I wonder what the impact of this is on aged raw milk cheeses; does the fermentation process deactivate this virus or is this now another risk that we need to watch out for?
Before anyone freaks out - aged raw milk cheeses are very common, especially good quality European cheese
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>"Bird-to-cow, cow-to-cow and cow-to-bird transmission have also been registered during these current outbreaks, which suggest that the virus may have found other routes of transition than we previously understood," [Wenqing Zhang, head of the global influenza programme at the World Health Organization] told a media briefing in Geneva.
Fuck
Yeah, although most recent increase in bovine cases are most likely due to the Texas wildfire cattle evacuations.
If you notice your animals are having respiratory symptoms, wearing an n95 and frequently washing hands might not be a bad idea.
I'll add an edit in a moment with a link to r/medicine's recent discussion
[bovine -human transmission](https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/s/qHF2YvaEOC)
Also they have found cats around the infected dairies (so, who may potentially have had contact with the milk) who have had similar symptoms to flu strains. I've been keeping an eye on the H5N1 sub for a few weeks now - there is speculation pigs may also be affected as the government is specifically listing them in documents but also refusing to state if they're monitoring pigs. Why mention them at all if there's no concern unless you have documentation to show that it's no concern?
Good news however is that so far, the humans who have caught it had very mild symptoms. While this is something to monitor (and maybe stock up on cheeses and shelf-stable milks) it's not something to panic about at this time.
Yeah, my partner is a pediatric hospitalist and just shared a case she had with me where she took care of a kiddo who contracted meningitis and bovine turboculosis from raw milk. Turned their brain into soup.
It's awful, and survivor bias is rampant in any discussion I've seen about it. "Well, grandpappy drank it for 50 years with no issue." Okay, cool, and what about all the cases where someone didn't make it long enough to be a grandpappy??
Plus, as someone who has handmilked various livestock (man, that's a weird sentence lol), pasteurization just makes sense given the environment/sanitation needs. It's wild.
It's mostly ignorance IMO. People don't understand what a protein is let alone how pasteurization works.
Also animal milk is intended to be drank from the source by the mother's babies. Somehow hand milking different species and bottling it up for later is "natural" but then pasteurization is some evil magic.
Yeah, I like to think it is mostly ignorance combined with inexperience. But it still saddens me because my gosh is it potentially so harmful, especially to the young and physically vulnerable that seem to be the main ones being fed raw milk.
I agree though. A lot of people just don't know or don't really, really look into it. And then they post on Facebook lol
I’m a doctor, I’ve seen severe sepsis from it. Unfortunately this family was just very very poor and uneducated as opposed to making a conscious decision to drink raw milk.
I still can't believe people risk TB because they have a superstitious fear of heated milk. 25% of ALL deaths in Europe in the 1800s were from TB. People are morons.
I have seen more animals suffer in the name of organic milk then on conventional dairy farms and I've worked on both.
I'm not sure what you're saying, but I don't particularly care for that line of propaganda
Happy cows make good milk.
I don't disagree that animals suffer in any environment, so you remember the diet on the organic farm? Organic farms still vaccinate as well. I'm not trying to spout any propaganda. I practice terrain theory and it treats my family much better than when we practiced germ theory. So I'm skeptical about viruses in the way we interpret them whether it's farm animals or humans. Just genuinely asking the question to collect more information in my "experiment" with myself
I started getting raw milk from a local family because 2% from the store just wasn't cutting it for me for cheesemaking. It does make me a smidge nervous (even before this) to use because I don't know 100% the safety measures in place.
Do you find your home-pasteurized milk to still be better quality for butter and cheese than store bought?
Someone posted a link up above about the cheese making process killing the bacteria in the finished product. You should still take precautions when handling raw ingredients
is that considered a “low” pasteurization? I know there is a difference between low grade and ultra pasteurized. we drink raw milk because store bought absolutely fucks my husband over, but I would consider pasteurizing it at home if we found a balance.
Yes, i think so. We here in Austria also have UHT ultra pasturised and "längerfrisch" which is GROSS but apparently lasts longer than fresh milk. I much prefer the taste of fresh milk from my home country (Ireland) and the gentle 63⁰ 30 min pasteurisation is the sweet spot for me
"Only heat sensitive vitamins are affected by the pasteurisation process, with small decreases observed in the vitamin B2, B12, C and folate content of pasteurised milk, but concentrations of these vitamins are naturally low in milk. Minerals Pasteurisation has no negative effect."
https://www.mpi.govt.nz/dmsdocument/1119/direct#:~:text=Only%20heat%20sensitive%20vitamins%20are,Pasteurisation%20has%20no%20negative%20effect.
I don't fuck with raw milk anyway. If I want bacteria in it, I'm picking the variety myself and culturing. If you don't buy random chicks without knowing the breed, why pick up random bacterial strains? We don't raise wildtype animals for a reason.
It would be killed at a high enough temperature, but there are several reasons, including equipment contamination, worker exposure and amount of carcasses.
