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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
"Thirty years after the era-defining 'Got Milk?' campaign—itself a project of the California Milk Processor Board—the U.S. dairy industry’s PR machine appears to be getting a second wind."
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
"Raw milk enthusiasts are doubling down on the claimed benefits and safety of their favorite elixir, and say the government warnings are nothing more than “fearmongering.”" 🙄 #h5n1#hpai#birdflu#milk
👀 "Mark McAfee, founder of Fresno’s Raw Farm and the Raw Milk Institute, said his phone has been ringing off the hook with “customers asking for H5N1 milk because they want immunity from it.”" #h5n1#hpai#birdflu#milk
"I'm changing the world," grinned Rodolphe Landemaine, between mouthfuls of a lovingly laminated, butter-free, pain au chocolat.
Landemaine, a baker, now owns five busy boulangeries in Paris, with more on the way in other French cities, all serving entirely dairy-free products to a mostly local clientele.
Not that he advertises the absence of #butter, or #eggs, or cows' #milk, in his shops. Indeed, the word "vegan" never crosses his lips.
"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.
Do you drink raw milk? You probably don't want to do that right now. @HelenBranswell has some quotes from experts who all sound horrified at the prospect of anyone drinking that milk.
FDA: "Today, the FDA received some initial results from its nationally representative commercial milk sampling study. The agency continues to analyze this information; however, the initial results show about 1 in 5 of the retail samples tested are quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR)-positive for HPAI viral fragments, with a greater proportion of positive results coming from milk in areas with infected herds. " https://www.fda.gov/food/alerts-advisories-safety-information/updates-highly-pathogenic-avian-influenza-hpai
With all the focus on bird flu in milk, this Smithsonian Magazine article on 19th Century milk is stomach churning. 🤢
I grew up with "Milk Does The Body Good!" and "Milk is healthy!" etc. etc. etc. and had no idea prior to U.S. food safety laws and pasteurization, it was downright deathly.
There is a very old very good reason why we pasteurize milk. It seems to be forgotten. Everything is not default safe, we made it safe. But everyone with living memory of the hell before #vaccines and modern medicine and here, #food safety and sanitary #science, is dead. And #ignorance reigns.
They wish to relearn the obvious, with death and suffering for us all.