«"I had lots of people say, 'Who cares about the mammary glands? Why do you care about what happens if an influenza virus infects a breast?'" recalled the virologist [Dr. Alyson Kelvin].
"Well, I have a long list of reasons. But it was really hard to get more funding to understand the answers to those questions."»
Wow. A microbiology lab at Texas A&M accepted purchased raw milk samples from NPR for H5N1 testing, then contacted the milk producers to seek permission. When the producers said, "don't test our milk," the lab not only declined to carry out the tests but also refused to send the samples on to another lab.
@kdnyhan Right now there is a very clear data avoidance and data delay effort going on with the US government response to this and several times they've made releases of information apparently as a response to highly qualified university labs releasing experimental data. They basically sit on stuff as long as they can. That occurred Friday with a bunch of stuff apparently in response to U of W's results and earlier when Andrew Bowman released his ten state milk sampling road trip results.
“raw milk containing #H5N1 can remain infectious for weeks when stored at refrigerator temperatures”
Common sense substantiated by research, that.
Researchers also gave mice raw milk containing H5N1. The virus almost immediately began affecting them.
Euthanized on day four, and still:
“the mice had high levels of H5N1 bird flu virus in their respiratory tracts, as well their hearts, kidneys, spleens, livers, mammary glands, and brains.”
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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
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison squirted raw H5N1-containing milk from infected cows into the throats of anesthetized laboratory mice, finding that the virus caused systemic infections after the mice were observed swallowing the dose. The illnesses began quickly, with symptoms of lethargy and ruffled fur starting on day 1. On day 4, the animals were euthanized to prevent extended suffering.
Jak to jest z tą "ptasia" grypą #H5N1, ktoś podpowie? Czy ona się na inne zwierzęta przenosi tylko drogą pokarmową? Akurat się przymierzam do produkcji jogurtu, i nie wiem, czy wystarczy wyselekcjonowany dostawca, czy od razu zrezygnować z krowiego?
"...interstate movement for a lactating dairy cow from a sale barn directly to a slaughter facility requires only a Certificate of Veterinary Inspection (CVI) stating that the animal is clinically healthy; no testing is necessary."
I'll repeat that in case you missed it.
NO TESTING IS NECESSARY for dairy cows being sent to slaughter.
I suspect "clinically healthy" is a bit misleading in a similar way that "mild #Covid" is
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
I was helping a farmer friend today get her car up to her mechanic's place, which is about 10 miles out of town.
On the drive back, she took a call from someone who was looking for raw cow's milk.
She's only on Facebook as far as social media goes, so she hasn't seen any of the news stories about people seeking out raw milk in order to try to infect themselves with #H5N1 to "gain immunity" from it.
She was gobsmacked!
I was trying SO hard not to laugh while she took the call.
I told her that I've seen a number of news stories about people doing exactly this. I said what scares me the most is, the mortality rate is over 50%. One in two people! Why would anyone think this is an acceptable risk?
She appreciated the information I gave her and said that she would adjust her response when she received more calls.
Apparently she's received a lot of calls recently.
She's not even a dairy farmer!
I know 100+ years ago when we didn't have #vaccinations, #antibiotics, or #antivirals, exposing yourself to pathogens was one way to possibly gain immunity from whatever was going around.
But thousands upon thousands of people were sickened and died from things that we can now prevent or treat with drugs, #sanitation, #hygiene, #masks, and vaccines. It wasn't all bread and roses in pre-modern America. Our average life expectancy was almost half what if is today.
"Natural" is not inherently superior. Immunity debt is fucking bullshit. Exposing yourself willingly to a deadly pathogen does not increase your chances of living longer or being healthier afterwards. If someone did this to their kids? It would be flat out child abuse.
Yet, I always forget that most of the population doesn't read a book after they leave school, doesn't believe in science, and thinks if something is on the internet, it must be true.
Even and especially, people in my profession and allied professions believe the wackiest ideas about how the the human body works that are simply not true.
I'm pretty tired of the stupidity of other humans at this point. Go ahead. Drink the raw milk. Take yourself out of the gene pool. I know I can't do anything about it once you've made up your mind to do something so risky and stupid. SMH
"An early indication that something had gone awry on farms in northwestern Texas came from devices hitched to collars on dairy cows. Turley describes them as “an advanced fitness tracker.” They collect a stream of data, such as a cow’s temperature, its milk quality, and the progress of its digestion — or, rather, rumination — within its four-chambered stomach."
In den USA ist ein weiterer Mensch nach Kontakt mit Kühen positiv auf das Vogelgrippevirus H5N1 getestet worden. Experten äußern sich besorgt, sehen aber derzeit kein akutes Ansteckungsrisiko. Von Lilly Zerbst und David Beck.
We've currently got 2 confirmed dairy worker H5N1/HPAI infections in 2 months from 52 confirmed infected dairy herds. There were 27,932 dairy herds in the US as of 2002. Back of the napkin math tells me that if all those herds became infected, one would expect dairy workers to become infected at a rate of around 537 workers a month, but we're of course taking stringent measures to ensure more dairy herds don't get infected right? Right? Right?
Just to clarify a technicality from some of today’s headlines:
There was actually a <third> person diagnosed with highly pathogenic avian influenza #H5N1 today according to the CDC dashboard. It was the <second> among dairy workers (both of whom had conjunctivitis, whereas the case of an infected poultry worker presented with fatigue).