(Not so) fun fact, there are several US states which prohibit the direct sale of unpasteurized milk, but allow the owner to drink milk from the cow, so they exploit the loophole by having buyers purchase a fractional share of the cow so that they can drink the milk.
Is there a place I can find a straightforward summary of the characteristics of this virus? Or is a lot of data collection being stalled by the CDC thus far?
Edit: Why the fuck are we not doing wastewater data? The fatality rate in humans is 60% but with a huge fucking asterisk that milder cases probably aren’t being counted? What fucking use is that? So the fatality rate is “somewhere between 0 and 60 percent and who the fuck knows?”
I get the joke, but talking more seriously, a pandemic disease outbreak anywhere in the world is a threat to all. I doubt it could be contained within one country.
Other raw milk drinkers, such as Peg Coleman, a medical microbiologist who runs Coleman Scientific Consulting, a Groton, N.Y.-based food safety consulting company, claimed the government’s warnings have no basis in reality.
Oh hey, I looked into this one when one of my friend's aunts went on about raw milk.
So basically, she's done research on the microbiota of raw vs pasteurised milk and concluded the beneficial bacteria of raw milk can outweigh the risks for non-immunocompromised people. People can still get pasteurised if they wish. Another argument is that products with a higher fatality rate are still legal.
However, the flaws in her research don't account for are this:
If huge corporations are allowed to simply not sterilise their milk, they will do so, meaning raw will be the cheaper product and therefore more likely to be purchased by the average person, who may or may not understand the risks involved. A struggling family doing their groceries will choose the cheaper milk and possibly put their elderly/infant family members at risk.
Her research is done with samples of raw milk that are a lot more controlled. The difference in risks between a sample of milk from a healthy cow directly into a sterile vessel into a lab environment is vastly different to milk produced en masse under capitalism, where cows are crowded together in battery farms, fed with the cheapest grains available, and milked with the same equipment that's milked a thousand other cows, and all the milk is pooled together where it's impossible to separate "safer" raw milk and contaminated milk from sick cows are then to be cooled and bottled. Her research simply does not account for the corners that will definitely be cut in an industrial capitalist scale
Dying from alcohol poisoning because you drank perfectly legal 180 proof alcohol is different to dying from H5N1 milk because alcohol poisoning isn't contagious.
I'm starting to actually buy into the theory that some nefarious actor is actually doing the whole "let's tell them not to stick their heads in bags and they'll do it reflexsively"
Is it really a coincidence we constantly arrive at the dumbest possible position this consistently?
H5N1 has a roughly 50% mortality rate in known cases for humans. It's probably an overestimate but we shouldn't assume it's way off.
So half that would get it from milk die and half would be "immune" for a while lol. Though maybe not even immune to whatever variant might become effective at human-human transmission.
They're picturing milk straight from a happy, grazing cow earlier that morning, that's been put in a bottle and refrigerated till they purchase it, diseases are freak accidents. Obviously the wise old farmer wearing overalls with a piece of straw hanging from his mouth wouldn't sell you the milk if the cow seemed sick, right?
The reality would be thousands of cows in cages being milked with the same equipment as every other cow, sick or otherwise, and all the milk gets pooled together and bottled and possibly spends 2-3 days in transit.
I thought raw milk simply has an extremely low shelf life and that that was the main purpose of pasteurization. Why did people drink milk before the discovery of pasteurization if it is so dangerous?
As someone who grew up around a small farm, raw milk is not inherently dangerous. We drank plenty of it and it was always fine. However, it’s safe with caveats, if the milk has been collected in a hygienic manner from a well managed farm with good controls (to avoid contamination with salmonella, e-choli etc) and if it’s been collected from healthy cows. Cows can pass diseases through their milk the same way human mothers can through their breast milk. Probably the biggest ones to be aware of (in the uk at least) are Tuberculosis and Brucellosis but there are plenty of others.
Those are some pretty big caveats. And if they’re not met then there is a reasonable chance raw milk can make you pretty sick (or dead). You may be happy to trust someone else to have the checks and vigilance to be confident in raw milk, but I’m not sure I would, especially from a faceless large dairy corporation. With large commercial herds, there is no way the farmer/s know each cow and its condition when they have so many head to look after. And financial pressure doesn’t push towards erring on the side of caution…
I got a tiktok the other day where a microbiologist stitched a raw milker saying that it never goes bad, just turns into buttermilk you can use in all your pancakes and other baking. She was just baking with spoiled milk.
In reality you're 650x more likely to get sick than pasteurized milk, 45x more likely to be hospitalized.
Okay, but at least they're talking in terms that would make sense with a sophmoric knowledge of immunology, not flat denial.
I'm trying to pull out the positives here.
Eh, they've always used whatever was around and convenient to reinforce or spread their delusions. There's plenty to cherry-pick out of science to backup basically whatever you want, so long as you ignore the rest of science that doesn't fit your narrative or is even just less convenient. Their (mis)use of scientific terms and phrasing isn't new, and if anything needs to be criticized more than the straight-up batshit antiscience imo.