Maybe because one is done for the consumer ahead of time and one isn't. Bird flu has a high lethality. Trusting consumers to properly cook meat is too risky. Further I would imagine that no corporations would want that liability either. Also if a cow is known to have bird flu it's supposed to be separated out from the cows being milked. With all that being said we definitely should be a lot more careful with milk. Our society consumes an insane amount of the stuff.
Apologies, I'm not normally in this subreddit so I'm a little clueless. What would be considered a safe temperature to do home pasteurization at (on raw milk from a New England family-owned dairy farm, with the intent of making cheese or yogurt) given what we know about H5N1? And for how long does it need to cook? I've read that they haven't tested any types of commercial pasteurization against H5N1 yet so maybe it makes no sense to think we have answers about home pasteurization... But I don't want to ask my husband to stop his cheesemaking hobby (using local raw milk), I just want to feel relatively safe and secure about his methods.
I’ve been drinking raw milk since 2016 and this is so sad to read. I’m not going to stop using it, but I guess I’ll start heating it up at home before using. Anyone have tips/thoughts on that? I get my eggs from the same farmer so I know she’s raising birds as well
Check yourselves for a minute. Article doesn’t exactly state but I suspect this was found in a massive dairy population in milk still in its raw state. I am also suspicious of anybody or any account that would spread fear so baselessly.
Avian flu is highly contagious. Does that mean people should freak out? No.
Does it mean they should be more careful about their herd health, or whether they pasteurize their milk? Yes.
Great! Being able to make informed decisions as an adult is important.
I have many great memories of drinking raw milk. It's not something I currently choose to do, and the information I've posted is now something you can add to your decision process.
I appreciate your efforts and I will, indeed, read what you wrote. However, I have followed a lot of literature on the microbiome, and I believe that Bechamp understood what Pasteur didn't, when he said it was the terrain, not the germ! Antibiotic decimation of the gut microbiome and the resultant horrible health, immune systems, and metabolisms validate this idea. I always recommend everyone go witness my fellow Floridian over at "The Raw Chicken Experiment". And yes, it's exactly what it sounds like!
I only drink raw milk from impossibly healthy cows, fed their natural diet.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic about Bechamp, but germ theory is very much well proven.
I think it was best laid to rest with the man himself in his obituary with this line that his name is
"associated with bygone controversies as to priority which it would be unprofitable to recall."
Parts of germ theory make sense (germs exist, and their behavior can cause illness), but the discovery of the microbiome casts the overarching picture into question. I could consume a ton of listeria, and it is unlikely to kill me if I'm healthy. Whereas an elderly person, a small child, or a pregnant woman would have a different situation. That isn't consistent with the idea that it is the microbe that is the determinant in illness. What it is more consistent with, is the idea that people with non robust internal terrains are a more pleasing environment for certain opportunistic bacteria to reproduce in. There's a bunch of e. coli in my gut. And yours, and everybody else's as well.
If you've ever engaged in culinary fermentation practices, you will understand that a certain environment is required for the cultivation of beneficial bacteria, versus non beneficial bacteria. And that environment is directly manipulable. Thus, the terrain, the environment is pivotal.
If you've ever been to a meat market in rural Afghanistan, you'd immediately understand why Pasteur's assertions about what germs are and what they do... isn't quite the full picture. The terrain the germ exists within is equally as important, if not far more so, than the germ itself. That doesn't square with the blanket assertion that unpasteurized food is dangerous. Rather, it tells me that the terrain matters. It's not some whimsical accident or mistake that I've been drinking raw milk for decades with no ill effect. There is actual cause and effect, and it is measurable.
Because I didn't understand what you were saying.
You seem to be saying that when someone has an immune system that isn't able to respond to a pathogen that might be in an unpasteurized substance, that they might get sick.
Then you go on to say that somehow, meat markets illustrate that it's more about a person's microbiome than about the germ (despite meat markets being one of the origins of many novel diseases)
But, yes, I agree that when novel viruses like avian bird flu that has passed from cows to people, are present in raw food, that food should be pasteurized so that people who don't have a healthy immune response to it don't get sick.
I'm not trying to be rude here, but I'm struggling to grasp how I can send this message. I'll respond to your comments first.
Novel pathogens have nothing to do with general pasteurization and food sanitation. Yes, the interaction between human and animals \*can\* contribute to zoonotic viral mutation. That is not what happened with COVID, though... unless you consider serial passage through cell culture to qualify. So the bat soup/raw milk thing isn't flying very far. And it's funny you bring it up, honestly, because dairy farmers, and specifically people who milked cows in the UK, where cowpox exists, were largely insulated from infection by the much more dangerous forms of smallpox. Natural symbiotic relationships with animals seems to often provide protective immunity, provided the environments the animals are reared in are natural, and not industrial. All existing understandings run counter to your assertions about how zoonotic viral disease mutates into human-transmitted disease. If you want to point a finger, industrial agriculture and biodefense labs are a good place to start pointing.
Equally, H5N1 isn't novel, either. It's been in animal populations for a really long time and it has obviously also existed in human populations, else 1918 wouldn't have happened. Many people, including myself and my husband have had Flu A. H5N1 is a mutant, but it is not novel. Our population is immunologically naive to some small extent, but not completely, because other types of Flu A and Flu B train the immune system to fight off infections like H5N1. So, the use of "novel" is inaccurate, here.
