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New bird flu strain detected on poultry farm as experts monitor mutations

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New bird flu strain detected on poultry farm as experts monitor mutations

A new strain of bird flu (highly pathogenic avian influenza, or HPAI) has been detected on a duck farm in California. 

The World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) reported the outbreak of the new strain, H5N9, earlier this week on its website.

The more common H5N1 strain was also found at the same farm, which is located in Merced County, according to reports.

BIRD FLU PROVES FATAL TO CATS: HERE’S HOW TO PROTECT YOUR PETS

“This is the first confirmed case of HPAI H5N9 in poultry in the United States,” WOAH wrote. 

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A new strain of bird flu (highly pathogenic avian influenza, or HPAI) has been detected on a duck farm in California.  (iStock)

Health agencies are conducting “comprehensive epidemiological investigations and enhanced surveillance,” according to the statement.

David J. Cennimo, an associate professor of medicine and pediatrics in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, said this new strain could point to the “adaptability” of influenza viruses.

HAS A ‘QUADEMIC’ HIT THE US? 4 VIRAL INFECTIONS AND WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT THEM

“Birds are very susceptible to avian influenza in general. Some strains of the virus are mild, some deadly,” he told Fox News Digital.

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H5N9 has been seen in the past, Cennimo noted, and generally causes mild illness in birds. 

Ducks backyard

“Birds are very susceptible to avian influenza in general. Some strains of the virus are mild, some deadly,” an expert told Fox News Digital. (iStock)

“The ducks in California, however, were dying,” he said. “Genetic testing showed this H5N9 was different from historical samples and was, in fact, a reassortment.”

(Reassortment is the process by which influenza viruses swap gene segments, according to the National Institutes of Health.)

      

With influenza viruses, scientists name them based on the Hs and Ns (hemagglutinin and neuraminidase surface proteins), according to Cennimo.

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There are “continual mutations” of flu strains, so not all H1 versions are the same, the doctor said.

Testing chicks bird flu

There are “continual mutations” of flu strains, so not all H1 versions are the same, a doctor said. (iStock)

“This is why humans are getting influenza vaccines yearly, and you will see the strain compositions change some years, even though they remain H1N1 and H3N2,” he said. 

“In this case, the H5 in the H5N9 was the H5 from the currently circulating H5N1 bird flu that is more pathogenic.”

“While H5N9 is not generally a very dangerous virus, we need to keep an eye on this new strain.”

With H5N9, he said, the virus appears to have switched its N1 and picked up an N9 from another virus. 

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This can happen when two different viruses simultaneously infect the same animal, he said.

Blood collection tubes H5N1 in front of chicken

Researchers become concerned when there are large outbreaks of bird flu in poultry farms, one expert noted. (iStock)

“While H5N9 is not generally a very dangerous virus, we need to keep an eye on this new strain,” Cennimo cautioned.

“To date, I am not aware of any human infections with H5N9. Again, this will be monitored.”

The jump from birds to humans

Dr. Jacob Glanville, CEO of Centivax, a San Francisco biotechnology company, told Fox News Digital, noted that birds are “constantly a reservoir” for many types of influenzas that normally do not infect people. 

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“Researchers monitor them, as the bird flus have evolved to become human global pandemic strains multiple times in the past,” he told Fox News Digital. “In order to infect humans, they need to mutate in order to adapt from a bird to human host.”

Bird flu

To date, there have been 67 confirmed cases of human bird flu in the U.S. and one death, according to the CDC. (iStock)

Researchers become concerned when there are large outbreaks of bird flus in poultry farms, according to Glanville.

In addition to interfering with the food supply, having many infected birds in proximity to pigs, cows and humans greatly increases the risk of mutations that could spill over into “mammalian infections.”

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“Currently, this is the main concern for H5N1,” he said. “Other reports of bird flu are worth monitoring but are currently low risk.”

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To date, there have been 67 confirmed cases of human bird flu in the U.S. and one death, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

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Marijuana Dependence Linked to Higher Risk of Death

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Marijuana Dependence Linked to Higher Risk of Death

Hospital and emergency room patients diagnosed with cannabis use disorder — defined as an inability to stop using cannabis even when the drug is causing harm — died at almost three times the rate of individuals without the disorder over the next five years, according to a study published on Thursday, the largest on the subject.

