Data Report

SUMMARY - A child in the state of California is recovering from an infection of HPAI (Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza). The source of the infection is unknown and no other family members of the child seem to have been affected. People who were in close contact with the child have been notified. This is the first case in California not to be associated with the dairy industry.

LINK - https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-11-19/alameda-county-child-believed-to-be-latest-case-of-bird-flu-source-unknown

We can not be certain that what this child experienced was human-to-human transmission.

Regardless of how this child contracted HPAI (Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza), the facts remain:

** Our surveillance on livestock contamination from HPAI remains limited.
** Our knowledge of the severity of that same livestock contamination remains limited.
** We are observing more incidents of humans contracting HPAI.

A caveat: Observing more incidents of a condition does not correlate with an increase in the number of those conditions. Put simply, if you are not looking for a condition, you tend not to find it. Once you are looking for a condition, you are more apt to find it everywhere. Examples include autism (which was historically dismissed as someone being "simple") & Alzheimer's (again, historically dismissed as someone simply "getting old"), which were both traditionally dismissed as other conditions until the scientific and medical community addressed them as such.

** The conditions that we are observing in humans may be "mild" but they are noticeable.
** HPAI is well-known in birds and at least one instance in pigs (which would potentially allow the condition to be more easily transmissible to humans).

With these and other facts, we must be cognizant that HPAI is a growing threat to humans. The amount of the increase in that threat may be debated but the increase itself should not be debated.

Add to this situation that Covid-19 continues to evolve (as of this writing, XEC is on the rise but has not become the dominant strain in the US) and our population faces significant challenges. A majority of Americans are neither masking nor getting vaccinated for the latest strains.

While I hope that these challenges do not rise to what occurred in 2020, we can't guarantee that. It is up to us, those who are Covid Cautious, to protect ourselves from future hardships as best as we can. What I am suggesting is not "doom-saying" but merely a logical extension of the facts as they are presented.