How Bird Flu Could Impact YOU: Virologist Explains the Risks, How to Protect Yourself, & Why Egg Prices are So High

When it comes to the bird flu, you are probably panicking about the wrong things! Understand the bird flu’s impact on wild birds, chickens, cows, cats, your grocery bill and whether or not your health is at risk. Dr. Seema Lakdawala, a molecular virologist from Emory University, is here to calm your fears with the latest bird flu news and help you better understand how the virus will impact you. She breaks down everything you need to know — what the H5N1 virus is and how it spreads, if the bird flu will become a pandemic, the difference between avian influenza and the seasonal flu, the bird flu symptoms in humans, how bird flu is affecting chickens, ducks and cows, how infections in wild birds are causing the spread of the virus and how you can best protect yourself from infection. Understand the impact vaccines will have against the virus and why we need to offer the vaccine to our poultry farmers and veterinarians, how your cat could be at risk for the bird flu virus and why infected chickens are causing high egg prices and egg shortages. And be sure to stay tuned until the end of the video! Mayim shows you a few egg substitutes for baking to save you money and precious eggs while we combat this virus and sky-high egg prices! Current CDC Bird Flu Stats: https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/situation-summary/index.html Learn more about Emory University School of Medicine's Department of Microbiology and Immunology: https://med.emory.edu/departments/microbiology-immunology/index.html BialikBreakdown.com https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ YouTube.com/mayimbialik https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTOocPnDh2YQZZwh86K2OxA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mayim Bialik?

  Are there just too many people? And is there too much bureaucracy for us to effectively manage an outbreak of a contagious and dangerous virus?

• 0:11Speaker 01

  CDC actually does have a really great infrastructure for capturing influenza cases in most states. What they do not have, and what they don't have purview on, is the cows.

• 0:20Mayim Bialik?

  I haven't heard about milk. I'm hearing about eggs.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Oh, oh, yeah, no, you should have been hearing about milk, too. The reason I think people like me are worried is because of the cows, and the cats, and all of the mammals that are infected. Why can't we demand that there is no H5 in our grade A milk?

• 0:38Mayim Bialik?

  So it's actually not that crazy?

• 0:40Speaker 01

  It's not that crazy to say, I want to ensure that the milk we're drinking doesn't have bird flu in it.

• 0:45Mayim Bialik?

  How contagious is it, is the question?

• 0:54Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm M. B. Elick.

• 0:56Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 0:57Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to an MBB Reports. We're going to talk about something that you may have not wanted to think about, or you wanted to hope that someone other than you would think about. Jonathan, what are we talking about?

• 1:08Jonathan Cohen?

  It's been in the news, and the big question is, are we on the verge of another pandemic? Egg prices are soaring, birds are being affected, but it is more than birds, it is more than the bird flu, because it is being transmitted to cows, to cats, to other mammals, and also to humans.

• 1:32Mayim Bialik?

  So 166 million chickens are dead so far, either from acquiring the bird flu or being culled in an attempt to control the bird flu. We're going to be talking to Dr. Sima Laktowala. She's an associate professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Emory University. She trained as a molecular virologist at the Salk Institute in San Diego. This is her jam, this is what she lives and breathes as a scientist, and we're going to be talking to her about how concerned should we be, if at all, what does transmission look like? How can we control it? What are the risks to humans? And what are the precautions that we should be taking. And we're also going to talk a little more generally about what vaccines can do and what

• 2:17Mayim Bialik?

  they can't do and how we can more reasonably frame what the government is responsible for and what we're responsible for when it comes to the things that organisms encounter on a daily basis.

• 2:28Jonathan Cohen?

  She shares fascinating information about the transmission, how these farms work, what they're doing properly and what the risks are currently.

• 2:37Mayim Bialik?

  Also, at the end of this episode, we're going to talk to you about how your understanding of the bird flu can save you possibly close to $1,000 a year.

• 2:46Jonathan Cohen?

  If you've never thought about it, or you've heard a lot about it in the news, this will be eye opening. We are excited to welcome.

• 2:53Mayim Bialik?

  Dr. Sima Laktowala. We've brought you here to talk about something that's apparently very important that I've been ignoring and that many of us have been ignoring. So if, if one were to pull up the current CDC stats, apparently bird flu is a thing that we should be caring about. It is widespread in wild birds worldwide. That's something that like, when I hear those things, I hear those things on the news a lot and I'm like, oh, that's nice for scientists to think about. I don't know, it probably affects people who are farmers. But now it's infecting cows. And beyond that, it's infecting humans. And it's infecting, we're seeing human cases

• 3:37Mayim Bialik?

  in dairy and poultry workers. And there's this very disturbing, you know, graph or chart on the CDC website, which basically shows like wild birds, chickens, cows, and humans. And there's all these arrows showing all the different things that can happen in terms of transmission. And then there's a cat. And that's where I was like, we need a doctor.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. I was about to say, like, you're missing out on cats. Cats are a big thing here.

• 4:06Mayim Bialik?

  So I'd like you to sort of help us understand what's going on.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I think you've laid it out really well for, for folks. I would say what's happening right now, where most of us in the, in the world of like pandemic influenza emergence, really sort of just sit up and be like, hey, we need to do something about this, was in April of last year, when it was introduced into cows. And I will tell you why that's a really important. Thing that happened. So typically influenza, you know, we could talk about all the different flavors of influenza.

• 4:41Mayim Bialik?

  So this is a flu?

• 4:42Speaker 01

  This is a flu.

• 4:43Mayim Bialik?

  Birds get the flu.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Birds, you know what? Birds get flu, horses get flu, dogs get flu, whales get it, seals get it. Every animal species we have tested has some type of influenza virus. Cattle typically have something called influenza D. Okay, so you and I.

• 5:00Mayim Bialik?

  D for dairy.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  D for dairy. You and I, and there's also a C, but that's not for cattle.

• 5:04Mayim Bialik?

  Okay.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  But you and I get influenza A and influenza B. That's what's like.

• 5:08Mayim Bialik?

  I once had them at the same time.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  Oh, that's fun.

• 5:11Mayim Bialik?

  My E and two was like, you're very, very special in a horrible way.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  It doesn't happen often.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  So influenza A, so H1N1, we kind of, we've all heard about it.

• 5:21Mayim Bialik?

  That was a bad one. We had that.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, so right now, H1N1 and H3N2 are co-circulating, right? So we're having a lot of cases of both. But that's what we have in our vaccine, right? And then we've got flu B. Okay, so cattle had this other flu D, little flavor. Flu A is what happened and what spilled over in April into, is bird flu. And that spilled over into cows.

• 5:39Mayim Bialik?

  When you say spilled over, I want you to be really specific about what's happening.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, I wish, I wish I totally could understand the introduction from cows into, from birds into cows. And I'll tell you, I've thought, I spent a lot of time thinking about this. And I still am like formulating different hypotheses that we're testing. The best scenario we have right now, and I'll tell you why we think this is the best, but it's, I'm sort of shifting my opinion a little bit, is that perhaps it was a bird that pooped onto the milking equipment in a dairy in Texas. So a lot of these dairy farms, I'm happy to tell you all about them, are open air barns. And the milking equipment gets attached onto the udders of these lactating cows. And there is like, it's like a breast pump, right? Positive, negative pressure. So some things can go back up. So if the milking equipment is not cleaned, right, you can have things going back up the teats

• 6:27Speaker 01

  of these animals. So not only is influenza A now in cows, so in wild birds, influenza is fecal-oral. So that means it's typically replicating in the gastrointestinal tract.

• 6:37Mayim Bialik?

  Okay.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Of wild birds. And so they deposit it in water lagoons, you know, like places like that water, and then they feed, and this is how they like spread it to each other, typically, right? That's the thought is like shared water, feeding holes and things like that. How it gets into the cows is really fascinating.

• 6:55Mayim Bialik?

