A family with four cats, two outdoors, all eating balanced raw chicken diets experiences a cat getting sick after catching a bird with the flu. The outside cat infects an inside cat, then the owner catches flu by petting the cats and—here’s the kicker—spreads it by grabbing tissues from a box. Soon, the whole family contracts flu from the “contaminated” tissue box, as does a visiting aunt, all while ignoring the actual likely route: direct contact with infected birds and outdoor cats.
“Heroic” Public Agency Response
The health department and CDC are alerted of bird flu and soon the FDA swoops in to “save the day,” bullying the tissue company into a voluntary recall. Of course, this is absurd—giant tissue conglomerates would lawyer up, while small companies get steamrolled. The media buys in, pushing dramatic blame on inconsequential objects like the tissue box, never pausing to dig deeper or question the real cause.
The Epidemiology (What Should be Done)
What should happen? Health departments and regulatory agencies (FDA) ought to perform full traceback investigations, interviewing owners, and identifying genuine causes—like hands transferring bird flu from outside cats that hunt wild birds. The real epidemiological process follows the chain: outside cat, wild bird, human hands, not random objects like tissue boxes. Most agencies “pick the low-hanging fruit,” blame the wrong culprits, and lack true epidemiologists to connect the dots.
“FDA Logic”: The Contaminated Pet Food Bag
This rant points out the FDA’s practice of testing open packages for pathogens—like a pet food bag contaminated by dirty hands after petting cats. It’s “case-proven,” yet multinational tissue brands would never allow a recall over something so ridiculous. Small pet food makers, lacking resources, get scapegoated and bullied instead.
Statistical Reality (The Ignored Science)
Ironically, cats fed raw diets are statistically less likely to get sick from flu than conventionally-fed cats. Need epidemiology? Epidemiologists use statistics like attributable risk, odds ratios, and can even run a Chi-square or a Fisher exact – these days they can even do it with AI.
The real statistics of the current bird flu “issue”? (If the math makes your eyes glaze over, don’t worry – you can skip this part. But I guarantee you a true scientist and/or epidemiologist at the FDA knows exactly the meaning of each one of these tests and yet is ignoring the data!)
Analysis:
- Raw-fed cats: 3,500,000 population; 5 reported cases; calculated risk = 0.00014%
- Non-raw-fed cats: 82,500,000 population; 605 reported cases; calculated risk = 0.00073%
Statistical significance:
- Fisher’s Exact Test p-value = 0.0000027
- Chi-Square Test p-value = 0.000075
- Both p-values are well below 0.05, indicating the observed differences are highly unlikely to be due to chance.
Relative Risk and Attributable Risk:
- Relative risk (RR) = 0.19, meaning raw-fed cats had one-fifth the reported risk of bird flu compared to non-raw-fed cats; non-raw-fed cats are five times more likely to be infected.
- Attributable risk = 0.00059%. This means 99.9994% of bird flu risk in cats is due to factors other than diet.
Birds, Not Pet Food: The Real Culprit
Stop blaming raw food, dairy, or meat—it’s called “bird” flu for a reason. The actual source: wild birds, not USDA bird meat in FDA regulated pet food. (Did you catch that? USDA jurisdiction is NOT FDA jurisdiction…) Cats don’t “ordinarily” (it’s a legal term as defined by the FFDCA) catch bird flu from USDA-approved raw food; they get it from hunting “outside birds,” and humans transfer it from not washing their “cat hands” in between petting sessions.
Punchline for the FDA
In summary, this sarcastic scenario shows how FDA investigations often misattribute blame, ignore epidemiological logic, and create public panics out of mundane household items, while the real vector—wild birds and direct contact—is overlooked. This bitter irony underlines the need for smarter, science-driven health investigations and better statistical literacy among decision makers.
Never base recourse on tests of open packages—always prove results with unopened packages and always trace the origin of contamination to the source, even if it does cross jurisdictions.
What About Cat Owners
The sad truth is that as long as the FDA and health agencies are inappropriately focused on raw pet food, cats are going to die. The real cause of bird flu in cats is exposure to outside birds. The statistics prove it. But as long as everyone turns a blind eye to the truth, cats will die and cat owners will be devastated, not knowing they could have prevented the death of their cat.
