“Buboes, phlegm, blood and guts! Boils, bogeys, rot and pus! Blisters, fevers, weeping sores! From your wounds the fester pours.”

— Chant sung by Plaguebearer Daemons during battle

Hot on the heels of Corona-chan’s highly successful attempts to spread the blessings of Grandfather Nurgle far and wide, we now have news that a truly lethal flu strain has once again reared its ugly head, in – where else?!? – China:

As China grapples with the rampant Wuhan coronavirus, another sickness has broken out in the country: the deadly H5N1 bird flu.

The outbreak took place at a farm near Shaoyang city, in China’s central Hunan province, the country’s Ministry of Agriculture announced on Saturday. 4,500 of the farm’s 7,850 chickens have died from the illness, and local authorities have culled nearly 20,000 birds to contain its spread.

H5N1 is an avian flu virus that causes severe respiratory disease in birds, and is contagious to humans. No human victims have yet been reported, but the World Health Organization (WHO) states that more than 350 people have died from the virus since it first spread to humans in Hong Kong in the late 1990s.

H5N1 is a far deadlier virus to those who contract it. Nearly 60 percent of H5N1 patients die after contracting the sickness, compared to two percent of Wuhan coronavirus (2019 nCoV) patients thus far.

You know what? I think that John Ringo may well be the greatest unsung and dishonoured prophet of our time.

For those of you who don’t know what the fuss is all about, H5N1 is a genuinely lethal strain of avian flu that can be transmitted from birds to humans. The reason why it has a 60% mortality rate – or at least, it did the last time there was a serious outbreak, more than 20 years ago – is because of the way that it attacks human hosts.

H5N1 attacks either the respiratory or digestive tracts of birds. When it infects humans, the virus looks for similar binding sites in humans – which just happen to be in the lungs, resulting in, basically, viral pneumonia that causes the victim to “drown” in his or her own fluids.

If H5N1 were to bind into the same sites in humans that it does in birds, AND could be easily transmitted between humans… that would be a true world killer.

The good news is that H5N1 cannot yet be transmitted between humans quickly – YET.

The bad news is that it is probably just a handful of mutations away from jumping between humans, rather than merely between birds to humans. Right now, this little bastard is spread from birds to humans via direct contact or by humans inhaling microscopic amounts of avian faeces.

(As disgusting as this sounds, that is the way your olfactory system works. When you smell garbage or shit, the reason you smell it at all is because tiny bits of that stuff are landing on your olfactory receptors. Try thinking about that the next time you have to use a public toilet – or, worse by far, an Indian public toilet.)

The horrific news is that, if H5N1 becomes easily transmissible between humans, the way that the regular human seasonal influenza virus H1N1 is, and starts spreading at the rate that H1N1 does… we’re looking at hundreds of millions of potential casualties worldwide.

Maybe BILLIONS.

Let’s put that number into a bit of perspective.

Back at the end of the Middle Ages, when the Plague destroyed what was until that point a rather advanced European civilisation, the Black Death caused an estimated 75 to 200 MILLION casualties across the continent. Over the space of three serious historical outbreaks, the Black Death has killed anywhere between 150 and 300 million people.

By comparison, the Spanish Flu outbreak after WWI killed an estimated 50-100 million.

Now, remember that these disasters occurred at times when the world was far less interconnected and vulnerable than it is today. Back in 1918, around-the-world travel was not possible in under a week. Back in the Middle Ages, the world still hadn’t been circumnavigated.

Today, you could get on a plane in Newark, NJ and be in Singapore 18 hours later. Ten hours after that, you could be in Sydney, Australia. And a few hours after that, you could be in Auckland, New Zealand.

There is simply no part of the world that is safe from a highly infectious, virulent, and deadly plague these days.

OK, that’s the terrifying part of the story. Now let’s put in a bit of perspective.

First: H5N1 CANNOT be transmitted between humans. Not yet. It’s apparently not terribly far from doing so, but it’s not yet there.

Second: there do appear to be some promising vaccines out there which are effective at countering the spread of H5N1 and which are clinically proven to work in human subjects. Western government understand the extremely lethal threat that human-transmissible H5N1 poses and are stockpiling as much of those vaccines as they can get.

Third: preventive and proactive measures undertaken across more than 20 years of exposure to H5N1, such as mass culling of domesticated poultry whenever the slightest sign of H5N1 is found, have proven to be effective at containing the spread of that shit.

Does that mean we can rest safely in our beds at night?

Not really.

Remember that this latest coronavirus epidemic started spreading in China. So too has the latest outbreak of H5N1. So did the original outbreak back in the late 1990s. And so did SARS in 2003.

Why is China such a fertile breeding ground for potentially horrifying pathogens?

Partly because it is a pretty crowded country with not exactly stellar public health facilities, a LOT of superstitious nonsense concerning the spread of disease, plenty of extremely unsanitary habits among its people, and of course a highly authoritarian top-down system of government that cannot stand any perceived challenges to its authority or questioning of its competence.

This, by the way, is a problem throughout the Dirt World, not just in China. India isn’t all that much better – indeed its public sanitation is unquestionably worse in many aspects.

But it’s not just humid crowded soggy places where people eat really weird shit that you see the spread of such nasty little killers – it’s also happening in Saudi Arabia, of all places, land of camel-jockeys and [CENSORED!!!].

The Saudis are dealing with an outbreak of H5N8, a strain of bird flu that is not yet dangerous to humans but has evidently become more virulent for avian species.

That same article mentions that Vietnam is also dealing with an outbreak of H5N6, another avian flu strain.

So… should we be concerned?

Well, yes. But there is no need for panic. Not yet.

Avian flu is dangerous to humans – but only in very specific strains. Most strains of avian flu have no effect whatsoever on people and cannot be transmitted to us. The reason for this is pretty technical, it has to do with the way that the hemaglutinnin in the virii bind to specific receptors in the cells of their hosts and which cells have those receptors, if any.

The only real takeaway here is to keep a very close eye on what the ChiComs are doing. It has become abundantly clear that the Chinese government and infrastructure simply cannot be trusted to warn the rest of the world about serious contagions.

If past patterns are any indicators, we will see the next serious contagions coming out of either China or Africa – and for pretty much the same reasons: poor sanitation, terrible and very foolish food habits, cultural customs that make no scientific sense whatsoever, and lack of any serious transparency either on the part of the people or their governments.