• zephorah@lemm.ee
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    1 day ago

    Raw milk is a disease vector for H5N1 right now, and as been for most of the year.

    https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2405371. (Location for the sick worker in the article: Texas)

    Why it doesn’t matter so much for those of us not working directly with cows is pasteurization. In my household, we’ve since switched to ultra pasteurized in the cases we’ve not been doing that already, just to play safest.

    The more humans that catch H5N1, the more likely it is to take and make a vector out of humans.

    To be fair, it is often good to avoid processing your food. However this does not include the cleaning aspect of that food. Would you suddenly stop washing your fruits and vegetables? Flashing a little heat on the milk for safety is fine. It doesn’t create the milk equivalent of beef jerky or a ritz cracker. If you’ve ever spent any time in a milking barn, among cows, or seen the milking process you might not even drink milk after. You’ll want bacteria and virus death in your milk.

    But wait, Zeph, surely this process is only effective for bacteria, we’ve always been taught that the same means of death for bacteria don’t typically work on viruses. (Antibiotics). Pasteurization is it’s own thing.

    https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7169671/