  But there's contamination of some sort that allows this virus then, now why does, why does the cow's immune system not say, this is bird flu, it's not mine?

• 7:05Speaker 01

  It does, right? So they do make antibodies against it. But they, what happens when the cow gets sick? The way they found this is that the, some of the cows, and not all of them. This is really interesting, right? It's not very severe in cows. So when we talk about bird flu, we're talking about highly pathogenic avian influenza. So this is HPAI. This is the one where everyone's like, oh, this is really bad, especially in chickens, which we'll come to, right? We've had 166 million chickens die in this country during this outbreak right now. And that's because it is lethal in chickens. And so we kill them before they like die from the disease. And so in cows, that's not happening. But what does happen is that they stop producing as much milk. And the milk they do produce sometimes becomes what's called mastitis. So it's like a typically a bacterial pathogen.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  It's like chunky, yellow. And so the way this was diagnosed was this very bright veterinarian went onto a dairy farm in Texas, noticed dead birds, weird acting cats, and said, and this like mastitis was like, we need to check for our bird flu. And lo and behold, it's bird flu. So not only did we not expect the virus to go into cows, and typically respiratory, maybe? That's what influenza D is in cows? But it's in the, it's in the, it's in the mammary gland of cows. Okay, so this is where all of us get really concerned because cows, like pigs, are these animals that we have a lot of interface with in terms of domestic agriculture. Right? We work, humans work with cows.

• 8:32Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, we literally made them to work with them.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Absolutely, right? And so like, somebody works and milks these animals every day, all day long.

• 8:41Mayim Bialik?

  I worked in a dairy. My family lives on a dairy in Israel.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Did you really?

• 8:44Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, so like, I, I've spent many years experiencing the dairy. Yeah, you have to have direct

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:51Mayim Bialik?

  conscious contact with your cow.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Yes, and like, you, every teat is

• 8:55Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, you're touching everything.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  You're touching everything, right? And so especially in the process of milking, right? It's not even just like, oh, with feed and with like, you know, and their respiratory. No, it is like, because it's in the milk. And not only are we talking about some virus in the, in the milk, like, it is 10 to 100 million infectious virus particles per milliliter of milk

• 9:17Mayim Bialik?

  No.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  in some of these infected cows.

• 9:18Mayim Bialik?

  Say that again?

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, 10 to 100 million.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  And that is more than we can actually probably even grow with this virus in the lab. So like vaccine people are probably like dying because you know, they want to like, the higher the stock, the better the vaccine prices, right? But like, the virus is growing so well in cows, so well.

• 9:39Jonathan Cohen?

  When we talk about how much virus is in that little amount of milk, how much virus makes you very sick?

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Oh, not a lot, right? So we don't know what you're referring to as a human infectious dose 50. So in animal models, so we use ferrets a lot as a surrogate for humans when we think about pandemic risk of flu viruses. And in ferrets, you can give them like 10 to the 2, so like 100 or 1,000 virus particles, and they'll get really sick and die. If they have some pre-existing immunity, which is some work that we've been doing, like humans, we have pre-existing immunity. We'll talk about why it's not very severe in over the 70 cases that have become infected in the US. We like have some level of pre-existing immunity. How much virus they need to become infected is actually not that much more. They just don't get as severely ill. And so, yeah, you don't need that much.

• 10:28Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, so hold on one second. I want to talk more about the birds, but I also really need to talk about the cows right now, because is that milk infected?

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Yes, the milk is infected. The way that we are testing, so this is something that I think is like, people don't know, and I really wish people would know. So when you look on the USDA website, it tells you that 970 some odd herds in the US are positive for H5N1. Now, you worked on the dairy farm. How many cows did you have on your herd?

• 10:56Mayim Bialik?

  We had hundreds.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's a small dairy.

• 10:59Mayim Bialik?

  Very small.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:00Mayim Bialik?

  We only had three pens.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, dairies have thousands. And what we are not doing is testing individual cows. So when I say 976 herds,

• 11:08Mayim Bialik?

  Herds.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  It does not tell you how many cows are actually infected, because we are not testing individual cows.

• 11:15Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, so one thing I want to ask, I'm kind of hung up on the cow thing, because, well, I want to get back to birds. But one of the things that I knew from my time on the dairy is we would have a list of cows that had infections. And those were cows. Cows that we had to, sorry, everyone, we had to put antibiotics on their teats before we would milk them. These are cows, though, like, can you drink that milk and not get sick? Because like, I haven't heard about milk. I'm hearing about eggs.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Oh, oh, yeah, no, you should have been hearing about milk, too. So, yes, pasteurization will inactivate the virus. The USDA and FDA did a very nice study where they mimicked all of the conditions of pasteurization, including like, the way the virus, the way the milk moves through the different types of diameters of stainless steel pipes, for the different times of temperatures and like, cooling. The process is actually quite complicated. There's a lot of homogenization steps. And they spiked in a lot of virus, and it did become inactivated. However, that was a one-point study. We have not done repeat sampling of like, what would be really nice is, you know, looking at viral load, infectious virus load, in silos at grade-A facilities before and after processing

• 12:29Speaker 01

  to ensure that we're actually inactivating everything. I will say, my coffee today has milk in it. I am still drinking milk.

• 12:35Mayim Bialik?

  Are you crazy?

• 12:37Speaker 01

  I know. And I give milk to my kids. So, but only pasteurized milk. Nobody should be drinking raw milk.

• 12:42Mayim Bialik?

  So, this is a raw milk question?

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely.

• 12:45Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, I'm a vegan person. We're the only mammals that drink the milk of another mammal. So like, to me, it makes no sense, and it's strange, but more power to you. Let's go back to the birds for a second. Wild birds. The picture on the CDC website is, I believe, a quail, a lovely little bird. And what kind of birds are infecting the chickens?

• 13:06Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 13:07Mayim Bialik?

  Like, do we know?

• 13:09Speaker 01

  We don't know. There's lots of different, so surveillance in wild birds is really hard. As you can imagine, how are you gonna go around and trap all of these like, songbirds that we see? We have isolated and identified H5N1 in songbirds, wild condors. So typically, when we talk about migratory birds and like, the...

• 13:26Mayim Bialik?

  And you can't stop them from flying around.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  You can't stop them from flying around. And when you think about like, what our reservoir for influenza is, we always say it's like, you know, migratory birds, like mallards. And like, these are like, you know, we talk about ducks, a lot of ducks, right? The ones that like, they fly all over.

• 13:41Mayim Bialik?

  I love a duck pond.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Who doesn't? But don't get close.

• 13:47Jonathan Cohen?

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• 16:30Jonathan Cohen?

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• 16:35Jonathan Cohen?

  When you say, "Don't get close to a duck pond," like, I think, let's talk about what the transmission looks like. What is the risk? Because obviously, we want to talk about chickens and the risk to the food supply, but just to think about the transmission and the pathways, should you be afraid of a bird and how close is too close?

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So, so one of the things is that migratory birds do not display symptoms of infection, right? So when we talk about, like, highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses, it is lethal in chickens.

• 17:11Mayim Bialik?

  Like, chickens get sick?

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Chickens get very sick.

• 17:14Mayim Bialik?

  What does it look like when they get sick?

• 17:15Speaker 01

  You know, I haven't infected a chicken. I think it looks really bad. Like, it's bad, and you have to cull them. They have to, like, be destroyed. They do not get, you know, sent to, like, go to your grocery store. Like, that's not happening. So, you know, so that, because we've known about bird flu, right? So one thing, I think, important to note is that, you know, bird flu was first identified in the late 90s, early 2000s. You know, there was an outbreak in Vietnam and in mainland China. And so, you know, we have been on the radar. Bird flu has been on everyone's radar for a long time.

• 17:45Mayim Bialik?

