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A dairy farm worker prepares cows for milking in Ontario, Canada, in July 2022. | Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Here’s what’s worrying experts right now about H5N1’s spread among dairy cows — and what isn’t. Last year, when an H5N1 avian flu virus — commonly known as bird flu — was spilling over from bird populations into a variety of wild mammals, Seema Lakdawala, a virologist and influenza A transmission specialist at Emory University, was “not overly concerned” about human risk. We don’t have “much of an interface with seals or with foxes, for that matter, or polar bears,” she says. But when it comes to cows, that interface is vast. People on dairy farms regularly interact with cows and their milk; when the animals and their milk are infected with a virus that can cause disease in humans, and that mutates constantly, each of those interactions functions as an opportunity for the virus to workshop its adaptability. Now, says Lakdawala, “I am more concerned than I have been, and it’s not for the general public — it is for dairy workers.” The H5N1 outbreak among cows on 34 dairy farms in nine states has so far led to only one very mild human infection. However, the virus was likely spreading among cows for months before it was detected. Lakdawala’s greatest concern is that this highly changeable virus has now arrived at an important point of human-animal convergence, and that we are not prepared. For a virus to cause a human pandemic, it has to have three important characteristics, say flu experts. It has to cause human disease; it has to be something our immune systems haven’t encountered before; and it must spread easily among humans, especially through the air. The latest events do not yet demonstrate that H5N1 has new capacities in any of these categories. However, they hint that the virus has the machinery to evolve those capacities — and that it could do so before we know it. In dairy cows, H5N1 has found an excellent laboratory for evolving traits dangerous to humans Although Lakdawala was concerned when mink, seals, and other mammals were infected with H5N1 last year and the year before, cows are different. An outbreak among “mammals with a large interface with humans” is a red flag to her. It’s a numbers game. Although all viruses mutate routinely, flu viruses are particularly good at shapeshifting and can even swap entire chunks of genetic material with other flu viruses if an animal is co-infected with more than one of them. These mutations happen randomly, and most don’t make the viruses more dangerous to humans — but it’s entirely realistic to imagine that some occasionally do. If that occasionally human-threatening mutation happens to a flu virus that has infected, say, a wild fox, it doesn’t pose a particularly high risk of causing a pandemic among humans. After all, few wild foxes have contact with humans. If it happens in a cow, however, there are far more opportunities for the virus to effectively workshop its new features. People who work on dairy farms are constantly interacting with cows and their milk — they check udders, hook and unhook milking machines, and perform other tasks to care for the animals. That puts them in lots of contact with any virus infecting the cows. If the virus were one that didn’t infect and kill people or that doesn’t mutate and adapt as easily as the flu does, perhaps it wouldn’t be as concerning — but H5N1 does infect people at close proximity to animals, and at least half of the more than 900 people who’ve been infected with the virus since it came on the scene in 1996 have died. “There is a high viral load in milk of these infected cows, and so it is a concern to me in terms of spillover [from] cows into workers,” says Lakdawala. “And the more often the virus has an attempt to spill over, the more likely it is to adapt.” We already know the virus is adapting in mammals, she says. “The more spillover events, the more attempts that the virus has to find a successful variant that can take off or infect the human — and then one infected individual, three infected individuals, go home” to their families, where they could potentially spread the virus further. It’s not a pandemic right now, she says, but now is the time to act to reduce the opportunities for spillover events. For the first time, we have proof of H5N1 spreading among a mammalian species When a virus leaps from one species into another, that’s not usually enough to cause a large outbreak. You could look at H5N1’s history: Although the virus has leapt from animals into people hundreds of times, it has very rarely spread among people. When infections effectively stop spreading once they cross species lines, the non-transmitting species is called a “dead-end host.” Birds readily transmit H5N1 to other birds, but until recently, scientists have thought mammals getting infected with H5N1 were dead-end hosts. In the past couple of years, they’ve had some sneaking suspicion that minks and other mammals getting infected with the virus were spreading it among themselves — but they never had