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First, they confirmed the raw milk was chock-full of H5N1 virus. Then, they stored some of the raw milk at refrigerator temperature to see if levels of the virus in milk would drop off over time. Over 5 weeks, viral levels in raw milk dropped a bit, but not much.
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This should also imply that the virus gets into fermented raw milk products. And if you look for "raw milk ice cream", you'll see that there are sellers and there is a market. I find the issue of ice cream more interesting because it can be stored for a long time, which means outbreaks later.
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Heating the milk to 72 degrees Celsius, or 181 degrees Fahrenheit, for 15 or 20 seconds — conditions that approximated flash pasteurization — greatly reduced levels of the virus in the milk, but it didn’t inactivate it completely.
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This is flash pasteurization, meaning that the heat is applied for a shorter duration, but at a higher temperature. And this is the most common method; I've seen it in action and it's usually some nice machine that efficiently does this, which means that it's cheaper than the "vat pasteurization". Speaking of vat, I'm not sure how many people still do this since the rise of "cartons", but I grew up with raw milk plastic bags and boiling the milk; unfortunately, I wasn't raised vegan. Anyway, I distinctly remember the challenges of boiling cow milk, so I wonder how many of the raw milk buyers are doing their own pasteurization (boiling = vat pasteurization at high temperature).
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“But, we emphasize that the conditions used in our laboratory study are not identical to the large-scale industrial treatment of raw milk,” senior study author Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a virologist who specializes in the study of flu and Ebola, said in an email.
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It's true that further processing, which is done in these milk factories, can change the results. They mention the importance of homogenization, but there's also dilution as cow milk is pooled from many sources, so if just a small % of that is infectious, then the dilution will reduce the viral load per unit of fluid, making pasteurization more likely to succeed. I'm not sure about the homogenization and emulsification help in this sense:
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a process that emulsifies the fat globules in milk so the cream won’t separate.
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I'm not sure about this one. I've seen this in research on tuberculosis bacteria in milk, but not for viruses. Just like with SARS-CoV-2, there is a question of the non-linear effects of viral load (more viral particles, exponentially worse outcomes). They can't really answer. And, who knows, maybe homogenization will make it easier to cow milk to be accidentally aerosolized and/or inhaled.
I wouldn't CNN to go for the pessimistic reporting...
So, yeah. The raw cow milk drinkers are working stochastically to bring about a new pandemic. And probably new waves of as a bonus tuberculosis. Did you know about drug resistant tuberculosis? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidrug-resistant_tuberculosis
The institute's founder, Mark McAfee, told the Los Angeles Times this weekend that his customers are, in fact, specifically requesting raw milk from #H5N1-infected #cows. According to McAfee, his customers believe, without evidence, that directly drinking high levels of the #avianinfluenza#virus will give them immunity to the deadly pathogen
"On April 16, APHIS microbiologists identified a shift in an H5N1 sample from a cow in Kansas that could indicate that the virus has an adaptation to mammals."
For the few who don't know mammals includes us humans.
Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) is the group in the USDA that inspects and monitors US our food supply.
🧵 1/ #SharonAstyk wrote:
"A bit of good news today, even as "H5N1 is found in Ohio cows, & cats exposed have died - the strain transmitted to an agricultural worker seems only to have one of the mutations required for easy human to human spread. The BAD news is that this mutation was found ONLY in the human case, which means that it may have occurred IN the human case, which is very bad.
Let's put that in context - I doubt that even all the agricultural workers in contact with infected herds have been tested. Moreover, given the heavy reliance on undocumented workers in most agricultural businesses, I'd be shocked if someone showing symptoms of viral illness weren't either afraid to come in for testing or fired by the bosses who don't want the hassle. But that one sequence is cool.🤨
But let's assume that we get lucky, & it is a few years before the virus starts transmitting human to human. What I want to talk about today is the food supply in a larger context."
2/ ...: "Note, as I keep reminding people, that we have been in a much worse food crisis since 2021 than the front page food crisis in every paper in 2008.
Besides the horrors of #Gaza, 48 million people in #WestAfrica are suffering from extreme hunger, including tens of thousands in Mali, Burkina Fasa & Niger who have reached starvation levels. A combination of #drought, #war & politics have led to horrifying outcomes.
At the same time, harvests globally have been mostly stable, but there are reasons to be concerned about change. The prediction is that within 15 years we will have a 30% decline in global food production - & that only accounts for climate change & its effects, not the political withholding of food in man made famines like in Gaza or Syria, nor the depredations of #AvianInfluenza or other diseases on the food chain. Moreover, #food has suffered heavily from inflation, which is starving the world's poorest people, but leaving even folks in richer nations struggling to get by."...
Not only an important avian health issue, but a public health issue. Also has implications for understanding other viruses. And at the intersection of climate and biodiversity crises, and a blaring siren regarding the poultry industry (on a related matter, read Robert Wallace's "Big Farms Make Big Flu," about swine flu).
How the current bird flu strain evolved to be so deadly
Hey, world. Just so you know, #H5N1 has mutated on Finnish fur farms to spread between mammals. #Finland will not stop the practice of farming mink, fox in steel cages etc despite this. This should not be a surprise, since we value neither animal nor human life. Feel free to apply pressure. #respiratory#pandemic#policy#policyfailure
Isabella Eckerle, Prof at Geneva Centre for Emerging Viral Diseases:
"FFS! Shut down these farms and stop the farming of these animals! This is playing with fire and really provoking adaptation of the virus to mammals. We are not ready for another pandemic, and the situation does not seem to be under control at all."
Nyt kun Iltalehti uutisoi tästä niin saa helpommin tämän tänne Mastodoniin näkyville (ei tarvitse twitter-linkkejä, jotka on välillä vähän vaikeita saada näkyviin). Hyvät Suomi-päivät menossa. Eilen Politico uutisoi näyttävästi uudesta rasistikohusta (kts viesti alla), ja tänään turkistarhat, luontosuhde, lintuinfluenssa...
(for english, see next toot) #Suomi#lintuinfluenssa#politiikka
Nice Finland-days are going on... Yesterday, Politico reported on a new racist scandal in government , and today fur farms, the relationship with nature, bird flu...
(for english version I need to use twitter-links, sorry) #politics#AvianInfluenza#Finland
Oh, how confidence inspiring it is to hear the same people who have minimized #COVID19 risk since January 2020 are now in television minimizing #HPAI#avianinfluenza risk. Interpretation: the virus replicates in mammals and spreads via respiratory pathway, and these people wouldn't admit it even if the human pandemic had already started.