  But it's mostly been on your radar because you're a doctor who studies these things. Because I hear about a lot of things that happen, and I'm like, "Not my problem. Not my problem." And even when COVID started, I was like, "It's a thing on the news." And then all of a sudden, it was like, "Oh, you're on lockdown." So this is what I'm also trying to understand, and I think what we're trying to ask. In terms of transmission, I'm happy for you to know all the things about Songbirds and condors and all these things because that's your job. But as a, as a, as a layperson, what do I need to know? Like, is this like a thing that I should have been more aware of last year? And only now that egg prices are being affected, people are learning about it.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  So I think what's important for people to know is if you see a dead animal or a sick acting animal, do not get too close. Especially at duck ponds, going back to this, right? Bird feces, you know, don't get too close to bird feces. We do not know the extent of the outbreak in the wild bird population. So it's always best to keep a safe distance from wild animals. I think that is like universally always true.

• 18:46Jonathan Cohen?

  Just clarifying that statement to be super tactical. Are we saying that potentially in bird feces that may be laying next to a bird, a duck pond or in, on your path, that breathing that in, if you're too close?

• 19:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is a good question is like, how long is the virus stable in feces? We don't know the direct answer to that. Right, my, my lab works a lot on how long the virus stays alive on surfaces and in the air. And so also when we talk about inhalation of H5N1, this is an important point, right? What size aerosols are you breathing in and how much? So most of the time you, we breathe in, every breath we take, we're breathing in hundreds of pathogens that have been expelled into our environment from other people, plants or animals. The vast majority do not make us sick. So there is an important aspect of how much you have to breathe in. Where does it land? How much of it is infectious? And what really initiates an actual like substantial infection?

• 19:45Mayim Bialik?

  And look, we had all of these conversations around COVID that nobody wanted to listen to scientists because, you know, people were like, whatever, I'm not going to get into it. But when people were like with the envelopes and the fruits and vegetables and like it was getting insane and like I had to explain to my children, like if something is dry and like viruses need a substrate, they need fuel.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Right, because I think that there is a, there's an interesting sort of caveat here of like, how are humans getting infected with the virus? Right, so is inhalation and walking through a park a huge risk right now? No. Most of the, most of the infections.

• 20:18Mayim Bialik?

  But they said that about COVID and then they were like, oh, guess what? It's everywhere.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  It's everywhere.

• 20:22Mayim Bialik?

  And you have to wear a mask all the time. And then they were like, okay, no, we were actually wrong and that was overkill. So this is where I don't know how hysterical to be.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  Okay, this is, this is like so interesting, right? So what I study is obviously transmission. And, and can I just tell you that I have been studying transmission for over a decade, right? Since 2009. This is like when I started influenza transmission. And I will tell you that we know so little. How transmissible, so let's say you and I were both infected with flu. And we both were shedding it in our nose. You could be way more transmissible than me. Like the amount that you're expelling into your air that's infectious could be more than mine, even though our viral loads are exactly the same. Why that is, we do not know.

• 21:05Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I mean, I have a couple of ideas and I'm sure you do too, but okay.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  But, but like, that's my point is I don't, we don't know when someone is infected, what their forward transmission potential is.

• 21:16Mayim Bialik?

  And that's why being conservative is what our government tried to help us do. And that's what we may be told to do in this case. The, the conservative route.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  Would be that assume everybody who is infected has the forward transmission potential. And that all environments in which there are birds potentially could have H5.

• 21:35Mayim Bialik?

  What do you mean all environments that have, every environment has birds?

• 21:38Speaker 01

  We've had a number of humans get infected that have backyard poultry.

• 21:44Mayim Bialik?

  So let's go into chickens.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Yes, let's talk about chickens.

• 21:47Mayim Bialik?

  We got the cow teat potential transmission of how it got to cows. But it sounds like pasteurization, homogenization, like that whole process is in theory not placing us at risk in terms of cows. However, human interaction with cows who might be infected may be more of a concern. And what seems to have happened, birds of a feather flock together. It seems that wild birds have somehow gotten into the chicken jam. And what happens when you have chickens in factories is you have a tremendous amount of animals in a very small space, which is not natural, right? They can't get away from each other. If one of them's sick, they're all left. Likely going to be sick.

• 22:28Mayim Bialik?

  And in addition, again, you have animals that have, in many cases, been bred in ways that maybe don't make them as naturally able to defend themselves from things. They may have different kind of immune systems and being in the conditions that they live in may also change a little bit about how they would fight things off. So if one gets sick, you potentially have a lot getting sick. What else do we need to know about how the chickens got bird flu?

• 22:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there are a lot of biosecurity measures on most commercial poultry farms. Clearly migratory birds, as you just said, right? They will fly over these farms. They could probably poop on the air ducts going in and out. Like the direct sources are unclear. We just know that they're getting sick. The other thing that is happening is that poultry farms are getting infected from the cows. So shared workers seem to be a potential transmission source, whether it's on their boots and they're not cleaning them before going in, whether it's them themselves that are infected and transmitting it is unclear.

• 23:29Mayim Bialik?

  Human transmission could also be part of the...

• 23:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, like a human source, a human like person, yes. That's right. I did not grow up on a dairy farm. And so every farm I visit, I'm just like, wait, you do what with the sick milk?

• 23:41Mayim Bialik?

  So for those who need us to fill in the blanks, there are many places and many opportunities for liquid poop to gather. And birds, being what they are, will fly about.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  So what happens on farms is that the water that's used on farms to clean the corrals, sometimes flush the barns, definitely clean the dairy parlors, all of that is not put into our wastewater system, right? That goes separate. It gets stayed on the farm. What happens when cows are sick, as you mentioned, they have antibiotics, that does not make it into our milk supply, right? Those cows are milked separately. And that milk can either get fed to baby calves that are on the property, or it gets poured down and all of that liquid then goes into holding tanks and then eventually make it into different manure lagoons. Based on where you are, these manure lagoons can then be used. Used like the solid stuff is separated and gets used as fertilizer.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  The liquid stuff is then used sometimes for irrigation. And what we're learning now is also sometimes to flush the barns themselves. They reuse that water. So now imagine you I mentioned 100 million virus particles per milliliter. Let's say a cow makes, what would you say on average, like 10 liters, 30 liters?

• 24:59Mayim Bialik?

  It's a big animal.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  It's a big animal per milking session. Okay, so now you've got 10 sick cows. You're making like 100 liters of this twice a day, pouring it down. Even dilution factor, you still have a lot of infectious virus and it's not being treated. This is like what I'm learning now, where we're not doing anything to treat the milk before it gets disposed of.

• 25:21Mayim Bialik?

  I'm sorry, with all due respect, the notion of treating infected milk sounds crazy. Meaning you're treating infected, potentially infected milk that's not even going to be used. But I mean, you have to use resources though to do that.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so you'd need resources to do it. But I think that my point was is that because we're not treating it, it's just going into the environment. So what we're talking about is like, why are, how are the birds getting it? There are birds at every single manure lagoon, right? They feed there, they stop there. It's very easy to imagine that they just pick up the virus that's remaining infectious because it's not being inactivated. The pH of these manure lagoons is about neutral. You know, and like, yeah, there's heat, but we don't know if that's affecting the persistence in the milk. So.

• 26:08Mayim Bialik?

  This is a multi-step problem.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Yes, it absolutely is. And I feel like this is what's hit, this is why everybody in my, in my world was like in April and maybe like, whoa, wait, hold on, what's going on? Like, we should be really concerned here because you're right. When it's in the wild birds, we know it's in wild birds. We watch these, we get worried about the poultries and we like, you know, highlight for the USDA. Like, everybody is supposed to be like, taking better, more precautions on poultry farms to ensure that their flocks are, stay safe. When it started spilling over into seals in 2022, this happened in Chile. Everyone's like, huh, that's weird. But again, humans, we're not around seals so much. So it's okay. Let's not take too much care. We don't need to freak out the public. People like me can think it's interesting, but no big deal.

• 26:51Mayim Bialik?

  Right. What did it look like in seals?

