Bird flu infects another Sioux County dairy farm • Iowa Capital Dispatch
Bird flu infects another Sioux County dairy farm • Iowa Capital Dispatch
The recent detection of the virus in a herd of 1,700 dairy cattle is the third in the state in the past week.
It's really not that bad as long as you don't drink unpasteurized milk. Chicken farms are where the problem will come from. Pasteurization still works. People need to stop listening to YouTube influencers who promote Raw milk.
And if because of that human-to-human transmission starts occurring, it'll very much be an issue for everyone else too unfortunately :/
On another side note: Raw milk is very much problematic, but there is some evidence to suggest that flash pasteurization may not be fully effective at neutralizing. We don't have enough evidence to fully say with 100% certaintaty that all pasteurization methods work. They might, but there some of them might not
It should be noted this article is from 3 weeks ago, and this whole thing started well before that, so we would probably have already been seeing infections in people for some time if current pasteurization techniques were not effective.
Yeah I looked up the preventative steps across a few different places and they all pretty much say the same. "Don't drink raw milk. This is why people stopped drinking raw milk and why pasteurization was such a hip thing. Stop being stupid".
I swear stupid people are going to kill us all.
You won't even get a pandemic stimulus check this time. Get back to work.
Seems like from all the cows that have been infected, none have fallen seriously ill and all have fully recovered. Among the hundreds (thousands?) of cows that have been infected, are we at 3 total people who have caught it from them? And all had a minor illness and made a full recovery.
Keep in mind that testing volumes are rather low. The number of cases is like higher than what we're seeing reported. Both for cows, humans, and other species. In general, other species than cows have not fared as well:
One month ago:
More than half of cats around the first Texas dairy farm to test positive for bird flu this spring died after drinking raw milk from the infected cows, scientists reported this week
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cats-died-after-drinking-milk-bird-flu-infected-cows/
In general, at least with previous variants of H5N1, it's usually seen an ~50% mortality rate in humans. Its possible the current spreading variant could be different, but we should not undermine its potential to be very deadly.
But in the hundreds of cases where humans have been infected through contact with animals over the past 20 years, “the mortality rate is extraordinarily high”, Farrar said, because humans have no natural immunity to the virus.
From 2003 to 2024, 889 cases and 463 deaths caused by H5N1 have been reported worldwide from 23 countries, according to the WHO, putting the case fatality rate at 52%.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/18/risk-bird-flu-spreading-humans-enormous-concern-who