Patients with cannabis use disorder were 10 times as likely to die by suicide as those in the general population. They were also more likely to die from trauma, drug poisonings and lung cancer. Those numbers suggest that cannabis use disorder is about half as dangerous as opioid addiction and slightly less dangerous than alcohol use disorder, the researchers said.

A second report, published on Tuesday, found that more cases of schizophrenia and psychosis in Canada have been linked to cannabis use disorder since the drug was legalized.

“Many people think, ‘Oh, cannabis is not harmful — it’s organic, it’s natural; how great,’” said Dr. Laura Bierut, a psychiatrist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who is an author of an editorial accompanying the study of death risk. But the marijuana sold today is far more potent, and more harmful, than what baby boomers smoked in the 1960s and 1970s, she said.

“It is a public health threat just like alcohol,” Dr. Bierut said.

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Recent research suggests that three in 10 cannabis users will develop cannabis use disorder, defined as being unable to stop using cannabis even though it’s causing serious health and social problems. As with alcohol, many people use marijuana recreationally without adverse effects or addiction.

The researchers took advantage of records in Ontario that capture millions of residents’ encounters with the government health system, which covers 97 percent of the population there.

From the records, the scientists in Thursday’s study identified 106,994 people who were diagnosed with cannabis use disorder during an emergency department visit or hospitalization between 2006 and 2021.

The researchers linked the records with vital statistics records and found that 3.5 percent of them died within five years of treatment for the disorder. In a matched comparison group of people of the same age and sex, the death rate was 0.6 percent.

The authors then made adjustments to account for other risk factors that may have contributed to their deaths, including mental health disorders, other substance use and conditions like heart disease and cancer.

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Even when taking deaths by those other causes out of the equation, the researchers concluded that patients with cannabis use disorder were at a 2.8-fold increased risk of death compared with the general population. The risk was greatest in young adults ages 25 to 44.

Dr. Daniel Myran, an assistant professor of family medicine at University of Ottawa and the study’s first author, noted that these are most likely underestimates of cannabis’s toll.

“Our estimate is that for every person treated for C.U.D. there are another three who didn’t seek care,” he said. “So this is not just C.U.D., but bad enough that they sought care for it.”

He also noted that the study could not conclusively determine whether the cannabis itself increased death risk, or whether it was other lifestyle or health factors that happen to be more common among heavy cannabis users.

“Either way, this group is really, really high risk, and could benefit from intervention and monitoring and prevention,” he said.

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On Tuesday, the same research group published a study looking at whether Canada’s recent legalization of marijuana affected rates of psychosis and schizophrenia.

Cannabis use has been associated with the development of schizophrenia, a serious mental illness, as well as transient psychotic episodes characterized by a loss of contact with reality. Some research has found no association between cannabis legalization and an increase in these disorders, but many studies are too small to detect changes in the prevalence of psychotic disorders, which are rare.

The new study analyzed cannabis-linked psychosis in Canada during three periods: before the country made cannabis legal (2006 to 2015), amid widening use of medical and nonmedical cannabis (2015-2018) and after the recreational use of cannabis was made legal (2018 to 2022).

The rates of schizophrenia were stable over time. But the percentage of cases attributable to cannabis use disorder increased to 10.3 percent during the legalization period, up from 3.7 percent before legalization, the authors found. The rate of psychosis (without a diagnosis of schizophrenia) nearly doubled after legalization.

Young adults ages 19 to 24 were most vulnerable, said Jodi Gilman, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who wrote a commentary about the study.

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“This is a period of the life span when the brain is still developing and still vulnerable to the effects of cannabis,” Dr. Gilman said. Psychosis and schizophrenia are also known to develop in young adulthood, she added, “so you have a double hit.”

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Disease starts on your plate, cardiologist says — here's what to change

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Disease starts on your plate, cardiologist says — here's what to change

More than 133 million Americans (40%) had at least one chronic disease in 2022, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Topping the list of chronic diseases are heart disease, cancer, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and diabetes.

Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a cardiologist and public health campaigner based in London, believes a big part of what’s fueling all those conditions are the foods on Americans’ plates.

MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN: WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT THE MOVEMENT

“I think you cannot fix health or health care without fixing the food,” he said during an on-camera interview with Fox News Digital.

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Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a cardiologist and public health campaigner based in London, believes a big part of what’s fueling diseases are the foods on Americans’ plates. (Dr. Aseem Malhotra)

Studies have shown that only one in eight Americans has optimal metabolic health, which Malhotra defines as “the state of balance the body maintains between storing fat and burning it for energy.”

What drives metabolic health?

In his bestselling book, “The 21-Day Immunity Plan,” Malhotra writes that metabolic health is measured using five markers.

Those include blood glucose levels, blood pressure, waist circumference, cholesterol profile (the body’s levels of triglycerides, a type of harmful fat found in the blood), and high-density lipoprotein (a beneficial cholesterol-carrying molecule).

‘GOD-INTENDED FOODS’ ARE KEY TO A HEALTHIER AMERICA, EXPERT SAYS

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“A person is considered to have metabolic syndrome when they fail to meet three of these optimal values,” he writes. “For example, someone who has high blood pressure, high blood glucose and high triglycerides would be considered to be at the highest risk of experiencing health problems.”

Poor metabolic health is directly linked to the development of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and stroke, Malhotra cautioned.

Couple cutting veggies

Improvements can happen within just 21 to 28 days, according to Malhotra — purely from changing dietary habits.  (iStock)

It also puts people at a higher risk of cancer and dementia, as well as complications from infections.

The worst things someone can do for their metabolic health, Malhotra said, is to eat a diet high in ultraprocessed foods, sugar and other low-quality carbohydrates, such as flour-based products, rice and pasta.

More than 133 million Americans (40%) had at least one chronic disease in 2022.

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To optimize metabolic health, he recommends eating whole foods, avoiding the aforementioned foods, keeping active and reducing stress through yoga, Pilates, meditation or even regularly hugging close friends and loved ones.

Improvements can happen within just 21 to 28 days, according to Malhotra — purely from changing dietary habits. 

LARA TRUMP ON SETTING A HEALTHY EXAMPLE FOR HER CHILDREN

“That means cutting out ultraprocessed foods and eliminating what we call low-quality carbohydrates — the refined breads, the pastas, rice, potatoes,” he said. “If you eliminate those — I’m not saying forever, but if you do that for four to six weeks, you will actually start to reset your metabolic health.”

“And then, of course, you can have those foods occasionally.”

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cancer patient looks out window

Topping the list of chronic diseases are heart disease, cancer, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and diabetes. (iStock)

Optimizing metabolic health doesn’t mean people can’t enjoy food, said Malhotra, whose father taught him to cook when he was a teenager.

“I love food like most people — it’s one of the greatest pleasures of life,” he told Fox News Digital. “I cook every day.”

“But I have the resources to be able to afford healthy food as well, which a lot of people don’t have, and that’s a real issue,” he added.

TOP INFLUENCERS IN MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN MOVEMENT

In his daily diet, Malhotra avoids ultraprocessed foods — but it wasn’t always that way. He refers to himself as a “reformed junk food and sugar addict.”

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“I used to eat fast food all the time and lots of sugar,” he shared. “But when I realized it wasn’t good for me, I looked to the research. I converted very quickly and broke that addiction.”

Fighting ultraprocessed foods

Sixty percent of the calorie consumption in the U.S. diet comes from ultraprocessed foods, the doctor pointed out, going on to share his definition.

      

“These are industrial formulations made up of five or more ingredients, usually with additives and preservatives, and they basically contain unhealthy oils, sugar. They lack fiber [and have] a lot of refined carbohydrates.”

In Malhotra’s view, ultraprocessed foods have been “designed deliberately” by the food industry to make them “hyper-palatable and probably addictive.”

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Junk Food

Sixty percent of the calorie consumption in the U.S. diet comes from ultraprocessed foods, the doctor pointed out. (iStock)

“I think that would be one of the most important things that needs to be tackled — how do we curtail the consumption of ultraprocessed food while simultaneously increasing consumption of whole foods?”