definitive proof. That is, they couldn’t rule out the possibility that all the animals had gotten infected by eating bits of the same sick bird, or through another so-called “common source” exposure. It’s much harder to contain a pathogen’s spread within a species if members of that species can transmit it to each other. What the dairy cow outbreak shows for the first time is that mammals can indeed now infect each other with H5N1 — and can do it efficiently. “Genetic data and epidemiologic data are all quite strongly suggesting that these viruses are getting transmitted in some way between these cows,” says Louise Moncla, a veterinary pathobiologist at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine whose team has analyzed genetic data from infected cows that the US government recently made available. This virus’s mode of transmission isn’t apparent yet — and it matters It’s not yet clear how the virus is being spread through and between dairy cow herds. High viral loads in cows’ udders and in their unpasteurized milk make it possible that contact with contaminated milking machines is doing most of the transmission. However, it’s also possible the virus is spreading through the fecal-oral route or through contaminated air; the latter would be particularly concerning because it’s so much harder to prevent. (Moncla notes that while the classic genetic fingerprint for a bird flu’s ability to spread through air between mammals is absent from this strain of H5N1, that doesn’t mean we’ve ruled out respiratory spread.) Regardless of exactly how H5N1 is spreading among cows, the significance that they’re transmitting the virus to each other is clear to flu experts: If the virus has adapted to spread among one mammalian species, it raises the specter that it can also adapt to spread among humans. There is a precedent for flu viruses to spread from livestock to humans, leading to a pandemic: The H1N1 flu outbreak began when a flu virus spread from pigs to humans. It caused far less death than expected through a stroke of luck — because the virus had similarities to strains that circulated in the first few decades of the 20th century, many older adults still had some flu immunity left over from childhood infections. If H5N1 develops the ability to spread among humans, it would be a novel infection to most immune systems, giving us much less protection from old flu infections. There are “no signs of that [ability] so far in the cattle sequences,” says Andrew Pekosz, a virologist who studies respiratory virus biology at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. “That’s a good thing.” Still, because we don’t know much about how influenza A viruses like H5N1 behave in cows, we don’t yet know what cautionary measures will do the most to slow their spread. In 2011, scientists learned that the influenza D virus causes respiratory illness in cattle. However, not all flu viruses are created equal: “I did not ever anticipate seeing an influenza A in cattle,” says Lakdawala. While influenza D infections don’t appear to cause much disease in humans, influenza A viruses very much do: All of the past global flu pandemics have been caused by influenza A viruses. Because this is such an unusual event, says Moncla, “we know very little about how flu replicates and transmits in cows.” That makes it hard to quickly design and implement precautions to prevent the virus from spreading to the people who handle them. “What would calm me down is if we started implementing interventions that would mitigate the presence of the virus and its transmission amongst cattle, and spilling over into humans,” says Lakdawala. “Say, okay: Every dairy farm worker is gonna wear a face shield,” she said. It would help to know whether cows that are infected but asymptomatic have infectious virus in their milk, and whether they can transmit virus to each other, says Pekosz. Ongoing studies by academics and federal agencies should help answer those questions. Here’s why you shouldn’t panic At the moment, there are more “coulds” than “ares” with H5N1: Although the virus is showing that it couldadapt further to spread among humans, so far it hasn’t; and while it’s reasonable to conduct studies to ensure pasteurization works against this particular strain of H5N1, there’s no reason to think it won’t. It’s also worth noting that according to the USDA spokesperson, the virus has so far not caused severe disease or death in the cows it has infected — they’ve all recovered with supportive care. In that way, this outbreak is very different from the ones we’ve seen in some other mammals. Furthermore, testing at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has already demonstrated that existing antiviral medications are effective at preventing human infections with this strain of H5N1 and that two existing candidate vaccines could be used to rapidly scale up mass production of human vaccines against this virus if needed. So for now, the general public shouldn’t be overly concerned about the virus, says Pekosz. “Scientists are … working extra overtime for this. But the general public should still feel safe.”