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Oh, they were getting very sick. And it was primarily in like seal haulouts. A lot of birds there at the same times with the seals. So like, again, like, there's a lot of interaction of these like, and we care because seals are mammals, right? And so there are adaptive mutations the virus can do.

• 27:08Mayim Bialik?

  Let's move from chickens to the reason that we keep chickens. So what happens if a sick chicken lays an egg? You have a sick egg?

• 27:17Speaker 01

  I don't think the chicken, once it gets H5, can lay an egg.

• 27:20Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, oh.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is actually really devastating in chickens, this virus.

• 27:26Mayim Bialik?

  Huh. So we're not, the issue is not that we might be getting any infected eggs. The issue is chickens are dying. And then there's also an active culling process to try and stop the spread, which has led to less eggs.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, and really high prices. Yes.

• 27:47Mayim Bialik?

  So what is the scale that we're talking about that has led to prices going up? A local restaurant where I eat a lot has a sign that says, if you order eggs, we will be charging an extra $2 because they just can't, they can't afford it.

• 28:04Mayim Bialik?

  What's the scale? Like, when 500 chickens were killed, nobody knew, eggs weren't affected. When 5,000 chickens were killed or dead, I'm assuming we didn't know. What scale are we talking about of sick chickens?

• 28:18Speaker 01

  It's 166 million.

• 28:20Mayim Bialik?

  It's like, I don't know that I can picture that number.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  The number is massive.

• 28:24Jonathan Cohen?

  I mean, how many chickens do we have?

• 28:25Speaker 01

  That's a good question. I don't actually know the denominator of like, how many there exists in the US. So that's, that's a very fair question.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  But this is, this is a very massive scale of like chickens dying.

• 28:39Mayim Bialik?

  And is this happening all over the US?

• 28:40Speaker 01

  All, every state is affected. They've found it in poultry farms in every state.

• 28:44Mayim Bialik?

  Is it just affecting, it's obviously affecting eggs. Is it also affecting?

• 28:50Mayim Bialik?

  Like other poultry farms? Like, is it affecting the price of chicken?

• 28:55Speaker 01

  That's a good question. I'm not an economist, so I don't know.

• 29:00Jonathan Cohen?

  Google tells us that at any given point, there are 1.5 billion chickens in the US, 1.2 billion broiler chickens, and 374 million egg-laying chickens. So out of 374 egg-laying chickens, we don't know how many of that 26 million are egg-laying versus broiler chickens.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  166 million, yeah. There have been both outbreaks in broiler chicken farms and egg-laying producers.

• 29:31Mayim Bialik?

  For these animals, they're producing a lot of eggs. And so the detriment in terms of consumption is going to be more evident with eggs rather than chickens themselves.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, potentially, yeah. Because you would never be able to sell those chickens.

• 29:47Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 29:48Mayim Bialik?

  And you could be losing hundreds of millions of eggs.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:54Mayim Bialik?

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• 31:47Jonathan Cohen?

  Can you tell us a little bit about the context? Because people have heard bird flu before it spiked. There have been times in history where it's been in the news. This seems different. How is this different than previous times?

• 32:02Mayim Bialik?

  Why should we care?

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Now.

• 32:04Mayim Bialik?

  Now, I think is also the question.

• 32:06Jonathan Cohen?

  Besides the price of eggs.

• 32:07Mayim Bialik?

  Because also, I'm going to be, I'm being super honest. Part of me is like, oh, because of COVID-19, everybody's acting all uppity about some flu that only Dr. Seaman needs to think about. I don't need to think about it. It seems like that's not true. So how worried should we be and what should we be practically doing about it?

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'm going to break this into two parts. So Jonathan, your first point about like, how bad is this in terms of the poultry? You know, we had a very large outbreak in 2017, 2018, I think. And I think we're a little bit, we're worse than that. But it is containable and most likely steps are going to be made and egg prices will, you know, rebound because they're going to bring in more chickens. Right? Because that's what you do. The reason I think people like me are worried is because of the cows and the cats and all of the mammals that are infected. And the fact, and I think we'll come to this about like, what is being done to contain the spread? There is so much H5N1 currently out there.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Because of the manure lagoons, because of the milk, because of the cows, because of the, the, now like you're seeing it in peri-domestic animals, so like mice are getting it, right? You're catching like deer mice, prairie vowels, um, there have been llamas infected. How widespread is this? We just do not know. And that is troubling.

• 33:27Mayim Bialik?

  But apparently, if it's jumping from birds to cows, there's no reason immunologically to believe that it's not going to jump to, I mean, it can go to cats, it can go to humans.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Yep. And so the, the question now, of course, is like, as you mentioned with COVID-19, right? Are we just freaking out about this because we're just on the heels of COVID-19 and everybody is just, you know, like a little bit anxious? I totally get it, right? We all lived through that pandemic. I lived through it too, just like everybody else. And I do not, under any circumstances, ever want to go into lockdown again or have virtual school, right? I got two young kids. That is not fun for anyone.

• 34:00Mayim Bialik?

  No one wants to recreate the confusion, the hysteria, and the politicization of science, which never should have happened, which has led to a tremendous distrust of the medical establishment. Even when I went to the CDC website, I'm like, I don't know, CDC's let me down before and they said a lot of things that they've now been like, whoops, we were wrong. So like even that level of trust, I don't want to deal with that again, you know?

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Right. And even for the CDC, they give feedback and give advice with one brush stroke. And we know that everybody's situation is unique. Everybody's making their own risk calculations and so much, what we need to do is meet people where they are. And we fail at that. We do not know how to meet people where they are, to implement things that make sense for them, that make, uh, that they're able to do, that are feasible, that will make an impact. And I think about this a lot with, when we, when we go to dairy farms or I talk to dairy farmers, I like, one of the voices we don't hear enough at the table right now are people who own dairy farms.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  Because they're not the ones who are implementing the interventions that are feasible, right? That's coming from the CDC or the USDA or the state, right?

• 35:14Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, so, so let's talk about that. What are farmers being told? What are they being told to do? How are they supposed to be monitored? The reason that we're actually here with you in person is because you just, you're visiting farms.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  I think it varies by state, right? And this is again where it's the Achilles heel of all of this, right? We can blame the USDA and can blame the CDC, but the reality is, is that so much of what's happening, because these are commercial entities, is being driven by State Department of Agriculture and food. So it depends on the state. So in California, there is bulk tank testing every week. The, the scale is massive. What we haven't done, which is surprising to me, is we knew about this in April, right? This was like, it first emerged in April, and so by now, we're about a, almost a year, right? You would think we would have in place ways to like, say, hey, if you're a farm...

• 36:10Mayim Bialik?

  Like, there's no ti- you don't have time. We don't have time for the government to try and figure out what to do. We need to be doing it already.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  We need to be doing it already. And so what should have happened is maybe like, and, and again, because it's state by state, not every state is even testing, right? So there's some states that are opting not to test.

• 36:27Mayim Bialik?

  So what, they're just killing their chickens and hoping it doesn't come back?

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, they have to kill the chickens because that's a USDA mandate for, for poultry farms, but on dairy farms...

• 36:35Mayim Bialik?

  And they just get new chickens?

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, and dairy, no, I'm talking about dairy farms. Like, they don't, they don't even know how many herds are positive in their, in their state. So Missouri, perfect example. They had two cases of H5N1 in people without any known exposure. So this was back a few months ago, and these individuals said they didn't drink any raw milk, but it was the dairy clade of this virus, very similar to the, the stuff that's coming out of cows. Um, and so they, but Missouri did not implement any dairy testing. They didn't know. They were like, nope, we don't have it.

• 37:08Mayim Bialik?

  Those people could have infected other people.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  They could. Well, so they did, like, so the CDC went in and did ring, ring surveillance. And so they tested their hospital workers. So these were two, like, it was a couple. They lived together. They think it was a common exposure. But again, by the time it was caught, because we didn't have everything in place, it was weeks, like, three or four weeks after they were first tested positive.

