Avian flu is infecting cows across the US via cow-to-cow transmission. Here's what you need to know about the bird flu spread.

A strain of bird flu known as H5N1 or highly pathogenic avian influenza has made a worrying leap to cattle herds across the US over the past month. This development has sparked “enormous concern” among health experts, including the World Health Organization’s (WHO) chief scientist, who warned of the virus’ “extremely high” mortality rate in humans.

  • tal@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
    561·
    6 months ago

    “Almost all dairy nowadays is pasteurised and that will kill the virus,” Rossman explains. “So for the vast majority of people drinking milk, there’s absolutely no reason to be concerned.”

    “The only potential concern at all would be people that are drinking unpasteurised milk. But of course, if you’re drinking unpasteurized milk, you also have a risk of a lot of other infections that could occur.”

    The states affected so far are Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and South Dakota.

    In the US, the FDA has banned sale of unpasteurized milk, but that only affects stuff that crosses state lines; they don’t have authority to ban within a state. Some states allow sale of unpasteurized milk – stuff gets produced and sold in the state.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_raw_milk_debate

    Idaho and New Mexico, both affected states, permit sale of unpasteurized milk directly in stores.

    And this doesn’t just affect some person who is absolutely determined to disregard health advisories and drink raw milk in those states. If the virus jumps to humans there and begins human-to-human transmission off one of them, the whole world can potentially be impacted.

    I mean, with COVID-19, we spent a lot of time early-on dinging China for having wet markets that helped create risk for disease jumping animal-human barriers. This is also not good.

    • kescusay@lemmy.world
      33·
      6 months ago

      And you know the same mouth-breathers who rejected all factually accurate information about COVID-19 and vaccines will just refer to this as the next “plandemic” and pretend viruses aren’t real. Some will go out of their way to visit farms and drink milk straight from the cow’s udder just to “prove” there’s nothing to worry about.

    • ccunning@lemmy.world
      18·
      6 months ago

      I don’t know if it’s widespread or not, but at least in Virginia they wouldn’t stop you from drinking raw milk from “your own cow” so you could buy “shares” of a cow allowing you to have some percentage of the cows raw milk output.

      • tal@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
        4·
        6 months ago

        Yeah, they talk about it in the WP article I linked to – that’s a “herdshare”. That’s also an issue, but at least the barrier is somewhat higher than just cruising down to the grocery store. You gotta be more of a True Believer and go out of your way to take part in one of those.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herdshare