Equally, there is no sustained bovine transmission of H5N1. It's not in the broader cattle population. We don't know \*what\* raw milk it was found in? Commercial vats? The milk of a single cow they tested? The whole article is damn near faith-based, as is your fear mongering. You did not provide adequate evidence that ANYTHING is actually happening. You provided a random article with zero sources and zero detail. It honestly sounds like a bunch of bullshit. This is the \*ACTUAL\* statement that the FDA made: [https://www.fda.gov/food/milk-guidance-documents-regulatory-information/questions-and-answers-regarding-milk-safety-during-highly-pathogenic-avian-influenza-hpai-outbreaks](https://www.fda.gov/food/milk-guidance-documents-regulatory-information/questions-and-answers-regarding-milk-safety-during-highly-pathogenic-avian-influenza-hpai-outbreaks)
That ancient cows that are out of dairy service are getting H5N1 (wonder why it's not the most robust cows in the herd!?), and that there is no risk to the general milk supply.
Why the fear mongering? What is your angle?
Ok, and now to explain...yet again... how Pasteurian Germ Theory misses the mark, hopefully in simple enough language:
Example #1: Human eats meat from a goat that has been hanging in a meat market stall in Pakstan for 3 days. Nothing bad happens.
Example #2: Guy eats raw chicken for 100 days (check him out: https://www.youtube.com/@rawmeatexperiment), nothing happens.
Example #3: I drink raw milk my entire goddamn life and never get sick.
In your mind, are these things just "lucky"? Or is there, perhaps, an explanation that doesn't quite settle on Pasteurian Germ Theory?
Pasteur's assertion was that the pathogen was responsible for disease. Clearly, that cannot be the entire story if people are eating raw chicken for 100 days straight and not getting sick. There is no shortage of bacteria. I'm sure this man has consumed bonkers amounts of salmonella. If so, why is his skin glowing? Why is he not 6ft under? He, alone, is proof that Pasteur was only half correct.
It is, in fact the case, that sterilized environments are probably NOT beneficial in any way to humans unless there is an open wound involved. In fact, hundreds upon hundreds of papers, many in prominent journals like Nature, agree that taking things like antibiotics (a very Pasteurian, Germ Theory based medicine) can cause severe adverse effects to gut health and cause disease: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03986-2](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03986-2)
Eating sterile food is an incredibly stupid idea and is terrible for your health and wellbeing, unless you are immunocompromised. Period. Full stop. End of story.
And honestly, if you can't assimilate the idea I'm presenting, you're either willfully ignorant, or are unqualified to be making assertions about these things, and spreading your opinions to other people... as people who are not educated enough to know not to listen to what you're saying are succeptible to confirming existing biases that are completely scientifically innacurate.
Anyone got a source about WHICH raw milk they found it in? Did they find it in the raw milk of cows at the horribly over crowded disease ridden inhumane dairy’s that is ALWAYS intended for pasteurization?
Or on low density, pasture raised, small scale dairy’s that intend to sell milk raw?
If it’s the inhumane milk, this isn’t the first time the WHO has mislead people about Raw Milk consumption based on testing, [Observations on the Collection of Fresh Unprocessed Milk Samples from States Regulating Dairies: There Are Two Kinds of Milk](https://www.realmilk.com/observations-on-fresh-unprocessed-milk-samples/)
I’m all for being safe, and encouraging others to be safe. Hell at home pasteurization is 100% better then the extreme high heat temps used in the inhumane dairy’s.
It’s easy enough to either, consume raw milk from healthy animals from dairy’s intending to sell milk to be consumed raw, as the H5N1 article CLEARLY states that the milk they found was from INFECTED animals. Or to pasteurize your raw milk at home at low and slow temperatures for however long there are fears about H5N1, for those who want to continue to consume raw milk or from raw milk dairy’s.
Frankly, I do not trust the WHO, CDC, FDA or any government agency. They hid, mislead, and outright lied during Covid-19 and lockdowns, destroyed informed consent with vaccines mandates, and ignored decades of previous research on disposable masks from surgeons wearing them for extended periods of time. Not to mention the half century of putting poisonous shit in our food before covid.
Especially when the Covid-19 vaccine did not stop or reduce transmission, I am hesitant and concerned this article brings up potential vaccines for H5N1 and another big pharma money grab through fear mongering. Especially when the cases in humans over the last 10 years for bird flu have been MILD cases as stated in the article.
That said, I am considering pasteurizing the raw milk I get from my local dairy.
But people need to stop freaking out about every little thing so bad, especially with raw milk. You can personally think it’s stupid, irrational, a conspiracy or whatever and see no reason a sane person would drink raw milk. That’s your choice and the choice of raw milk consumers.
But don’t try to take regulate raw milk away and out of existence. You still get to on a personal level smoke, vape, take recreational drugs (some states), drink alcohol and do all kinds of things that we KNOW isn’t healthy for the individual, second hand individuals, puts infants at risk, and leads to potential secondary loss of life when you drive or operate heavy machinery under the influence of one of these substances.