• 37:27Mayim Bialik?

  Are there just too many people? And is there too much bureaucracy for us to effectively manage an outbreak of a contagious and dangerous virus?

• 37:38Speaker 01

  We have so many plans in place. So I would have said yes if we were starting from nothing.

• 37:43Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, plans in place and a dime will buy you a seltzer in 1950.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  Okay, fair, right? So, so, so do I think it's feasible? Of course, like, the CDC actually do, does have, like, a really great infrastructure for capturing influenza cases in most states. What they do not have, and what they don't have purview on, is, is the cows, right? So they can say, hey, if you catch it in a clinic, then, you know, and you test flu positive, then we need to subtype it, right? Particularly if you work in a dairy farm. But most dairy farms, the most poultry farms, use migrant workers. And so they are not gonna potentially wanna get tested. They are a vulnerable population. And what we haven't touched on yet is that most people are not getting severely ill. We have had 70 human cases in the US.

• 38:30Mayim Bialik?

  So this is the other thing, like, maybe, like, people get the flu all the time. It's on my table right now. People get the flu all the time. But what is the concern? Why is the fact that people are getting this flu, even if they're not getting severely sick, why should that concern me?

• 38:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, so in 2009, H1N1 pandemic, right? So, previous to 2009, we had a different H1N1 that circulated, the, you know, easy way. Spilled over, caused a pandemic, wasn't that many deaths, right? 16,000 people died in the US that year. 200,000 cases, you know, nationally, or more. And so, it wasn't, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't that bad. But that virus now has co-circulated. It continues to cause a problem. So this introduction, this virus will come in. If it can get a foothold, and it can succeed, we will not just... Just be dealing with it now. It's like covid. It's gonna be there. It's gonna be another virus that we contend with. And then what happened? So you're a little flu virus, right? This is gonna be where we use demonstration. You see these little spikes on the inside?

• 39:29Mayim Bialik?

  Yes.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  There's eight of them. Okay, so flu has eight genomes. It's like chromosomes. Okay, so inside of an infected cell, those eight segments have to come together to make a another virus. Now, let's say you've got H5 and H1. Right? Because now it's like it's just everywhere. You're just getting infected. Now you have an H5 and an H1 mixing. This is what happens in birds. So birds have so much diversity of viruses because they're just constantly mixing and creating new things that overcome our immune systems, overcome vaccines, can overcome antivirals. Right? Like, we just open ourselves up to so much more diversity. That, okay, yeah, maybe it's not so bad now. But like, maybe in five years, it's gonna be really bad. Because all of a sudden, we're gonna have a reassortment that's just gonna go gangbusters.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  And the reason H5 has always been a concern is that initially, when it emerged, and it's a much different strain than it is now. This was back in 2003. Like, so when the bird virus was first identified, H5N1, it was an outbreak in Vietnam, Cambodia, and some other places in Southeast Asia. And of the cases that we identified, thirty to fifty percent, so almost half, well, one-third to a half of people who were infected, got so sick that they died.

• 40:44Mayim Bialik?

  That's a very, very high percentage.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:46Mayim Bialik?

  What's the percentage of people that die from the common flu, let's say?

• 40:50Speaker 01

  Oh, maybe like 0.1%.

• 40:52Mayim Bialik?

  0.1%, a percentage that most people who didn't do more than high school math would be like, I don't even know what that means. It's so small.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:00Jonathan Cohen?

  Back in 2003, when those people were getting that sick and the mortality rate was that high, was it spreading? Did we find? Clearly, it didn't. It was contained. So it was only a very select group of people. So I think that is also the question that people are asking is, Who is getting sick and how sick are they getting now? And what is the likelihood of the virus mutating in order to be widespread? And if it does get widespread, does that automatically mean that it reduces its lethality in order to get widespread?

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, so fair. So currently, the CDC is reporting 70 cases. We know that's an underestimation based on CERA surveys, which means we've looked for people who have antibodies against H5, particularly dairy farm workers. And we know we're missing maybe like 7 to 10%. And of the 70 people that have become infected, one person has died. There's been one fatality in Louisiana from H5N1. That person had a lot of comorbidities. They got infected from their backyard poultry flock. You know, they were tending it, the birds got sick, died, and they were working with the carcasses. We've had a number of severe cases. So there was a case just recently reported in Wyoming, also from a backyard poultry, and that person was hospitalized.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  The teen in British Columbia was hospitalized for, I think, over a month. Also, unknown exactly their exposure, but it was, you know, thought to be with, you know, a dead bird in the backyard, again, wild. And so, yeah, so they, so all of that, like, is to say that, yes, most of the cases are mild. I think, you know, we definitely would see the signal if it was more severe. We are missing cases, but if those cases were severe, we would see the signal because people would go and get, seek some help. You know, it could, right now, the main manifestation is pink eye and some respiratory symptoms.

• 42:55Jonathan Cohen?

  And we're not seeing human-to-human transmission?

• 42:58Speaker 01

  We have no documented human-to-human transmission.

• 43:01Mayim Bialik?

  But why wouldn't human-to-human transmission be possible?

• 43:04Speaker 01

  It would absolutely be possible, particularly in close-range scenarios. So I also want to make a distinction between, you know, because during the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone came like, oh, it's human-to-human.

• 43:12Mayim Bialik?

  How contagious is it, is the question?

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so definitely, close-range transmission, things like in households, like with kids, all of the things that we do as families in these close scenarios, definitely you can have sporadic infections from humans.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  Human to human, right? Does that mean it's sustained human to human transmission? Which is like the difference between something being sort of an epidemic, you know, something that's just sporadically emerging versus something that's being successful in the human population. The virus wants to get in, make more of itself, get out, and keep going, right? Like, that's what they love to do. And so, yeah, we're gonna, definitely, I expect to see more of these sporadic introductions and household, close-range transmission events.

• 43:54Jonathan Cohen?

  We haven't seen any pet to human transmission, have we?

• 43:58Speaker 01

  There has been a, there was a study that was just released in the MMWR from the CDC of a transmission event from a dairy farm worker to their pet cat. And then potentially, there was an adolescent in the house that also became ill but did not test positive or wasn't tested, I can't remember the exact detail. And so, this becomes complicated, right? Because people, when you have a pet cat, the cats seem to be very susceptible to H5N1. And so, there's a number of instances of cats getting it.

• 44:25Mayim Bialik?

  Presumably, outdoor cats you'd be more worried about.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  This is an indoor cat, yeah.

• 44:29Mayim Bialik?

  Right. That's not a good story.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  No. And so, yeah, so outdoor cats, you know, on dairy farms, definitely licking things, licking the milk.

• 44:37Mayim Bialik?

  Dogs. I'm thinking of dogs, all the dogs in America that run around and sniff birds.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  Well, it's interesting, so dogs haven't been, like, at least, I don't know if they're getting tested, but dogs have their own influenza, it's canine influenza. So, at age three, and eight is like a big thing a few years ago, there's, and it happens, you get like these sporadic, large outbreaks of canine, but it doesn't kill them, right? Again, it's like common flu in dogs. And it hasn't seemed to spread from dogs to humans. It actually went from horses to dogs, interestingly.

• 45:08Mayim Bialik?

  Are cats getting sick and dying?

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:11Mayim Bialik?

  Oh.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Some cats can get very severely ill. I think in the report, most cats we've heard about get severely ill. Most dairy farms, you go on, you're like, oh, you're positive, they always talk about how, yeah, we had some cats, but now we don't see them anymore. Like, they, you know, or like, they buried a bunch of dairy cats. Definitely, cats are getting sick, and they get ill, they get neurological symptoms. Some cats seem to have recovered. So, one of the cats in the MMWR did get sick, but then recovered and didn't have to be euthanized.

• 45:38Mayim Bialik?

  But it could have already spread it. I mean, this is the point of trying to contain something like this.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:43Mayim Bialik?