To accomplish this, Malhotra suggested taking lessons from tobacco control, which he believes the U.S. did very well.

“I think you cannot fix health or health care without fixing the food.”

“Public health advocates and scientists called out the manipulations of big tobacco through three processes — targeting the availability, the affordability and the acceptability of cigarettes,” he said. 

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Malhotra recommends applying the same principle to processed foods, which might mean raising the price or using the taxation of those foods to subsidize healthier foods.

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“I also think banning advertising of ultraprocessed foods … would definitely go a long way to curbing that consumption,” he added. 

There is also a need for public health education campaigns to help people understand what ultraprocessed foods are, according to the doctor.

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Dozens of Clinical Trials Have Been Frozen in Response to Trump’s USAID Order

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Dozens of Clinical Trials Have Been Frozen in Response to Trump’s USAID Order

Asanda Zondi received a startling phone call last Thursday, with orders to make her way to a health clinic in Vulindlela, South Africa, where she was participating in a research study that was testing a new device to prevent pregnancy and H.IV. infection.

The trial was shutting down, a nurse told her. The device, a silicone ring inserted into her vagina, needed to be removed right away.

When Ms. Zondi, 22, arrived at the clinic, she learned why: The U.S. Agency for International Development, which funded the study, had withdrawn financial support and had issued a stop-work order to all organizations around the globe that receive its money. The abrupt move followed an executive order by President Trump freezing all foreign aid for at least 90 days. Since then, the Trump administration has taken steps to dismantle the agency entirely.

Ms. Zondi’s trial is one of dozens that have been abruptly frozen, leaving people around the world with experimental drugs and medical products in their bodies, cut off from the researchers who were monitoring them, and generating waves of suspicion and fear.

The State Department, which now oversees U.S.A.I.D., replied to a request for comment by directing a reporter to USAID.gov, which no longer contains any information except that all permanent employees have been placed on administrative leave. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that the agency is wasteful and advances a liberal agenda that is counter to President Trump’s foreign policy.

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In interviews, scientists — who are forbidden by the terms of the stop-work order to speak with the news media — described agonizing choices: violate the stop-work orders and continue to care for trial volunteers, or leave them alone to face potential side effects and harm.

The United States is signatory to the Declaration of Helsinki that lays out ethical principles under which medical research must be conducted, requiring that researchers care for participants throughout a trial, and report the results of their findings to the communities where trials were conducted.

Ms. Zondi said she was baffled and frightened. She talked with other women who had volunteered for the study. “Some people are afraid because we don’t know exactly what was the reason,” she said. “We don’t really know the real reason of pausing the study.”

The stop-work order was so immediate and sweeping that the research staff would be violating it if they helped the women remove the rings. But Dr. Leila Mansoor, a scientist with the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (known as CAPRISA) and an investigator on the trial, decided she and her team would do so anyway.

“My first thought when I saw this order was, There are rings in people’s bodies and you cannot leave them,” Dr. Mansoor said. “For me ethics and participants come first. There is a line.”

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In the communities where her organization works, people have volunteered for more than 25 years to test H.I.V. treatments, prevention products and vaccines, contributing to many of the key breakthroughs in the field and benefiting people worldwide.

That work relied on a carefully constructed web of trust that has now been destroyed, Dr. Mansoor said. Building that trust took years in South Africa, where the apartheid regime conducted medical experiments on Black people during the years of white rule. Those fears are echoed in a long history of experimentation by researchers and drug companies in developing countries and in marginalized populations in the United States.

The Times identified more than 30 frozen studies that had volunteers already in the care of researchers, including trials of:

  • malaria treatment in children under age 5 in Mozambique

  • treatment for cholera in Bangladesh

  • a screen-and-treat method for cervical cancer in Malawi

  • tuberculosis treatment for children and teenagers in Peru and South Africa

  • nutritional support for children in Ethiopia

  • early-childhood-development interventions in Cambodia

  • ways to support pregnant and breastfeeding women to reduce malnutrition in Jordan

  • an mRNA vaccine technology for H.I.V. in South Africa

It is difficult to know the total number of trials shut down, or how many people are affected, because the swift demolition of U.S.A.I.D. in recent days has erased the public record. In addition to the disabled website, the agency no longer has a communications department. And the stop-work order prohibits any implementing agency from speaking publicly about what has happened.

