist in different forms for a couple of years. Then we all saw the success of Wordle, Spelling Bee, all the games that every other publication had, and it was very clear why every news organization in the world wants games.

There's all sorts of reasons why they do it. We needed our own. And why do they all want games? Well, they need them because people are news averse, but they still need a reason to come to their apps and their websites. People like to form habits, or we like our readers to form habits.

We want them to have a reason for opening the app other than to check the latest news on fiscal policy. They should be also coming to have a bit of fun, to get the dopamine hit of playing a game and have something they can brag about to their friends or their colleagues. So even in house, we have a lot of our colleagues here at the Economist who come up to me and they tell me their latest score on Dateline. Economist correspondents clearly know how to have a lot of fun, and we're talking about things like wordle as though they're new. But this is a pretty old form of attention seeking from news organizations, isn't it?

Yeah. Newspapers have done this. If you think back to the original crosswords that were there, I think it was american publications were the first to come up with idea of crosswords. There was a period 20 years ago when the Sudoku was the big thing, that every newspaper had to have at least three of those on its back pages. Because news organizations understand that you're not just in the business of informing and educating your subscribers, your readers.

You're there to entertain them as well. Give them something fun. Give them a little bit of sugar to help the rest of the medicine go down. You keep using the word fun. Tell me how you came up with Dateline as our form of fun.

It's a safe form of fun, I think, for the economist, it's very much on brand. We're talking about our own content. We're telling our readers we have this archive of great content that goes back to 1843. You find, as you play it, that we're highlighting good articles that we've written either from the recent or the distant past. So it's a very on economist brand sort of game.

We came up with it because we thought our readers wouldn't be horrified by it. We tested it on many readers and they were all delighted to play it. But we also knew that our readers, just like our colleagues, are quite competitive people. They like to show that they know stuff. And so this is a test of knowledge, rather than, say, wordle, which is a test of your puzzling skills.

Rosie Blore
Wow. Any more ideas in the pipeline about other games? Yes, we do have more ideas. As I said, this is more of a knowledge game. This is the test of your knowledge of world affairs.

The Economist
There's no end of other possible knowledge games that we could invent and use the same format. I would love to shift and do a puzzle game. I think that really sort of satisfying dopamine hit you get from doing spelling b connections. That's really less about a test of your knowledge of world affairs and more of a sort of pleasant, puzzling something out and getting the reward for puzzling it. So I would love to launch next a puzzle game if we could.

I'd also love to hear from the listeners what ideas they have. What would they like us to be doing? So this is an ultimate call out to economist subscribers to come up with a perfect economist game. Couldn't end better than that. Thank you so much, Adam.

Thank you.

Rosie Blore
Do tell us your ideas for games or anything else you want to say about the show by emailing us@podcasteconomist.com.

tomorrow, the weekend intelligence will be presented by Zanni Minton Beddoes, the Economist's editor in chief on Gaza the day after what will happen when the war ends? Until then, that's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jack Gill. Our deputy editor is Jon Joe Devlin and our sound designer is Will Rowe, with help this week from Johnny Allen. Our senior producers are Rory Galloway and Sarah Lanyuk.

Our senior creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Maggie Khedifa and Benji Guy. And our assistant producers are Henrietta McFarlane and Koonal Patel.

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