Epidemiologist explains how worried you should be about Bird Flu in diary cattle.
{{ So far, there is only one confirmed human case. Rick Bright, an expert on the H5N1 virus who served on President Biden’s coronavirus advisory board, told me this is the crucial moment. “There’s a fine line between one person and 10 people with H5N1,” he said. “By the time we’ve detected 10, it’s probably too late” to contain.
That’s when I told him what I’d heard from Sid Miller, the Texas commissioner for agriculture. He said he strongly suspected that the outbreak dated back to at least February. The commissioner speculated that then as many as 40 percent of the herds in the Texas Panhandle might have been infected. }}
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What I’m going to be looking for in the next pandemic is the number of people who voluntarily subject themselves to infection and death by ignoring public health guidelines.
With the increase in ignorance and innumeracy, and battle lines being hardened, no doubt there will be more “voluntary death”.
What makes me shake my head is the media screaming “bird flu found in milk!!!” What is being found is fragments of the virus, because pasteurization killed it, like it’s supposed to.
But then cow meat is not pasteurized. If it is in the milk, it is very likely in the meat.
We don’t eat dairy cattle so it is entirely different stock, but it isn’t as massive of a leap from dairy cattle to beef cattle as it is from bird to cattle.
That would require it to be cooked well done however.
I have in-laws in north/west rural Texas. At least one is a dairy farmer, but they all know someone with cattle of some sort for some reason or another. I find it interesting that, almost without exception, they all eat their steaks well-done. It makes me wonder if they know something about the beef that I don’t.
Actually we eat about 3 million, old, spent out dairy cows per year.
Of course, the problem isn’t the dairy cows or the meat. It’s the chance that the farm workers handling the dairy cows will become infected with bird flu, now that we know that animal to human transmission is possible.
The killing of pathogens in food is a combination of time and temperature. In this particular case, the 165 degrees for poultry only needs to be met for about 1 second. Food is just as safe at lower temperatures for longer times. I wasn’t able to find the tables quickly, so just as an example of the trade off, you might need 160 degrees for 5 seconds or 155 degrees for 15 seconds to be just as safe as 165 for 1 second.
Similar relationships hold for other foods, potentially with different times and/or temperatures.
The same applies to pasteurization of milk. I was able to find that time/temp chart. Here you go:
The really good thing about this bird flu thing is that we have something new to panic about. The news was getting kind of dry with mostly political stuff and some geopolitical stuff.
Is there ANY chance that H5N1 fizzles out like Mpox, Ebola, and MERS? Given how easily it jumps to various species, it sounds like it’s on track to be the new COVID-19. (And I don’t see any reason to expect COVID-19 to end.) The fact that the CDC and other authorities have basically retracted all their talking points about stopping the chains of transmission, it’s clear that the people in charge have walked off the job.
The media was certainly stoking panic last night. At the end of the “report” they did say that pasteurization kills the virus, so the milk supply is safe, but, all through the report, the red banner on the screen said “bird flu in milk”.