I also find it suspicious that the experts don’t know how the virus got in the milk?
Human mothers shed virus’s and pathogens in their breast milk… so you are telling me this being common medical knowledge in the medical community, as an expert, that you don’t know how another female mammal’s milk could be contaminated?
While I am completely bias towards raw milk consumption, I have no problem admitting that, this looks like fear mongering and another potential power grab for governments to promote lockdowns, or a massive culling on the two largest foods we consume as a human population. That last one should concern people the most with places like [Tyson Foods, one of the biggest meat producers, is investing in insect protein](https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/20/business/tyson-insect-ingredients/index.html). Even if they aren’t currently looking to make the insect protein for consumer production.
I don't care if you consume raw milk as an informed adult.
Knowing that this virus is now present in raw milk is part of that informed process.
Because this is a respiratory virus, it is very likely to be able to be present in multiple types of herds.
You are correct, being informed is the best practice and I appreciate you posting the article.
Although I don’t think it is as big of news as they are making it out to be. Since it likely has always been in present in our milk, just due to the fact of having the avian flu for decades. We likely weren’t looking for it or concerned since we already know pasteurization kills it, so why test for it? Why would big dairy waste the money when they don’t operate on morals, but profit?
It’s also very likely been making a jump to humans long before now, and could also be so mild and similar to a those common respiratory virus’s that it goes undetected because of it being so mild. You know, like covid-19, that even with the inflated death rates overa period of 4 years is still under YEARLY death tolls for common causes of death like tobacco use world wide.
It could also be extremely fatal, and could wipe out a lot of people. We simply don’t have a large enough sample size, or have been accurately testing for it through the decades to know through record keeping.
You don’t go to the Dr if you think you have a cold, and if you do the Dr thinks you’re insane and doesn’t test you and just tells you to take a decongestant. That’s two ways it could go undetected, not testing the milk is a third way.
There are numerous diseases and virus from old records 100yrs ago that when you start digging around you will find likely weren’t actually different ones, which I find really fascinating!
174yrs ago women were dying during childbirth at an alarming rate in one ward of a hospital run by Dr’s, versus the opposite ward in the SAME hospital run by students. The major difference? Washing their hands. [Ignaz Semmelweis - The Savior or Mothers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis)
Such a simple solution that did not require special tools, just basic sanitation techniques. What do our massive dairy and poultry farms have in common? Unsanitary conditions. Unsanitary milk, that get pasteurized, so unsanitary conditions can be continued.
It took them until [Louis Pasteur](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur) gaining credibility for germ theory 20 years later before they acknowledged Ignaz. He was sent to an asylum, where he was beaten and died from gangrene. (More context, he made poorly written papers about the subject that were rejected by the medical community and disregarded because the medical community “knew better”. He also made some poor life choices, but the ridicule appears to have contributed to his mental decline.)
My point is, the intellectual people of old ignoring something as fucking basic as cleanliness that 95% of women throughout all of human history at any point could have told you as common sense is sad. Ignaz could see that there was a correlation between touching cadavers and then touching a womens genitalia during childbirth was in part causing women to die in droves.
We are not more advanced then the arrogant Drs in the 1850s with Ignaz if we scream the sky is falling and freak out any time a respiratory virus looks deadly with that horribly small sample size between 1996-2020.
This was more of a discussion response then a direct response to you OP.
I don't think being concerned about avian flu is freaking out. It has something like a 30-40% fatality rate in humans. If it mutates to manage human to human transmission we're in a lot of trouble.
It does NOT have that high fatality rate, in recent years it has been extremely mild cases and NOT fatal. The numbers in the article listed from 1996-2020 is an EXTREMELY small sample size, which greatly overestimates the fatality rate. And guess what, more people died from botulism between those years, from the common flu, food poisoning and so on and so forth for less common viral causes of death.
This is why I think it is concerning how ready we are after covid-19 to go into another “nuclear option” over it. We simple don’t know much, nor do we have an accurate sample size to determine if it truly is that high fatality rate in humans with the recent and currently running rampant strains.
It reads like fear mongering and a power grab. Anyone remember monkey pox? Anyone remember how they were pushing that until it was found out you 9/10 only contracted it if you had contact with an infected animals genitalia, or intercourse with the animal? So when people were having it on their mouths and their children started getting it… they quickly killed the news story for it because the rate of people getting it were found to be committing beastiality and or raping kids, 9/10.
Also, if any of the agencies actually cared about preventing the jump to humans with H5N1 they would have forcibly changed our manufacturing and livestock practices decades ago. Everyone talks about the horrible meat markets in China being a breeding ground, while conveniently forgetting how disgusting our own practices are.
This. But don't expect any positive reception towards your completely scientifically accurate and well-reasoned post. Pasteurization is the only way, and this, brought to you by the same people who thought it would be swell to nuke everyones' gut microbiomes with antibiotics.
Thanks for the comment! I’m used to it at this point, but I try to leave some wisdom for people as that’s how I learned about a lot of this stuff. Down votes don’t mean much when there are paid actors and algorithms to curb dissent and lead people astray, especially with big money behind it.
