Exploring Potential #Intermediates in the Cross-Species #Transmission of #Influenza A Virus to #Humans, Viruses: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/16/7/1129

We evaluate the roles of various animal #hosts, including #pigs, #galliformes, companion animals, #minks, marine #mammals, and other animals, in the spread of IAV to humans.

There's a mink in the sink!

https://cutetropolis.com/2024/04/01/mink-swims-in-sink/

#Minks

Word Search Puzzle 581

Word List : #graddan #preempt #wigwags #riffle #chicos #apeiron #prickish #loots #undercry #unordain #silyl #pities #unrounds #seebeck #minks #milieux #rectress #geaster

http://karafinance.com/2024/02/27/word-search-puzzle-581/

The Yule Vole is still nibbling beneath the juniper and this week’s goal is to not give up. I find myself perpetually gripped in grief for the future, grieving in the grip of the present. I find myself, yet fail to find myself. Some days I find hugs help.

Also: binge-watching old TV shows. Surprise opossum tracks in the snow. “It’s just the lower-grade stomach upset, thank god,” I hear myself saying. But time is a juggernaut, a millstone on wheels. Eighteen degrees and lilacs budding. The days fall through my hands like they were lubed by calendar clowns.

I think it’s about trusting the process. Not in the sense of “everything always works out for the best” but a belief in one’s ability to reach a workable solution–or, if an answer cannot be found, to believe my future self capable of Dealing With Things. To know that even though today might be glum as shit and no answers are forthcoming that I will manage to weather each new nightmare. I will know how to cope. Yes. Yes. Like the local deer, I have been practicing survival.

The opossum is so small but she dances around on her little pink toes with these mounds of snow. In the cold morning I find the signs: a ghost of her grinning presence, splayed and clawing.

A couple of weeks ago I had a dizzy spell. I wish it had been brought about by something significant or substantive but it was a TV show cliffhanger. An actress somehow twisted my limbic system, stabbed her character’s wretchedness through the screen so viscerally that it compressed my ribcage. Oh my GOD, I blurted, OH MY GOD–my torso lurching with such disbelief that I was heard at the far end of the house. For an hour we had to postpone the joy of grocery shopping while I learned what it means to “catch one’s breath.” A complicated process, because at the same time you’re chasing it you also have to completely avoid even the idea of standing up.

At length I think I caught the concepts, and eventually the reality. Just sat there, inhaling the physicality of shock, exhaling the uncertainness baked into this absurd mortality loaf.

Meanwhile: I have discovered that mink eyeballs project from their heads like shiny-black half-installed marbles. They literally stick out of the sides of their faces. It is adorable and yet I also want to shake my weird little fist at them: Stop doing that to yourselves! This instant! Untucked eyeballs cannot possibly be safe!

Here’s a more solid sentiment, from a TV show so old that only the Young Rich Guy had a cellphone: The only way a good idea can come to life is if somebody chooses to see it through. This is true yet sounds exhausting, and why I confess a preference to easier word combinations, like: Good job, Doctor P. You really drained the hell out of that liver.

Maybe the platelet-red pen stroke I can see through the holly bush (that I thought was a cardinal but turned out to be the neighbor’s traffic cone to guide his school bus parking) is a cardinal AND a traffic cone. Because aren’t we all beeping and backing into contextualized fears, don’t they alternately shift and change gears when seen close up or from a distance? I mean, are you just sitting there watching a screen, or are you actually working like hell to stay absolutely perfectly still? Maybe the neighbor’s life is so full of a cardinal’s bravado that he displays a hopeful little pointy-hat safety-feature on his lawn, just to cheer everybody up. Red in shade, orange in sunlight. Standing perfectly still in grayscale at midnight like a trembling possibility.

Mink are small, but listen: they are fierce–hopping around out there day or night, braving the world’s drifts. Nose and reckless eyeballs first, they will pierce your expectations with shrieks and hisses if you so much as whistle near their traffic cones. Or so I imagine. I want to believe the neighbor’s cone sleeps well in this wetland area, this mink territory, trusting in a certainty of not being stolen, not being squashed by an innocent bus. It sits there like a pointy hat with a proper job, an important responsibility every day, snow or more snow. I envy its fiery talent for safely navigating the world.

https://cbauder.com/2024/01/17/mink-are-fiercer-than-their-eyeballs-look/

#art #cardinal #deer #dizziness #humor #minks #nature #opossums #persistence #theUnknown #trafficCones #trustingTheProcess #voles #wildlife #worry

RT @Eurosurveillanc: Our new issue is available
⬇️⬇️
https://bit.ly/EUS2816

Topics include
#SARSCoV2 #minks #COVID19 #Omicron
#CCHF #hemorrhagicfever #CrimeanCongo
#outbreaks #antigen #publichealth #IDTwitter

🐦🔗: https://n.respublicae.eu/ECDC_EU/status/1649065798269390850

As the world is just beginning to recover from the devastation of Covid-19, it is facing the possibility of a pandemic of a far more deadly pathogen.

#Bird #flu — known more formally as #avian #influenza — has long hovered on the horizons of scientists’ fears.

This pathogen, especially the #H5N1 strain, hasn’t often infected humans, but when it has, 56 percent of those known to have contracted it have died.

Its inability to spread easily, if at all, from one person to another has kept it from causing a pandemic. But things are changing.

The virus, which has long caused outbreaks among poultry, is infecting more and more migratory birds, allowing it to spread more widely, even to various mammals, raising the risk that a new variant could spread to and among people.

Alarmingly, it was recently reported that a mutant H5N1 strain was not only infecting #minks at a fur farm in Spain but also most likely spreading among them, unprecedented among #mammals.

Even worse, the mink’s upper respiratory tract is exceptionally well suited to act as a conduit to humans, Thomas Peacock, a virologist who has studied avian influenza, told me

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/opinion/bird-flu-h5n1-pandemic.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare