Should We Worry About Bird Flu in Our Milk? The Answer is No, But You Should Worry About Drinking Raw Milk

While headlines such as “Bird Flu Found in Grocery Store Milk” are meant to shock, it appears extraordinarily unlikely that a consumer of pasteurized milk would contract the virus at the present time and there is no cause for alarm, except out of an abundance of caution.
However, there is one change in milk consumption some people might want to make.
Raw milk.
Given that dangerous pathogens including E.coli and Salmonella can be transmitted in raw milk, drinking unpasteurized milk has always been a bad idea. However, the risk associated with raw milk is at an entirely new and greater level of risk than ever before.
This is because the H5N1 virus crossed over to cows some time ago and the virus has been circulating in dairy cows for months now. While the concentrations of the virus in pasteurized milk are negligible, that is not at all the case with raw milk. Were a raw-milk fan to imbibe milk from an infected cow, things won’t turn out rosy, for sure, even if the milk cow is named Rosie.
Humans have been drinking the milk of other mammals following the domestication of animals during the Neolithic Revolution, which, if you don’t have a Ph.D. in history, was about 11,700 years ago. It was only 160 years ago in 1864 that French scientist Louis Pasteur discovered the process we now call pasteurization. M Pasteur discovered that heating beer and wine was enough to kill most of the bacteria that could cause the product to spoil, and this was achieved by eliminating pathogenic microbes and lowering microbial numbers to prolong the quality of the beverage.
In case I haven’t scared any raw milk consumers enough, the following is a list of pathogenic bacteria that raw milk may contain and I needn’t identify the consequences of any of these infections: tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid, Listeria, and streptococcal.
The CDC puts it in much clearer terms: “Raw milk – and products made from it –can make you and your loved ones sick.”
In the United States, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that only one human case of the virus has been reported and that individual had been working closely with cattle known to have the H5N1 virus. His symptoms were mild and primarily limited to conjunctivitis. Two years earlier, another American contracted the virus, but this person was presumed to have worked directly with poultry as no cattle-borne infections had been reported at the time.
Because an infection can occur when droplets or small aerosol particles of the active virus in the air are breathed in, “or possibly when a person touches something contaminated by [the virus] and then touches their mouth, eyes or nose,” a person would have to be in direct contact with cattle, poultry, or other birds with H5N1.
As a result, the people who have to be the most cautious are those who work with infected cattle.
It’s important to remember that viruses can become more infectious, just as we’ve learnt with SARS-CoV-2 and its host of variants.
Any questions?
(Photo: Accura Media Group)