In England, about 100 people have been inoculated with an experimental malaria vaccine in two clinical trials. Now, they no longer have access to the clinical trial staff if that vaccine were to cause an adverse reaction in their bodies. The trial is an effort to find a next-generation vaccine better than the one now used in Africa; that shot protects children against about a third of malaria cases, but researchers hoped to find a vaccine that offered much more protection. Malaria remains a top global killer of children; 600,000 people died of the disease in 2023, the latest figure available.

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Had the trial not been frozen, the participants would be coming to a clinic routinely to be monitored for adverse physical effects, and to have blood and cell samples taken to see whether the vaccine was working. The participants are meant to be followed for two years to assess the vaccine’s safety.

A scientist who worked on the trial said she hoped that partners at the University of Oxford, where it was being conducted, were shuffling staff to respond if any participant fell ill. But she was fired last week and no longer has access to any information about the trial. She spoke on condition of anonymity because she feared jeopardizing her ability to work on malaria research the U.S. might conduct in the future.

“It’s unethical to test anything in humans without taking it to the full completion of studies,” she said. “You put them at risk for no good reason.”

Had the stop-work order come later this year, the newly-vaccinated volunteers might have been in an even more precarious position. They were scheduled to be deliberately infected with malaria to see if the experimental vaccine protected them from the disease.

Dr. Sharon Hillier, a professor of reproductive infectious diseases at the University of Pittsburgh, was until this week director of a five-year, $125 million trial funded by U.S.A.I.D. to test the safety and efficacy of six new H.I.V. prevention products. They included bimonthly injections, fast-dissolving vaginal inserts and vaginal rings.

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With the study suspended, she and her colleagues cannot process biological samples, analyze the data they have already collected, or communicate findings to either participants or the partnering government agencies in countries where the trials were conducted. These are requirements under the Helsinki agreement.

“We have betrayed the trust of ministries of health and the regulatory agencies in the countries where we were working and of the women who agreed to be in our studies, who were told that they would be taken care of,” Dr. Hillier said. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my 40 years of doing international research. It’s unethical, it’s dangerous and it’s reckless.”

Even trials that were not funded in whole or part by U.S.A.I.D. have been thrown into turmoil because they were using medical or development infrastructure that was supported by the agency and is no longer operational. Millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer funds already spent to start those trials will not be recouped.

The shutdowns have business consequences as well. Many of those trials were partnerships with U.S. drug companies, testing products they hoped to sell overseas.

“This has made it impossible for pharmaceutical companies to do research in these countries,” Dr. Hillier said.

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Another H.I.V. trial, called CATALYST, has thousands of volunteers in five countries testing an injectable drug called long-acting cabotegravir. Participants were receiving bimonthly injections to maintain a sufficient level of the drug in their bodies to prevent H.I.V. infection. Without regular injections, or a carefully-managed end to use of the drug, the participants will not have enough cabotegravir to stop a new infection, but there will be enough in their systems that, if they were to contract the virus, it could easily mutate to become drug-resistant, said Dr. Kenneth Ngure, president-elect of the International AIDS Society.

This is a significant threat to the trial volunteers and also to the millions of people living with H.I.V. because cabotegravir is closely related to a drug that is already used worldwide in standard treatment of the virus. Development of resistance could be catastrophic, Dr. Ngure said: “It’s wrong on so many levels — you can’t just stop.”

A clinical trial run by the development organization FHI 360, which implemented many U.S.A.I.D.-funded health programs and studies, was testing a biodegradable hormonal implant to prevent pregnancy. Women in the Dominican Republic had the devices in their bodies when U.S.A.I.D. funding was cut off. A spokeswoman for the organization, which furloughed more than a third of its staff this week, said that it had pulled together other resources to ensure that participants continue to receive care.

Another trial, in Uganda, was testing a new regimen of tuberculosis treatment for children. The stop-work order cuts those children off from potentially lifesaving medication.

“You can’t walk away from them, you just can’t,” a researcher in that trial said.

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