  Like, how do you contain it, right?

• 45:46Speaker 01

  What I have been advocating for a long time now is that we need to know how widespread the outbreak is. Like, number one, how many cows, not herds, like individual cows, are actually infected in this country? Okay, how well is it spreading in the cows? Is what we're working on now, right? Trying to understand the transmission on herds between cows. And how do we block that? How do we prevent all of this virus? One, in the cows, in the milk, in the lagoons, in all of... The FDA had a really interesting study where 30% of dairy products they tested on the shelves have H5 RNA in it. Like, the virus is inactivated.

• 46:30Mayim Bialik?

  Sorry, you need to say that again.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the virus is inactivated, but there is virus...

• 46:35Mayim Bialik?

  It was in there.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  In there. 30% of dairy products on the shelves.

• 46:39Jonathan Cohen?

  Is there a risk to having inactivated virus? Like, does that interact with our immune system in some way?

• 46:45Speaker 01

  So, people are trying to figure out whether, you know, is that going to boost an immune response? Not likely, because like, it's going to go to the stomach, so it's...

• 46:54Mayim Bialik?

  No, but it's a proportional statistical sample of what's going on.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  Absolutely. It just tells you this so much. And one of the things that I get really concerned about is like, okay, yes, most of it's going to get inactivated by pasteurization. One of the things that sort of strikes me is that we, you know, we ensure that there are no antibiotics in our milk, right? So, if a cow is on antibiotics, even if they've recovered, that milk cannot go into processing. We also test for like, other somatic cells and things. We test all of the milk for grade A, make some grade A. Why can't we demand that there is no H5 in our grade A milk?

• 47:29Mayim Bialik?

  We're humans, we're used to things being introduced all the time to our bodies. It's not a big deal. Like, who knows how many other different types of inactivated RNA is already in the milk? And let's not be hysterical. I mean, that's just like the devil's advocate, you know, perspective. But also, people thought that we were nuts when people were like, maybe we don't want to eat meat that's been pumped full of hormones. Or maybe we don't want to feed our kids milk that's been pumped full of hormones. Or maybe we don't want to eat food that contains genetically modified particles that we actually don't know what they do to our bodies, right? I mean, people thought that was crazy.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Right, at the time.

• 48:02Mayim Bialik?

  So, it's actually not that crazy.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  It's not that crazy to say, I want to ensure that the milk we're drinking doesn't have bird flu in it.

• 48:09Jonathan Cohen?

  If you have to summarize a message for people who are paying attention to this, maybe not fully digesting the full ramifications, what's sort of a last either message of hope or concern or of safety that you would want to leave people with?

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think that the message of hope that everybody is relying on here is that influenza is an agent we know, right? So let's say we continue down this path and the virus keeps spilling over into humans. It keeps evolving and we, you know, have a pandemic of an age five. We do have licensed influenza vaccines that are updated constantly, right? So there's four licensed influenza vaccines. We have three to four licensed antivirals that would all be effective. The most important thing is that people don't understand that our vaccines are not tested to block infection. They are tested and licensed to block severe disease.

• 49:05Mayim Bialik?

  Say that again.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, so our vaccines are not tested to block infection. They are tested and authorized to block severe disease. That's it, right? So when you go in for licensure for a vaccine, it is that you've shown it protects from lethality.

• 49:22Mayim Bialik?

  To the best of its ability.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  To the best of its ability. Okay, so the next phase of vaccines, what we need to do, and this is something that my lab has really been thinking about a lot, is trying to get vaccines that block infection because that is what we have sold the American public and everybody. People think they get vaccinated and they're like, during the COVID-19, this is amazing. People be like, I got vaccinated, why did I get infected? I was like, well, yeah, like you can still get infected. You're just not going to get really sick and you're not going to go to the hospital.

• 49:47Mayim Bialik?

  And you can get sick to the point that you miss work and you're laying in your bed for four days not eating and you're moaning, just speaking from experience.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  No, it can happen. And so sometimes you have to be like, well, how bad could it have been?

• 49:59Mayim Bialik?

  Well, and this is the thing also. It's like, I want you to talk about comorbidity because this was something that, you know, got very politicized. And when we talk about comorbidity, how much of this can we try and stack in our favor? Is some of it genetic? Is it just genetic luck of the draw? Is it diet and exercise and all these things? Like, How much can we control around, I hope that I'm not that person who gets very sick from a virus?

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, so comorbidities are fascinating, right? So we talk about comorbidities as being anything that can, for influenza, diabetes, obesity, you know, anybody with any sort of immune diagnosis. You know, you've got lupus, or you've got any sort of autoimmune disorder.

• 50:43Mayim Bialik?

  Thyroid conditions.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Thyroid conditions, okay. What that means is that when you get-

• 50:46Mayim Bialik?

  That's what most women-

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Yes, you get vaccinated. You don't make a really strong antibody response, the way that we can test it, right? So in your blood. And I'll be honest, we have, you know, people don't tend to always appreciate how little antibodies we potentially could even be making to viruses or vaccines, because we're not testing everybody after you get vaccinated to be like, how much antibody did you raise? Right, we know this from cancer patients during COVID, that, you know, yeah, you could get three shots, and you could still have a titer that looked like you hadn't gotten anything.

• 51:18Mayim Bialik?

  Why?

• 51:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wish I like, I don't think we know the answer. You need to bring on an immunologist.

• 51:24Mayim Bialik?

  Right, but just for us to sort of formulate it a little bit, what we're talking about is that if you are in any way immune compromised, and immune compromise doesn't just mean you have an autoimmune condition, and it doesn't just mean that, God forbid, you have cancer or you're receiving chemotherapy that depletes your immune system. If you are in a state of compromise because you are fighting blood pressure, you are fighting excess plaque and cholesterol in your body, your body's not efficiently running at its optimal health, that is immune compromise, because as we know, I mean-

• 51:59Speaker 01

  Or you're stressed.

• 52:00Mayim Bialik?

  I was just gonna say-

• 52:01Speaker 01

  You like, I mean, the amount of things-

• 52:03Mayim Bialik?

  You've described 90% of people in America.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  Yes, we have anxiety and stress.

• 52:08Mayim Bialik?

  Which lowers our immune response.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Which lowers our immune response, and lowers our ability to fight infections off. It could potentially decrease our ability to really respond rapidly to a new insult.

• 52:18Mayim Bialik?

  So being a human is a comorbidity?

• 52:22Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, I guess like, especially being in your mid 40s as a woman, sure.

• 52:27Jonathan Cohen?

  We know there are levels to it. I think we need to ensure that while everyone does have their everyday stressors- Understanding that there are new diseases that are introduced to our environment all the time, it can be motivation to take those extra steps, to do the things that we know reduce stress, to even get the walk around the block, to go to bed half an hour or more sooner, and to take the small measures that will help support the immune system because we need our immune systems, maybe, like, let's not only rely on Western medicine to solve this problem for us.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely, but also, one thing that I should have said is that influenza, even a new strain, is coming in the context of all of this other pre-existing immunity in the human population, right? You and I have experienced influenza for our entire lives. Everybody has their first infection typically by the age of five, right? And every time you get re-exposed to influenza, you make an immune response against that original strain and the new strain, right? So you get boosting of your antibodies, and so what we have done is we've shown that, you know, pre-existing immunity against the 2009 H1N1 actually can reduce the severity of disease against this bird flu.

• 53:41Mayim Bialik?

  When you are a parent and your child gets a virus, for most people, they want the doctor to fix it and make it better, and they want to give medication that immediately lowers the fever, reduces the symptoms, allows you to not have to lose work, allows them to go back to school. But what you just described is what people who understand viruses and this kind of approach, like, there's a reason the body produces a fever, right? A fever is a symptom of a sickness that is the body's way of trying to raise the temperature to kill pathogens, right?

• 54:22Mayim Bialik?

