News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious biased sources will be removed at the mods’ discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted separately but not to the post body. Sources may be checked for reliability using Wikipedia, MBFC, AdFontes, GroundNews, etc.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source. Clickbait titles may be removed.
Posts which titles don’t match the source may be removed. If the site changed their headline, we may ask you to update the post title. Clickbait titles use hyperbolic language and do not accurately describe the article content. When necessary, post titles may be edited, clearly marked with [brackets], but may never be used to editorialize or comment on the content.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials, videos, blogs, press releases, or celebrity gossip will be allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis. Mods may use discretion to pre-approve videos or press releases from highly credible sources that provide unique, newsworthy content not available or possible in another format.
7. No duplicate posts.
If an article has already been posted, it will be removed. Different articles reporting on the same subject are permitted. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners or news aggregators.
All posts must link to original article sources. You may include archival links in the post description. News aggregators such as Yahoo, Google, Hacker News, etc. should be avoided in favor of the original source link. Newswire services such as AP, Reuters, or AFP, are frequently republished and may be shared from other credible sources.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
I would really appreciate help processing this.
The bird is sick, bird dies, bear eats bird, bear dies.
It shows that this particular influenza strain can infect both bears and birds.
Wash your hands, stay home if you're sick, don't eat birds that have died from influenza.
Ok, but... polar bears eat birds?
Polar bears aren't picky where their calories come from and they need a lot of them.
Also we should take into account the lack of sea ice which means the bears can't hunt marine food sources.
Yes, pretty much anything that is available.
https://polarbearsinternational.org/polar-bears-changing-arctic/polar-bear-facts/diet-prey/
If only AI summaries were half as good as this.
And if you're a bot... fucking bravo.
deleted by creator
Not necessarily; while ripping the bird apart to eat it, if blood and whatever other residues get on/in soft tissues like nose or around eyes, infection spreads easily that way.
Polar bears are birds.
In seriousness I don't know if this is fucked up or just something that happens sometimes.
Viruses can jump between species , especially if their target proteins are non-specific. It’s not necessarily rare, but nonetheless destructive.
Lol, polar bears aren't real. :-P
Wait I thought birds wer.... ohhhh
That might be true in the future.
Gulp, like anyone I do enjoy being right, but dayum in this case I very much hope that I am wrong!?!? :-P
If the bird flu can penetrate the Arctic it can penetrate the Antarctic. If that happens we'll lose a lot of penguins, far more than we can "afford".
A lot of penguins aren't in the Antarctic, so it may already be spreading through populations in places like South Africa and the Galapagos Islands.
(emphasis added)
This entire article is clickbait (or at least not "news") b/c while this may be the first time that a POLAR bear (reportedly) bit the dust, that is not saying really anything at all that was not already known.
That said, it does keep the fact that these viruses are real and have implications for human health & our economy (e.g., egg prices at grocery stories) in our cultural consciousness.
It's not clickbait.
They're aren't saying that it wasn't thought possible for the virus to infect polar bears. It's news because the virus has reached a vulnerable species in a highly vulnerable ecosystem for the first time. That was predicted previously but not known until now.
Begging your partdon, but that seems to not be true? Even the short summary of the article acknowledged that it had already previously reached bears, animals in Alaska, and vulnerable species (bald eagles are still protected), and a quick internet search found this article that says that H5N1 specifically was known to infect polar bears a month ago, from a sample collected two months prior to that.
The only part that is novel is that the polar bear died this time. Except without knowing comorbidity factors, we cannot even say that it died "from" H5N1, nor learn anything at all about the severity of H5N1 in polar bears from this single isolated incident.
Anyway, thank you for explaining - people were downvoting without doing that and I appreciate you stepping up!:-)
Pretty sure that's the same bear. Utqiagvik is the largest city in North Slope and one of just a few cities in the Arctic. The virus was detected 3 weeks ago but we don't know when it was reported on that USDA site. That still makes the detection in polar bears and in the Arctic very recent. That information was probably only publicly available more recently than 3 weeks ago.
The earliest reporting I could find was 3 days ago in Alaskan press and earlier today in nonlocal reporting.
I still say it's legit news, and not click bait. Appreciate the civil discussion though!
I probably was too brief - I did not intend to suggest that it was "fake news" or anything, just that the novelty was of an extremely narrow and specific kind. In looking around the internet at some journalism lingo, "churnalism" comes somewhat close to what I meant. Basically we have this 24/7 news cycle by for-profit companies that in an effort to maximize the stock dividends of their investors must spit out new content every minute of every hour of every day, regardless of how "important" that news is. Which isn't to say that H5N1 being deadly is not news-worthy! Though I am suggesting that all these articles on this precise subject matter (of this single polar bear having died from it) seem to have borrowed from the importance of being more deadly world-wide, in order to sell their stories about this singular individual bear.
Next we could have an article on the second polar bear to have died from it, or the third, or perhaps from the first female polar bear (or male, whichever is the opposite of the earlier one), or the first non-Alaskan polar bear to die from it etc. And while each new one can technically be "correct" and "novel", I would argue that at some point it is no longer "news-worthy". Yet apparently in this case I would be wrong, b/c some people seem very interested in this new fact!:-P
Come to think of it, it probably is b/c polar bears are cute. So rather than "clickbait", I probably should have said that it is "sensationalist news", meant more to shock and awe and "entertain" (even if in the negative sense) than to inform.
And thank you in return for the same:-).