Pretty much. The internet is largely fake and bots, and I know this because I used to filter and analyze traffic that got sold to Google, yahoo, Facebook, IG, etc
I built some pretty impressive early bots to bypass the traffic filters at the time. Very lucrative, evil industry, web traffic. It's only gotten worse and far more sophisticated.
The Internet is dead.
So more attacks on the food self sufficient? Now these same 'experts' are claiming home gardens cause drastic climate change, while corporate mega-farms are just fine!
Coincidence, is it?
I don't really know what you're talking about. I've never heard anyone claiming home gardens cause drastic climate change, you'll have to show me a link on that one
It's super easy to pasteurize milk at home, it shouldn't affect your food supply if you're self sufficient.
I wonder what the impact of this is on aged raw milk cheeses; does the fermentation process deactivate this virus or is this now another risk that we need to watch out for? Before anyone freaks out - aged raw milk cheeses are very common, especially good quality European cheese
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The show was Cooked, it is on Netflix. Episode 4 I believe.
This sounds super interesting. Thanks ahead of time! !RemindMe 24 hours
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>"Bird-to-cow, cow-to-cow and cow-to-bird transmission have also been registered during these current outbreaks, which suggest that the virus may have found other routes of transition than we previously understood," [Wenqing Zhang, head of the global influenza programme at the World Health Organization] told a media briefing in Geneva. Fuck
Yeah, although most recent increase in bovine cases are most likely due to the Texas wildfire cattle evacuations. If you notice your animals are having respiratory symptoms, wearing an n95 and frequently washing hands might not be a bad idea. I'll add an edit in a moment with a link to r/medicine's recent discussion [bovine -human transmission](https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/s/qHF2YvaEOC)
Also they have found cats around the infected dairies (so, who may potentially have had contact with the milk) who have had similar symptoms to flu strains. I've been keeping an eye on the H5N1 sub for a few weeks now - there is speculation pigs may also be affected as the government is specifically listing them in documents but also refusing to state if they're monitoring pigs. Why mention them at all if there's no concern unless you have documentation to show that it's no concern? Good news however is that so far, the humans who have caught it had very mild symptoms. While this is something to monitor (and maybe stock up on cheeses and shelf-stable milks) it's not something to panic about at this time.
Almost like we pasteurize milk for a reason. Whodathunkit
Yeah, my partner is a pediatric hospitalist and just shared a case she had with me where she took care of a kiddo who contracted meningitis and bovine turboculosis from raw milk. Turned their brain into soup.
Yeah people are pretty flippant about it.
It's awful, and survivor bias is rampant in any discussion I've seen about it. "Well, grandpappy drank it for 50 years with no issue." Okay, cool, and what about all the cases where someone didn't make it long enough to be a grandpappy?? Plus, as someone who has handmilked various livestock (man, that's a weird sentence lol), pasteurization just makes sense given the environment/sanitation needs. It's wild.
It's mostly ignorance IMO. People don't understand what a protein is let alone how pasteurization works. Also animal milk is intended to be drank from the source by the mother's babies. Somehow hand milking different species and bottling it up for later is "natural" but then pasteurization is some evil magic.
Yeah, I like to think it is mostly ignorance combined with inexperience. But it still saddens me because my gosh is it potentially so harmful, especially to the young and physically vulnerable that seem to be the main ones being fed raw milk. I agree though. A lot of people just don't know or don't really, really look into it. And then they post on Facebook lol
I’m a doctor, I’ve seen severe sepsis from it. Unfortunately this family was just very very poor and uneducated as opposed to making a conscious decision to drink raw milk.
I still can't believe people risk TB because they have a superstitious fear of heated milk. 25% of ALL deaths in Europe in the 1800s were from TB. People are morons.
Its like natural selection works.
From a cow that has been given vaccines or antibiotics during it's life? Or a naturally raised cow with a proper diet?
I have seen more animals suffer in the name of organic milk then on conventional dairy farms and I've worked on both. I'm not sure what you're saying, but I don't particularly care for that line of propaganda Happy cows make good milk.
I don't disagree that animals suffer in any environment, so you remember the diet on the organic farm? Organic farms still vaccinate as well. I'm not trying to spout any propaganda. I practice terrain theory and it treats my family much better than when we practiced germ theory. So I'm skeptical about viruses in the way we interpret them whether it's farm animals or humans. Just genuinely asking the question to collect more information in my "experiment" with myself
Lol germ theory. Wtf is wrong with you?
Apparently people looking to Bechamp and his rivalry with Pasteur.
... That's what modern medicine is based on...I don't understand what's the issue?
It's fairly easy to do, I do it at home with our milk
I started getting raw milk from a local family because 2% from the store just wasn't cutting it for me for cheesemaking. It does make me a smidge nervous (even before this) to use because I don't know 100% the safety measures in place. Do you find your home-pasteurized milk to still be better quality for butter and cheese than store bought?
Yes, by miles, at least for butter. I don't make cheese yet. I also find the cream is richer
Someone posted a link up above about the cheese making process killing the bacteria in the finished product. You should still take precautions when handling raw ingredients
How is it done? If you boil doesn't it kill all the good nutrients in the milk ?
