Bird flu traces have been detected in milk is it safe to drink?

Got milk?The Food and Drug Administration announced this week that traces of bird flu have been found in samples of pasteurized milk obtained from grocery shelves, leaving consumers wondering if they should toss their jugs.But the FDA and the US Department of Agriculture claim that the commercial milk supply is safe because of the pasteurization process — heating milk to kill potentially harmful bacteria and viruses — and the diversion or destruction of milk from sick cows.The National Milk Producers Federation noted this week that the “viral fragments detected” in the milk samples “are nothing more than evidence that the virus is dead; they have zero impact on human health.”“There’s little risk of transmission in eggs and milk because you need to have direct contact with the infected animal itself.But more than that, the pasteurization process would kill any viable virus in there,” Dr.

Scott Roberts, an assistant professor in infectious diseases at Yale School of Medicine, said in a statement.He advises consuming pasteurized milk and eggs and avoiding raw products.“People are certainly more aware of the threat of pandemics now than they were five years ago,” Roberts continued.“In contrast to COVID, we know this is circulating and we know this is a growing problem.

So hopefully that gives us enough planning time where we can stop any future potential pandemics 10 years down the road.”Yet, the federal government’s response to the H5N1 bird flu outbreaks in dairy cows has come under fire from scientists who say the USDA has been slow to share data — and what’s been released has been incomplete.“There’s a whole community around the world of people like me and my colleagues, who have a lot of experience with this and often can see things or do analyses that might show something that others have missed,” Dr.Michael Worobey, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, told CNN this week.“You do...