  There are people who do not take a flu vaccine because they believe that if, for the most part, you will not get lethally sick, that the body is allowed to experience an immune challenge that allows them to produce antibodies that will support the system. I know many people who are pro-vaccine who don't take a flu vaccine.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, like, most of the US population, right? So the vaccine uptake rate is like 40%. So you're right, like, 60% of Americans are not taking the flu vaccine. Every year, I will say, what I do want to caveat here is that 10 to tens of thousands of people die every year in the US

• 55:00Mayim Bialik?

  Yes.

• 55:01Speaker 01

  From human seasonal flu. So it's not nothing.

• 55:03Mayim Bialik?

  Correct.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  But we did talk about this, it's a 0.1% mortality rate.

• 55:07Mayim Bialik?

  And I'm not, I'm not asking you to encourage people not to take a vaccine. That's not my interest. But the way that you just very casually described what happens when the body gets a virus should not be ignored. The solution is not to eliminate sickness. We are organisms that need to have an immune system to fight off new things.

• 55:26Speaker 01

  I absolutely agree. I'm pro pre-existing immunity. Like, we study it, we really believe in it, we think it's important for the emergence of potential.

• 55:35Mayim Bialik?

  It's real.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  It's real. It is real. We all have prior immunity against influenza viruses. Whether it's from vaccination or natural infection, even if we've gotten vaccinated, we've all been infected with influenza because like, you know, sometimes the vaccines aren't well matched. And there's a variant that's circulating that we get infected with anyways. Or because the vaccines are not to block infection, again.

• 55:58Mayim Bialik?

  And no one should lie to us or keep that information from us.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  No, no. We should say that very openly to everybody.

• 56:03Mayim Bialik?

  Correct. And we should also say, I mean, and again, a lot of this is socioeconomic, it's political, I get it, but in a culture when we had more parents able to take care of children, we had less of a hysteria around sickness. And I don't want to bring up chicken pox, but I'm going to bring it up. It can wipe out an entire classroom, which is really inconvenient and bad, and bad things can happen from chicken pox, but when you look at proportional statistics, what we have is we have a culture that's intolerant of sickness for a lot of important reasons. And it does take away, in a lot of cases, from understanding what your body needs to also learn when a virus is introduced to it.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  I think one thing is really important, we talked about before, which is like, meeting people where they are. Again, you have to meet people where they are, even in terms of vaccines. And I think what we need to appreciate and people need to understand is that because we don't test them against infections, that, one, they can still get infected if they get vaccinated, especially with H5. Or with flu, but that brings me to this H5 outbreak, right? So when we talk with people with socioeconomic or language barriers or ways in which we communicate the impact that vaccines will have. So one concern is, you know, telling every dairy farm worker, go get your seasonal flu vaccine. They then interpret that potentially as I'm not going to, it's going to protect me against this virus that's circulating in my cows.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  And it's not. It's very different. It's not in the human seasonal vaccine. There's no H5 component in the shot that you'll get this fall.

• 57:38Mayim Bialik?

  So is the solution that we should all get vaccinated against this bird flu?

• 57:42Speaker 01

  No, I actually think that vaccines, so it's interesting, right? So I've been long been advocating about releasing the vaccine from the stockpile. So because we've known about H5 for a long time, we actually have candidate vaccine viruses in our stockpiles in the event of a pandemic. When this was emerging, like any emerging outbreak, our most vulnerable people should be getting vaccinated, which are state veterinarians, people who are going on and taking care of these sick animals. Dairy farm workers should have it available if they want to enroll. I thought of this a lot. If I was a veterinarian and there was a vaccine, I'd be like, give me the vaccine. Currently, the H5 vaccine is not being offered to anybody. That's still happening.

• 58:21Mayim Bialik?

  Do you agree with that?

• 58:22Speaker 01

  I do not. I think it should have been offered to state veterinarians, the people on the front lines. Dairy farm workers, managers, and veterinarians should be offered the H5 vaccine because they're, and poultry workers, because they are, again, at the front line of this. And the way, the reason I say that is because, one, I want to limit their susceptibility. So when I talk about this, even with COVID, right? Okay, so yes, vaccines do not prevent you from getting sick, but you have to think about transmission prevention as a multi-layered approach. Okay, so the vaccine, we're in a war against a virus, okay? Especially for me, we're in a war against H5. Like, I do not ever want H5 to be successful in the human population. And so the vaccine is like your armor.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  Okay, it's going to prevent you from getting badly beaten, but it's not going to prevent you from taking some blows. Okay? Your mask is your shield. It's going to block you from like some severe attacks, but again, you can be beaten in with just those two things. And then you need a sword. You need some other level of intervention. And so for COVID, I always talked about like ventilation and air exchange rates and ways of like eliminating viruses in the environment and in aerosol contaminants. And the same holds true here. Right? We talk about the amount of virus just in our environment. So yeah, we need PPE, we need vaccines, and we need other interventions to reduce the exposures. Is it cleaning the milking equipment between milking sessions?

• 59:50Speaker 01

  Because that's not cleaned, right? The cows are cleaned.

• 59:52Mayim Bialik?

  It's a very, very big process.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  It's a very big process, but let's think about ways that we can do this. Or is it isolation and identification of cows that are sick to reduce the amount of exposure to other cows? Is it, you know, ways in which to enhance biosecurity on poultry farms? Like, this is not, this is not a single solution problem.

• 1:00:14Mayim Bialik?

  What, what, what level of vigilance do you feel kind of the average person needs to, to have right now? And besides finding alternatives for eggs, which we have some, you know, clever informational aspects of that, what, what do you think people should be thinking about right now?

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  What I am trying to get everyone to advocate for is, yes, I know the egg prices are high and potentially agricultural prices might get high if that happens, is that, is to communicate now, is to say now to our state departments of health and our state departments of food and agriculture to start working together to control these outbreaks. To get a handle on how widespread it is and to implement measures, get everybody, all the stakeholders at the table and start moving these things forward because I haven't seen it. We're having huge outbreaks. California, you know, again, I think it was like 10 cases in the last 30 days in California. Different herds are positive. We don't know the extent of migratory, of this presence of this virus and migratory

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  birds. Definitely, it's there. Is it 100% there? No, but there are upticks in all of the populations. It's just, again, I think what people need to appreciate, and I think we did this during the COVID-19 pandemic, because we were in such a very unique situation. Mentally, we were all like, oh, my God, where is this virus? Right? And like, you know, and I would talk to a lot of people, talk to my neighbors, and I would just be like, hey, this is what I'm doing. Like, what are you concerned about? Let's talk about what is feasible for you. So let's, everybody think about what's feasible for them. Yes, there is virus in the birds. There's probably a virus in your ducks, probably a virus in that water. Don't drink the duck pond water.

• 1:01:54Jonathan Cohen?

  Last question. Should I be concerned about the small flock of chickens in my neighbor's backyard? Should I not go near that flock?

• 1:02:05Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah. What about people? I mean, a lot of people have chickens in their backyard. Is this like a thing?

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  I think this is a big concern, right? Because commercial poultry farms have at least a lot of biosecurity ways of like containing the chickens such that they have little interaction with migratory birds, but then they still get it. As you said, in their much more intense situations, and they've been bred for a certain type of chicken. Backyard poultry is a little bit different. However, there are massive amounts of backyard poultry farms that are becoming infected because there is so much virus in the migratory bird population. PPE and like, you know, handling of birds, if you have backyard poultry, do not handle them barehanded. Wear a mask and wear gloves.

• 1:02:49Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, that's important.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  Right? Okay, so like, again, protect yourself from, you know, the potential of contamination. These individuals who had backyard poultry, it's unclear whether they use any PPE. It's unclear how many, you know, dead birds they had on their premise. But again, if you do have dead birds on your premise, do not pick them up without any proper PPE.

• 1:03:10Mayim Bialik?

  Also, and this is just, you know, this isn't just like, oh, I'm a vegan person and this is, you know, a chance to have this conversation. But one of the things that we do want to sort of put out there is that

• 1:03:22Mayim Bialik?