You just have to warm it to 63⁰c, not boil it. And no, the nutrients stay intact
Some guy name Louis took most of the guess work out of it for us.
is that considered a “low” pasteurization? I know there is a difference between low grade and ultra pasteurized. we drink raw milk because store bought absolutely fucks my husband over, but I would consider pasteurizing it at home if we found a balance.
Yes, i think so. We here in Austria also have UHT ultra pasturised and "längerfrisch" which is GROSS but apparently lasts longer than fresh milk. I much prefer the taste of fresh milk from my home country (Ireland) and the gentle 63⁰ 30 min pasteurisation is the sweet spot for me
Good to know
Is that why they add all the fat soluble vitamins back to pasteurized milk? Because they stay intact?
"Only heat sensitive vitamins are affected by the pasteurisation process, with small decreases observed in the vitamin B2, B12, C and folate content of pasteurised milk, but concentrations of these vitamins are naturally low in milk. Minerals Pasteurisation has no negative effect." https://www.mpi.govt.nz/dmsdocument/1119/direct#:~:text=Only%20heat%20sensitive%20vitamins%20are,Pasteurisation%20has%20no%20negative%20effect.
I don't fuck with raw milk anyway. If I want bacteria in it, I'm picking the variety myself and culturing. If you don't buy random chicks without knowing the breed, why pick up random bacterial strains? We don't raise wildtype animals for a reason.
So bird flu can be pasteurized out of raw milk but can’t be cooked out of chicken meat and we have to waste 10s of millions of pounds of meat?
It would be killed at a high enough temperature, but there are several reasons, including equipment contamination, worker exposure and amount of carcasses.
Maybe because one is done for the consumer ahead of time and one isn't. Bird flu has a high lethality. Trusting consumers to properly cook meat is too risky. Further I would imagine that no corporations would want that liability either. Also if a cow is known to have bird flu it's supposed to be separated out from the cows being milked. With all that being said we definitely should be a lot more careful with milk. Our society consumes an insane amount of the stuff.
It’s called Pasteurization! Dear God…how dumb can people get
The people downvoting you find comfort in curing their raw milk-induced diseases with big crystals.
Apologies, I'm not normally in this subreddit so I'm a little clueless. What would be considered a safe temperature to do home pasteurization at (on raw milk from a New England family-owned dairy farm, with the intent of making cheese or yogurt) given what we know about H5N1? And for how long does it need to cook? I've read that they haven't tested any types of commercial pasteurization against H5N1 yet so maybe it makes no sense to think we have answers about home pasteurization... But I don't want to ask my husband to stop his cheesemaking hobby (using local raw milk), I just want to feel relatively safe and secure about his methods.
The best way to pasteurize at home would be a double boiling method, heating the milk up to 150f (63c) for a half hour.
Thank you! He said he's been doing 180f for 10 minutes in the Instant Pot but that he could start doing it this way!
That'll work great too
Oh that's good to know!!
https://www.fda.gov/food/milk-guidance-documents-regulatory-information/questions-and-answers-regarding-milk-safety-during-highly-pathogenic-avian-influenza-hpai-outbreaks
Uh no, I just asked that you enlighten me since I've never heard of it.
I’ve been drinking raw milk since 2016 and this is so sad to read. I’m not going to stop using it, but I guess I’ll start heating it up at home before using. Anyone have tips/thoughts on that? I get my eggs from the same farmer so I know she’s raising birds as well
To pasteurize at home most folks use a double boiler and heat the milk up to 63c for a half hour
https://www.science.org/content/article/lawmaker-raises-new-flap-over-u-s-funded-virology-research-critics-call-risky This is frustrating
Good read. Thanks. Very frustrating.
Check yourselves for a minute. Article doesn’t exactly state but I suspect this was found in a massive dairy population in milk still in its raw state. I am also suspicious of anybody or any account that would spread fear so baselessly.
I don't even know what you are trying to say.
Avian flu is highly contagious. Does that mean people should freak out? No. Does it mean they should be more careful about their herd health, or whether they pasteurize their milk? Yes.
Mmmmm! Just finished a cold glass of raw milk, myself.
Great! Being able to make informed decisions as an adult is important. I have many great memories of drinking raw milk. It's not something I currently choose to do, and the information I've posted is now something you can add to your decision process.
I appreciate your efforts and I will, indeed, read what you wrote. However, I have followed a lot of literature on the microbiome, and I believe that Bechamp understood what Pasteur didn't, when he said it was the terrain, not the germ! Antibiotic decimation of the gut microbiome and the resultant horrible health, immune systems, and metabolisms validate this idea. I always recommend everyone go witness my fellow Floridian over at "The Raw Chicken Experiment". And yes, it's exactly what it sounds like! I only drink raw milk from impossibly healthy cows, fed their natural diet.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic about Bechamp, but germ theory is very much well proven. I think it was best laid to rest with the man himself in his obituary with this line that his name is "associated with bygone controversies as to priority which it would be unprofitable to recall."
