The last time we reported on “super bird flu,” the World Health Organization (WHO) was expressing “enormous concern” about the spread of the new disease. Clearly, the global health bureaucracy’s new motto is “never let a good virus go to waste.”
Now the media is beginning to fear-monger over pasteurized milk, in which traces of particles from the virus have been detected.
The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday that traces of the bird flu virus have been found in 1 in 5 samples of pasteurized milk, providing a more detailed picture of how much of the milk supply has been affected.The tested milk came from a nationally representative sample, with more of the positive results coming from milk in areas with infected herds of dairy cows, the FDA said. A spokesperson declined to say how many samples were tested.As of Thursday, bird flu had been detected in 33 herds in eight states: Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Dakota, Ohio and Texas.
After years of ignoring real science, the Biden administration is now racing to convince the public not to worry about the spread of the disease among the nation’s dairy herds based on the science behind pasteurization.
Federal officials and industry executives maintain the discovery of inactive fragments of the virus strain, known as H5N1, in milk sold to consumers is not, in and of itself, worrisome — rather, it’s evidence that the pasteurization process is working to neutralize the virus. But given that bird flu has never before spread to cattle, public health officials warn there are still many unknowns. And they and some farmers and lawmakers are now urging the government to rapidly expand its testing and research — and to make that data available ASAP.“This has been and continues to be a rapidly evolving situation and we are treating it seriously and with urgency, which why this week we issued a Federal Order to further protect the U.S. livestock industry from the threat posed by this virus,” said USDA spokesperson Allan Rodriguez in a statement.What is the Biden administration telling consumers about drinking milk?USDA, FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a statement Tuesday reiterating that “the commercial milk supply is safe.”And the agencies emphasized this week that pasteurization is key to preventing milk from transmitting the bird flu virus to humans. The pasteurization process, they noted, “kills harmful bacteria and viruses by heating milk to a specific temperature for a set period of time to make milk safer. Even if the virus is detected in raw milk, pasteurization is generally expected to eliminate pathogens to a level that does not pose a risk to consumer health.”That said, they did acknowledge that “the process is not expected to remove the presence of viral particles,” and said some of the milk samples the government has tested have contained these inactivated virus fragments.
I would like to reiterate a few key points about bird flu that I have made previously:
Quite frankly, if bird flu should suddenly become readily transmissible between humans with high infection fatality rates, I will immediately suspect genetic manipulation of the virus.
However, the current set of facts will not stop politicians from policy-wonking and power-grabbing especially as dreams of Covid 2.0 dance through their fevered imaginations.
“Containing this before it spreads among humans is critical. Given lessons learned from COVID, this federal response is insufficient,” Republican U.S. Senator Mitt Romney said in a post on X.Some lawmakers, including Romney, have made a bipartisan push to reauthorize legislation known as the Pandemic and All Hazards Preparedness Act that lapsed last year and is aimed at bolstering the nation’s response to pandemics and other public health threats. The recent spread of bird flu and the detection of H5N1 genetic materials in milk have increased some calls for action.The virus in the human case is significantly different from the bird flu virus samples taken from infected cattle that were made public by government officials last weekend, said Dr. Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Arizona.The difference between the genetic sequences of the worker’s virus and the 239 other samples provided indicate that “this was a very longstanding, widespread epidemic,” he told Reuters.
President Donald Trump’s former Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams offers the most appropriate risk assessment currently applicable for the virus.
Rather than consumers, the people most at risk are agricultural workers or anyone with close or prolonged exposure to chickens or cattle. It’s those groups who need strong, targeted guidance right now, Adams said.
Yet the headline for the article in which Adams is quoted reads: “Bird flu could jump to humans any day. A former surgeon general says it feels like 2020 again.”
It’s not bird flu that’s spreading among humans, it’s the panic being pushed by the American press.
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