  While eggs are delicious and you like them to make an omelet, there are many cases when people use eggs when there are replacers that actually take the place of eggs, do exactly the same thing, it's not a lot of labor and you save, we did the calculation, you save, you can save $500 to $1,000 a year, like depending on your intake of eggs. But things like if you're making pancakes, if you're making waffles, if you're making, if you're baking, that's actually a time that you can finally learn what people who don't cook with eggs have already known. You don't need eggs for all those things, so if you're still going to be using eggs, use them for what you actually need them for when they serve their eggy purpose. Omelets, frittatas, quiches, I don't know what else people are doing with them.

• 1:04:04Mayim Bialik?

  But this is a great time to learn to save money and use other resources without needing to rely on eggs, especially if it's in something, I, I promise, there are many, many alternatives out there and we've talked about some of them. Thank you so much, thank you for your expertise, thank you for being part of this conversation, and thank you for my three-dimensional virus.

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  You're welcome, so much.

• 1:04:27Jonathan Cohen?

  Obviously, the health concerns are of primary importance, but people's lives are being affected by the lack of eggs. You see on social media and in the news, the images of grocery stores with bare shelves. Eggs are so integral into people's lives, both for eating directly, but also for baking. You have an alternative.

• 1:04:48Mayim Bialik?

  Actually, here's something fun. I'm gonna take you into my kitchen right now and I'm gonna show you a few options. Hey, everyone, I'm very sorry that there's a bird flu and I'm really sorry that it's caused an extremely disturbing spike in egg prices. But I want to share a little something with you that vegans have been doing for years. And that is using things instead of eggs in baking. So if you want an omelet, I can't really help you. Yes, there are vegan egg products that will try and create an omelet or a quiche. It's not really my jam, it's not something that I feel the need to deal with. I can live without it, but when I bake, when I make pancakes, when I make anything that you'd normally...

• 1:05:31Mayim Bialik?

  Normally just like throw an egg in and stir it up. Here's the deal, people. You don't need to use an egg. I know this might sound shocking. It's not gonna taste any different. It's not gonna look any different. It's not gonna bake any different. You don't have to spend all those money on eggs. And you don't have to kill that many baby chickens to make things. I promise. So, I'm gonna go over three ways to avoid using eggs when you are baking. Um, this works in breads. It works in cookies. It works in any dessert product that's not like a meringue. Um, it also does work in things like pancake mix. Think about the money you will save if you don't have to keep buying eggs for these purposes.

• 1:06:16Mayim Bialik?

  And I know you want your eggs. You want them over easy. You want them scrambled. You want them all the boiled, poached. I don't care. You will need eggs for that and you will be paying a lot of money because of what's going on with the bird flu. But you do not have to suffer, nor do the baby chickens. If you're baking or making pancake batter or anything like that, waffles, anything. Okay, so we've got three ways we're gonna do it. The first way is so easy. Do you see what this is? It's applesauce, friends. And you're gonna be like, ew, it's gonna taste mushy. It doesn't. I use applesauce as an egg replacer specifically in things like banana bread, things that have a long baking time. It literally holds the consistency, binds all the other ingredients.

• 1:06:58Mayim Bialik?

  It's just applesauce, folks. Just like a quarter cup of applesauce. That's like literally all you need. Applesauce instead of eggs. That's number one. Number two is a product that, um, goes by various names. I use Bob's, but you can also use, uh, there's a company called Energy. And what this is, is it's a powder, as you can see, it's a powder. And the powder is made of like potato starch and things that when water gets added to them, they get kind of gelatinous. For lack of a better word, meaning they form a consistency that binds just the way eggs do. Um, this is what I use when I make latkes, for example. So like when you shred onions and potatoes, you normally like throw an egg in there to bind everything together. This does exactly the same thing. I'm gonna show you. You how easy it is.

• 1:07:42Mayim Bialik?

  You take one tablespoon of the powder. You add two tablespoons of water. And I'm taking a little whisk. You can also use a fork. But this is one of my favorite things is my little metal whisk. That's it. Um, what happens is if you let it sit, which I will um, let it do. It will thicken and then it takes the place of eggs. So it literally looks like this. It looks like that. It has, oh, look, kinda looks like an egg. A third way that you can make egg replacer is with ground flax meal. So you can buy this in a bag at any market. It looks like this. Um, flax seeds are, they're really cute. They're kind of the size of like sesame seeds. Um, but you can grind them yourself if you'd like, or you can go ahead and splurge and buy them ground.

• 1:08:26Mayim Bialik?

  The way that you use a flax egg is extremely easy. You take one tablespoon of ground flax. And you add two and a half tablespoons of water. Mix it up. It will look liquidy. And the same thing, flax will absorb the water. You can put it in the fridge and it will get gelatinous and you'll be able to use it as a binder. So a little bit looser, but also still holds um, once you bake it because the flax again then absorbs more liquid. But that absolutely takes the place of egg. Um, the flax is gonna take a little bit longer. Sometimes you put it in the fridge for a couple of minutes. Those are three ways to use eggs without eggs. Think of the money that you'll save. I'm happy to help you think of the money that you'll save because that's like one of my favorite parts of this.

• 1:09:10Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, I hope that that's helpful to people and it's very hard when a staple such as eggs has risen to the prices that it has. And I get it. So hopefully these three options will help you and maybe you'll like saving money and you won't care that it doesn't taste different. And you'll just become part of the flax egg replacer applesauce revolution. Uh, let us know how it goes.

• 1:09:29Jonathan Cohen?

  The average American spends a hundred and ninety-four dollars on eggs a year. Seven hundred and seventy-five dollars for a household of four. Uh, your alternative.

• 1:09:39Mayim Bialik?

  One of my, one of my alternatives is flax meal, which is not good for everything. But the calculation that um, that Valerie prepared for us um, has you saving uh, up, up, for a household of four. You could save uh, between five hundred and a thousand dollars a year, depending on your consumption. If, if you're an egg eater, like if I was raising kids who were egg eaters, I wouldn't want to be like, you can't have omelets today because I wanted to bake cookies for the postman. You know, like I, I'd want everybody to have all the things that they need, but it's a great time to start experimenting.

• 1:10:10Jonathan Cohen?

  My other takeaway from this episode is about, you know, those comorbidities. And yes, people are stressed. Yes, people have health conditions. But I think many of the guests that we speak to talk about changing the mentality of there will be a medicine, a shot, something that is going to fix and protect me from the world. We are in the world and amongst it, viruses do come up. And one of the best things that we can do for ourselves are these small, micro life changes to help us in whatever way we can.

• 1:10:42Mayim Bialik?

  Well, in addition, as Dr. Lekto Wala talks about, you don't have to pick one thing to do to try and prevent yourself from getting sick. So the notion that we've been told, do whatever you want, eat however you want, live however you want, just get a vaccine, as she told us, that's actually not even accurate, and it's not the way that we should even be understanding what vaccines are there for. So even if you choose to get vaccines, you still don't want to be one of those people who is a comorbidity statistic as much as you can prevent it. So all of the things that you hear on all of our episodes still hold true and can also, you know, booster your body's ability to fight off the viruses that we're going to encounter anyway.

• 1:11:27Mayim Bialik?

  But yeah, things like sleep, anything you can do to support your immune system, reducing stress, and, you know, seeing what changes in your life you can make that don't kind of make you check off those comorbidities is really important.

• 1:11:40Jonathan Cohen?

  If you like this new format of MBB reports, check out our episode on microplastics and the impacts on health. You can find that on the YouTube channel or anywhere you get podcasts. We also do an MBB reacts where we tackle, can science explain supernatural abilities, where we explore the telepathy tapes and extrasensory perception. That is also on the YouTube page or anywhere you get podcasts.

• 1:12:09Mayim Bialik?

  A lot of ways to break things down. We'll see you next time.