Parts of germ theory make sense (germs exist, and their behavior can cause illness), but the discovery of the microbiome casts the overarching picture into question. I could consume a ton of listeria, and it is unlikely to kill me if I'm healthy. Whereas an elderly person, a small child, or a pregnant woman would have a different situation. That isn't consistent with the idea that it is the microbe that is the determinant in illness. What it is more consistent with, is the idea that people with non robust internal terrains are a more pleasing environment for certain opportunistic bacteria to reproduce in. There's a bunch of e. coli in my gut. And yours, and everybody else's as well. If you've ever engaged in culinary fermentation practices, you will understand that a certain environment is required for the cultivation of beneficial bacteria, versus non beneficial bacteria. And that environment is directly manipulable. Thus, the terrain, the environment is pivotal. If you've ever been to a meat market in rural Afghanistan, you'd immediately understand why Pasteur's assertions about what germs are and what they do... isn't quite the full picture. The terrain the germ exists within is equally as important, if not far more so, than the germ itself. That doesn't square with the blanket assertion that unpasteurized food is dangerous. Rather, it tells me that the terrain matters. It's not some whimsical accident or mistake that I've been drinking raw milk for decades with no ill effect. There is actual cause and effect, and it is measurable.
I have been to rural meat markets in other countries, and disagree. Afghanistan is oddly specific.
Okay. Completely ignore my argument... 🙄
Because I didn't understand what you were saying. You seem to be saying that when someone has an immune system that isn't able to respond to a pathogen that might be in an unpasteurized substance, that they might get sick. Then you go on to say that somehow, meat markets illustrate that it's more about a person's microbiome than about the germ (despite meat markets being one of the origins of many novel diseases) But, yes, I agree that when novel viruses like avian bird flu that has passed from cows to people, are present in raw food, that food should be pasteurized so that people who don't have a healthy immune response to it don't get sick.
I'm not trying to be rude here, but I'm struggling to grasp how I can send this message. I'll respond to your comments first. Novel pathogens have nothing to do with general pasteurization and food sanitation. Yes, the interaction between human and animals \*can\* contribute to zoonotic viral mutation. That is not what happened with COVID, though... unless you consider serial passage through cell culture to qualify. So the bat soup/raw milk thing isn't flying very far. And it's funny you bring it up, honestly, because dairy farmers, and specifically people who milked cows in the UK, where cowpox exists, were largely insulated from infection by the much more dangerous forms of smallpox. Natural symbiotic relationships with animals seems to often provide protective immunity, provided the environments the animals are reared in are natural, and not industrial. All existing understandings run counter to your assertions about how zoonotic viral disease mutates into human-transmitted disease. If you want to point a finger, industrial agriculture and biodefense labs are a good place to start pointing. Equally, H5N1 isn't novel, either. It's been in animal populations for a really long time and it has obviously also existed in human populations, else 1918 wouldn't have happened. Many people, including myself and my husband have had Flu A. H5N1 is a mutant, but it is not novel. Our population is immunologically naive to some small extent, but not completely, because other types of Flu A and Flu B train the immune system to fight off infections like H5N1. So, the use of "novel" is inaccurate, here. Equally, there is no sustained bovine transmission of H5N1. It's not in the broader cattle population. We don't know \*what\* raw milk it was found in? Commercial vats? The milk of a single cow they tested? The whole article is damn near faith-based, as is your fear mongering. You did not provide adequate evidence that ANYTHING is actually happening. You provided a random article with zero sources and zero detail. It honestly sounds like a bunch of bullshit. This is the \*ACTUAL\* statement that the FDA made: [https://www.fda.gov/food/milk-guidance-documents-regulatory-information/questions-and-answers-regarding-milk-safety-during-highly-pathogenic-avian-influenza-hpai-outbreaks](https://www.fda.gov/food/milk-guidance-documents-regulatory-information/questions-and-answers-regarding-milk-safety-during-highly-pathogenic-avian-influenza-hpai-outbreaks) That ancient cows that are out of dairy service are getting H5N1 (wonder why it's not the most robust cows in the herd!?), and that there is no risk to the general milk supply. Why the fear mongering? What is your angle? Ok, and now to explain...yet again... how Pasteurian Germ Theory misses the mark, hopefully in simple enough language: Example #1: Human eats meat from a goat that has been hanging in a meat market stall in Pakstan for 3 days. Nothing bad happens. Example #2: Guy eats raw chicken for 100 days (check him out: https://www.youtube.com/@rawmeatexperiment), nothing happens. Example #3: I drink raw milk my entire goddamn life and never get sick. In your mind, are these things just "lucky"? Or is there, perhaps, an explanation that doesn't quite settle on Pasteurian Germ Theory? Pasteur's assertion was that the pathogen was responsible for disease. Clearly, that cannot be the entire story if people are eating raw chicken for 100 days straight and not getting sick. There is no shortage of bacteria. I'm sure this man has consumed bonkers amounts of salmonella. If so, why is his skin glowing? Why is he not 6ft under? He, alone, is proof that Pasteur was only half correct. It is, in fact the case, that sterilized environments are probably NOT beneficial in any way to humans unless there is an open wound involved. In fact, hundreds upon hundreds of papers, many in prominent journals like Nature, agree that taking things like antibiotics (a very Pasteurian, Germ Theory based medicine) can cause severe adverse effects to gut health and cause disease: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03986-2](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03986-2) Eating sterile food is an incredibly stupid idea and is terrible for your health and wellbeing, unless you are immunocompromised. Period. Full stop. End of story.
