Health officials say there's very little risk to humans from the bird flu outbreak among dairy cattle, but there's still much they don't know. Here are four questions scientists are trying to answer.
Genetic material is not the same as infectious virus and pasteurization is expected to inactivate the virus in milk, but the findings speak to the broader uncertainty about the extent of the spread.
Webby discovered this himself when he went to the store to grab a carton of milk, which he intended to use as a negative control in his work on H5N1.Currently the virus has only been detected in a tiny fraction of dairy herds in the U.S., but it’s hard to know the significance of that finding when you don’t also have details on the overall number of cattle tested, says Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Centers for Health Security.
The PCR testing that has found evidence of viral fragments in the milk on grocery store shelves doesn’t actually tell you whether or not it’s “live” virus, meaning whether it’s capable of replicating.Lee-Ann Jaykus“There’s evidence that that milk at one point in time may have had virus associated with it, but there is no evidence that that virus would be infectious, at least with the information we currently have,” she says.
Research on pasteurization in eggs, which happens at a lower temperature than milk, shows that the process inactivates the bird flu virus. Jaykus says even if the milk did happen to have a small amount of infectious virus, “there just isn’t evidence that that is a transmission route for flu.”“It’s a small inconvenience for me not to drink milk until we have more data,” he says, “It doesn’t mean that I think everyone should stop drinking milk. It’s a personal risk assessment.”
Virus could be spread on “milking equipment,” by “individuals moving from facility to facility,” and via rodents that come in contact with milk and then move around, he said. Moncla says it’s hard to say exactly how long the virus has been spreading through dairy cattle, although some scientists have suggested it may have beenThe USDA has also noted another concerning development — that there have been some instances of the virus moving from domesticated poultry to cattle.
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