The Avian Influenza Trilogy - more Scratch and Sniff
First case identified in England
On the 27th of January, the UKHSA announced that it had identified the first case of human influenza H5N1 in the West Midlands.
As the details were a bit thin on the ground (strange, given our heavy financial investment in protection), the usual nosey old geezer fired off a FOI request to the UKHSA.
It’s not that we do not believe the UKHSA; they are here to protect us.
The rationale for our request is to determine whether this case was an incidental finding due to contamination or a result of PCRing anything on two legs and exactly how they reached the conclusion of bird-to-animal transmission. These will be the object of further requests for info. We focussed on this one to keep under the £400 ceiling.
If you click on the link, you will get to an 11-page document written in 2020 by the late Public Health England, which is clear, concise, authoritative and widely disregarded in the orgy of testing that followed.
This post was written by two old geezers who, as reported in our Riddles series, spent a lot of time studying the cycle threshold and its significance. The old geezers would like to acknowledge K MacMartin for inspiring the title of this post.
PCR testing lab:
Thank you for your sample. What would you like us to find in it?
If 'they' are "PCRing anything on two legs", I wonder if they're including actual chickens in this PCRing festival. After all, chickens have two legs ... and scratch ...
I await the UKHSA answer with bated breath. After all, we prospective H1N5 victims need to prepare - for lockdowns, masks, PCR tests and vaccines, repeating all we've 'learned' to do five years ago.