I am seeing a lot of hubbub over a third case of #birdflu in a human in the US.
Just to be clear: Right now, in our "lowest" point of #COVID19 in almost a year, 278 Americans are being infected EVERY MINUTE. Ten percent or more will go on to suffer months or years of Long COVID symptoms. Some will have damaged brains, hearts, and other organs.
We shouldn't lose focus on the immediate and real risks we face of COVID.
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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
Korea reports 1st highly pathogenic bird flu case in more than 3 months "The latest case was reported on a farm raising around 22,000 ducks in Changnyeong, 264 kilometers southeast of Seoul, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs." https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2024/05/113_375258.html#hpai#h5n1#birdflu