Why we keep seeing egg prices spike

23 h

vox.com

With a new wave of bird flu affecting hens, egg prices are ticking up again. | Matthew Hatcher/Bloomberg via Getty Images How corporate greed plays a role in making bird flu outbreaks — and egg prices — worse. Egg prices are rising again. The culprit, again: bird flu. At least, that’s the surface-level reason. In the current wave, according to the CDC, the H5N1 bird flu has been found in over 90 million poultry birds across almost every state since 2022, and has even spread to dairy cattle, with over 30 herds in nine states dealing with an outbreak at the time of this writing. The last time bird flu struck US farms, in early 2022, egg prices more than doubled during the year, reaching a peak of $4.82 for a dozen in January 2023. During the bird flu outbreak in 2014 to 2015, egg prices also briefly soared. While prices now are still nowhere near the peak they reached in January 2023, they’ve been creeping up again since last August, when a dozen large eggs cost $2.04. As of March, we’re bumping up against the $3 mark, which is a nearly 47 percent increase. It’s also a huge increase from the price we were used to a few years ago: In early 2020, a dozen eggs were just $1.46 on average. The H5N1 strain of bird flu is highly contagious and obviously poses a big risk to hens. But the fact that bird flu outbreaks keep battering our food system points to a deeper problem: an agriculture industry that has become brittle thanks to intense market concentration. The egg market is dominated by some major players The egg industry, like much of the agricultural sector, is commanded by a few heavyweights — the biggest, Cal-Maine Foods, controls 20 percent of the market — that leave little slack in the system to absorb and isolate shocks like disease. Hundreds of thousands of animals are packed tightly together on a single farm, as my colleague Marina Bolotnikova has explained, where disease can spread like wildfire. According to the government and corporate accountability group Food & Water Watch, three-quarters of the country’s hundreds of millions of egg-laying hens are crammed into just 347 factory farms. The system also uses genetically similar animals that farms believe will maximize egg production — but that lack of genetic diversity means animal populations are less resistant to disease. When a hen gets infected, stopping the spread is an ugly, cruel business; since 2022 it has led to the killing of 85 million poultry birds. For the consumer, it often means paying a lot more than usual for a carton of eggs. Preventing any outbreaks of disease from ever happening isn’t realistic, but the model of modern industrial farming is making outbreaks more disruptive. And it’s not just these disruptions driving price spikes. Egg producers also appear to be taking advantage of these moments and hiking prices beyond what they’d need to maintain their old profit margins. “It is absolutely a story of corporate profiteering,” says Rebecca Wolf, senior food policy analyst at Food & Water Watch. Cal-Maine’s net profit in 2023 was about $758 million — 471 percent higher than the year prior, according to its annual financial report. Most of this fortune was made through hoisting up prices; the number of eggs sold, measured in dozens, rose only 5.9 percent. Last year, several food conglomerates, including Kraft and General Mills, were awarded almost $18 million in damages in a lawsuit alleging that egg producers Cal-Maine and Rose Acre Farms had constrained the supply of eggs in the mid- to late 2000s, artificially bumping prices. A farmer advocacy group last year called on the FTC to look into whether top egg producers were price gouging consumers. Are we doomed to semi-regular price surges for eggs? Our food system didn’t become so consolidated — and fragile — by accident. We got here because of three big reasons, Wolf says: by not enforcing environmental laws, by not enforcing antitrust laws, and by giving away “tons of money” to the agriculture industry. During the New Deal era, the federal government put in place policies that would help manage food supply and protect both farmers and consumers from sharp deviations in what the former earned and the latter paid. Under Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz in the 1970s, though, those policies started getting chipped away; Butz’s famous motto was for farmers to “get big or get out.” The spread of giant factory farms is in part a product of this about-face in managing supply. Because our food system is so concentrated and intermingled, it also means any single supply chain hiccup — whether due to disease, wars, or any other reason — can have ripple effects on others, affecting prices in a vast number of essential consumer goods and services. “When we have things like E. coli outbreaks, it’s hard to know where the problem lies because the way that we process and manufacture is so hyper-industrialized that you then have a problem with millions of pounds of food,” says Wolf. Thankfully, the Biden administration has been making some strides in loosening up food industry consolidation, often by shoring up enforcement of long-existing antitrust laws. But there’s still more we could do. There are bills that have been introduced to Congress, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Price Gouging Prevention Act, that would give the FTC the authority to first define what counts as price gouging and then crack down on companies that raise prices excessively. The cycle of food chain snags and higher prices doesn’t have to keep repeating. “We are maximizing profit truly over everything else — over the welfare of the animals, over the rights and wages of people who work in the food system, for even consumers who are at the grocery store,” Wolf says. “None of this is inevitable — we shouldn’t have to be here.” This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

