1/3/25

Friday, January 3, 2025

D+59

1972 Andrew Charles Clausen was born

In bed at 9, awake around 1, and unable to sleep with bait bucket thoughts, up at 1:40.  It's a cold day, 17° at 8 a.m., wind chill of -2°.   

Prednisone, day 234, 7.5 mg., day 49.   Prednisone at  5:30.  Other meds at 7:30.   

Again?  So soon?  A story in this morning's NY Times reports that if human-to-human transmission of the H5N1 bird flu virus becomes commonplace, experts fear a pandemic that could be far more deadly than Covid-19.   In mid-December, the C.D.C. confirmed the nation’s first “severe case” of H5N1 in a southwest Louisiana patient who was exposed to sick and dead birds in a backyard flock. Last month, California declared a state of emergency over bird flu in dairy cows.  Scores of people in the United States have contracted bird flu over the past year, most of them from infected cows or poultry. The overwhelming majority of the cases have been mild.

The case involving the Louisiana patient, however, was followed by an unsettling finding. Some of the genetic samples from the patient contained gene mutations that might help H5N1 infect people more easily. The patient remains in critical condition.

Experts know that each time the virus infects another person, it has another opportunity to mutate in a way that might increase its capability of spreading among people. In another troubling finding, one of the mutations identified in the Louisiana patient also turned up in a viral sample taken from a teenager with a severe case of bird flu in British Columbia. 

There can be little doubt that funding for research on bird flu detection, testing, therapeutics, and vaccines will be cut under the Trump administration, especially if RFK, Jr., becomes Secretary of Health and Human Services.  Trump 1 brought us the Covid-19 pandemic; will Trump II bring us a bird flu pandemic?   Should I stop filling the bird feeders?  Should I start another set of watercolor notebooks for Trump II?

 The End of the Golden Age.   Last night and early this morning, I listened to this article in The Atlantic by Franklin Foer from the April 2024 print edition.  As one would expect from him and from anything printed in The Atlantic, it was an excellent piece of writing, loaded with historical information and analysis and triggering many memories.  The golden age of which he wrote was a period when American Jews were widely accepted within American society and culture and anti-semitism was low.  It was also a period when Liberalism dominated political and cultural life in the country and the State of Israel was widely accepted as legitimate, democratic, and allied with America and Western Europe in values and international allegiance.  Today American Jews are vulnerable to increasing anti-semitism from the Left and the Right and Israel, identified by many Americans with Benjamin Netanyahu, is increasingly considered a fascist, racist, apartheid state. 

Lunch with CBG was wonderful.