After decades of inaction, states are finally stepping up on housing

24 h

vox.com

California Gov. Gavin Newsom at a press conference on September 28, 2022, in San Francisco, California. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images The affordability crisis is forcing politicians’ hands. For years, the easiest thing to doaboutbuilding new housing was nothing. The federal government largely deferred to state and local governments on matters of land use, and states mostly deferred to local governments, which typically defer to their home-owning constituents who back restrictive zoning laws that bar new construction. That’s slowly changing as the housing supply crisis ripples across the country. Experts say the US is short somewhere between 3.8 millionand 6.8 million homes, and most renters feel priced out of the idea of homeownership altogether. The lack of affordable housing is causing homelessness to rise. In Washington, DC, Congress has held more hearings on housing affordability recently than it has in decades, and President Joe Biden has been ramping up attention on the housing crisis, promising to “build, build, build” to “bring housing costs down for good.” But it’s at the state level where some of the most consequential change is taking place. Over the last five years, Republican and Democratic legislators and governors in a slew of states have looked to update zoning codes, transform residential planning processes, and improve home-building and design requirements. Some states that have stepped up include Oregon, Florida, Montana, and California, as well as states like Utah and Washington. This year, Maryland, New York, and New Jersey passed state-level housing legislation, and Colorado may soon follow suit. Not all state-level bills have been equally ambitious in addressing the supply crisis, and not all states have been successful at passing new laws, especially on their first few tries. And some states have succeeded in passing housing reform one year, only to strike out with additional bills the next. Real housing reform requires iterative and sustained legislative attention; it almost never succeeds with just one bill signing. Trying to determine why exactly a housing reform bill passes or fails on the state level can be difficult, though advocates say it certainly helps when a governor or other powerful state lawmaker invests time and political capital in mobilizing stakeholders together. Given that housing challenges are not spread equally across a state, sometimes it can be hard to decide whether to pass statewide laws that apply equally to all communities or to pass more targeted legislation aimed only at certain areas. Partly due to pressure from voters and from more organized pro-housing activists, legislative trends are starting to emerge. More states and housing experts are thinking not only about passing laws to boost housing production, but also about how best to enforce those laws, close loopholes, and demand compliance. States can make it easier to build more housing in a wider variety of places While states typically grant local communities a lot of discretion in land use policy, more lawmakers are realizing that balance may have tilted too far. As researchers with the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis outlined last fall, some states are now looking to increase housing production by enabling more multifamily housing and accessory dwelling units (ADUs) to be built without having developers first seek approval from local planning agencies or elected boards. This accelerated construction process is known as building “by right.” For example, Oregon passed a law in 2019 allowing fourplexes (a multifamily home that typically houses four families under one roof) to be built anywhere in large cities and for duplexes to be built anywhere in mid-size cities. Before, a developer would have needed to seek special permission to build such housing. States like Utah and Massachusetts are incentivizing the construction of new multifamily housing near public transit, while states like California and Florida are making it easier to build residential housing in places zoned for retail. Other states, like Maine and Vermont, are making it easier to build ADUs, which are second (and smaller) residential units on the same plot of land as one’s primary residence, like apartments or converted garages. State lawmakers sometimes impose new rules on localities to adjust their housing planning requirements, which can mean lowering the barriers builders must go through to begin construction or incentivizing cities to set more ambitious targets for production. Sometimes it means easing requirements like minimum lot sizes or parking spot mandates. Not all state-level bills will move the needle on the housing crisis Under pressure to do something about the housing crisis, some state lawmakers are advancing bills that allow politicians to claim they’re taking action, although the legislation itself is weak and unlikely to make big dents on the various problems. Some bills may even make affordability issues worse over the long term. For example, after failing to pass housing reform last year, lawmakers in New York came together again this year to push something through. Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul and her allies in the state legislature are cheering their recently agreed-upon housing package, which includes tenant protections and incentives to spur new construction,but experts and activists say it lacks real ambitious zoning and productionmeasures and will be unlikely to drive new affordability. Likewise in Maryland, Democratic politicians are cheering the passage of a new statewide housing reform package that includes renter protections and incentives to spur new affordable and dense development,though Yes-In-My-Backyard pro-housing advocates concede they do not expect the legislation to create much new housing, at least in the near term. Still, given that it was housing advocates’ first real attempt at passing statewide legislation in Maryland, they are hailing it as an impressive first step. “This is the first time the Maryland legislature overrode local zoning in a pro-housing way, and I would say this is a surprisingly drastic shift from the status quo even though it’s not enough,” said Tom Coale, a housing lobbyist in Maryland. When it comes to state-level housing reform, implementation and compliance matter Passing legislation for housing reform on the state level is often just the first step, as opponents then sometimes seek to challenge the new laws in court or localities search for loopholes or other ways to avoid compliance. Sometimes lawmakers water down housing production mandates and other enforcement mechanisms before the bills even pass through the legislature. While it’s not uncommon for local communities to try and avoid compliance when a housing law is first passed, somestates have also been firing back in subsequent sessions to close loopholes and ramp up penalties for local governments. While some statutes have strong enforcement mechanisms built in to begin with, many lawmakers are recognizing the housing reform process will just need to be dogged and responsiveto resistance and new challenges. Housing experts with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy say it’s likely to take at least three to five years after a statewide policy is passed before the public should expect to see any real changes in housing production, and they urge patience before claiming a reform has failed or succeeded. “Many of the ambitious state housing policies that have been adopted are still in the early stages of implementation, so we don’t yet have definitive evidence about what works and what doesn’t,” they wrote in September. “Without realistic expectations about this time frame, pro-housing advocates may get discouraged, while opponents claim that zoning changes are ineffective—all before the policies have kicked in.”

The AI grift that can literally poison you

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vox.com

Amanita muscaria mushrooms, a poisonous variety, are seen at a garden in Poland on October 2, 2022. | Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images When AI comes for mushroom foragers. Six months ago, I spoke with a man named Elan Trybuch about a problem he was seeing online. He kept coming across different ebooks about mushroom foraging that looked somehow off. Off as in: maybe poisonous. The books were shorter than most foraging guides were, and way, way cheaper, says Trybuch. He’s a software engineer and volunteer secretary for the New York Mycological Society, a nonprofit devoted to “spreading knowledge, love and appreciation of fungi.” He knows mushrooms and he knows AI, and he thought the covers of these books were probably AI-generated. “They had mushroom structures that don’t quite make sense,” says Trybuch. They were the mycological equivalent of a picture of a hot blonde with six fingers and too many teeth. Most disturbing was the information inside the books was totally wrong. “They aren’t even giving you descriptions of real mushrooms. They’re giving you something completely made up,” Trybuch says. Any readers looking to try to use these books to figure out which mushrooms were safe to eat and which weren’t would be out of luck, which to Trybuch was seriously concerning. “It could literally mean life or death” if you eat the wrong mushroom, he says. The problem of very low-quality, very low-priced, probably at least partially AI-generated ebooks is not confined to mushroom foraging. Garbage ebooks have been a problem on Amazon for at least a decade, but — not unlike many strains of fungi — they’ve exploded over the last few years. I spent months investigating the shadowy economy where they’re produced, and what I learned took me by surprise. Inside the scammy world of garbage ebook publishing Garbage ebooks are all over Amazon’s Kindle store, on every topic. Searching for Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling new book The Anxious Generation, I found Jonathan Haidt: The Biography of Jonathan David Haidt, Navigating Morality and Policy; A Joosr Guide to... The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom; and The Jonathan Haidt Story: Exploring the Life and Work of a Renowned Social Psychologist, Author, and Advocate. None of these are actually books so much as book-shaped digital files, designed to be picked up in keyword searches and get clicked on in a hurry by someone a tiny bit distracted or not digitally savvy enough to notice what they’re doing. This kind of grift has been around for a while. Now, with the rise of large language models, garbage ebooks have become easier and cheaper than ever to make. Garbage book grifters often don’t use AI to write their books, but they do use it to pick a topic and build an outline. Then they give the outline to a wildly underpaid ghostwriter to flesh it out into something that will pass muster as a real book. The model is a dangerously inviting prospect for anyone who’s ever toyed with the idea of publishing a book but doesn’t want to actually write one. It turns out, though, that the people who make garbage ebooks mostly lose money. The real cash seems to come from the people who teach others the garbage ebook scheme. These teachers claim they’ve shared the key to a life of passive income, but their students say all their courses offer is demands for more and more money, with the ever-deferred promise to teach you the real secrets to easy money once you’ve paid just a few thousand more dollars. Even these grifters are not the real villains. They are often small-time operators working one level of a very big grift industry. The grift is that technology and retail platforms have incentivized a race to the bottom when it comes to selling books. They’ve built an ecosystem where all the incentives are to sell at high volume and low cost. In book production, the biggest cost-saving and time-saving measure you can take is cutting out the labor of writing the actual book. Together, without ever caring enough about the issue to deliberately try to do so, these corporations have built a landscape in which it’s hard to trust what you read and hard to sell what you write. In the end, everyone loses: the would-be writers getting grifted in a fake publishing school, the real writers whose products are getting choked out of the marketplace by floods of cheap garbage, and the readers who just want to be able to buy a book without having to check to make sure the author isn’t a robot. I asked Elan Trybuch if he thought anyone was buying all those fake mushroom foraging guides. “Yeah,” he said. “I mean, there’s a sucker born every minute.” Read the full article here. This version of the story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.