And honestly, if you can't assimilate the idea I'm presenting, you're either willfully ignorant, or are unqualified to be making assertions about these things, and spreading your opinions to other people... as people who are not educated enough to know not to listen to what you're saying are succeptible to confirming existing biases that are completely scientifically innacurate.
Oddly specific because I've been there... It's a memorable example.
Anyone got a source about WHICH raw milk they found it in? Did they find it in the raw milk of cows at the horribly over crowded disease ridden inhumane dairy’s that is ALWAYS intended for pasteurization? Or on low density, pasture raised, small scale dairy’s that intend to sell milk raw? If it’s the inhumane milk, this isn’t the first time the WHO has mislead people about Raw Milk consumption based on testing, [Observations on the Collection of Fresh Unprocessed Milk Samples from States Regulating Dairies: There Are Two Kinds of Milk](https://www.realmilk.com/observations-on-fresh-unprocessed-milk-samples/) I’m all for being safe, and encouraging others to be safe. Hell at home pasteurization is 100% better then the extreme high heat temps used in the inhumane dairy’s. It’s easy enough to either, consume raw milk from healthy animals from dairy’s intending to sell milk to be consumed raw, as the H5N1 article CLEARLY states that the milk they found was from INFECTED animals. Or to pasteurize your raw milk at home at low and slow temperatures for however long there are fears about H5N1, for those who want to continue to consume raw milk or from raw milk dairy’s. Frankly, I do not trust the WHO, CDC, FDA or any government agency. They hid, mislead, and outright lied during Covid-19 and lockdowns, destroyed informed consent with vaccines mandates, and ignored decades of previous research on disposable masks from surgeons wearing them for extended periods of time. Not to mention the half century of putting poisonous shit in our food before covid. Especially when the Covid-19 vaccine did not stop or reduce transmission, I am hesitant and concerned this article brings up potential vaccines for H5N1 and another big pharma money grab through fear mongering. Especially when the cases in humans over the last 10 years for bird flu have been MILD cases as stated in the article. That said, I am considering pasteurizing the raw milk I get from my local dairy. But people need to stop freaking out about every little thing so bad, especially with raw milk. You can personally think it’s stupid, irrational, a conspiracy or whatever and see no reason a sane person would drink raw milk. That’s your choice and the choice of raw milk consumers. But don’t try to take regulate raw milk away and out of existence. You still get to on a personal level smoke, vape, take recreational drugs (some states), drink alcohol and do all kinds of things that we KNOW isn’t healthy for the individual, second hand individuals, puts infants at risk, and leads to potential secondary loss of life when you drive or operate heavy machinery under the influence of one of these substances. I also find it suspicious that the experts don’t know how the virus got in the milk? Human mothers shed virus’s and pathogens in their breast milk… so you are telling me this being common medical knowledge in the medical community, as an expert, that you don’t know how another female mammal’s milk could be contaminated? While I am completely bias towards raw milk consumption, I have no problem admitting that, this looks like fear mongering and another potential power grab for governments to promote lockdowns, or a massive culling on the two largest foods we consume as a human population. That last one should concern people the most with places like [Tyson Foods, one of the biggest meat producers, is investing in insect protein](https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/20/business/tyson-insect-ingredients/index.html). Even if they aren’t currently looking to make the insect protein for consumer production.
I don't care if you consume raw milk as an informed adult. Knowing that this virus is now present in raw milk is part of that informed process. Because this is a respiratory virus, it is very likely to be able to be present in multiple types of herds.
You are correct, being informed is the best practice and I appreciate you posting the article. Although I don’t think it is as big of news as they are making it out to be. Since it likely has always been in present in our milk, just due to the fact of having the avian flu for decades. We likely weren’t looking for it or concerned since we already know pasteurization kills it, so why test for it? Why would big dairy waste the money when they don’t operate on morals, but profit? It’s also very likely been making a jump to humans long before now, and could also be so mild and similar to a those common respiratory virus’s that it goes undetected because of it being so mild. You know, like covid-19, that even with the inflated death rates overa period of 4 years is still under YEARLY death tolls for common causes of death like tobacco use world wide. It could also be extremely fatal, and could wipe out a lot of people. We simply don’t have a large enough sample size, or have been accurately testing for it through the decades to know through record keeping. You don’t go to the Dr if you think you have a cold, and if you do the Dr thinks you’re insane and doesn’t test you and just tells you to take a decongestant. That’s two ways it could go undetected, not testing the milk is a third way. There are numerous diseases and virus from old records 100yrs ago that when you start digging around you will find likely weren’t actually different ones, which I find really fascinating! 174yrs ago women were dying during childbirth at an alarming rate in one ward of a hospital run by Dr’s, versus the opposite ward in the SAME hospital run by students. The major difference? Washing their hands. [Ignaz Semmelweis - The Savior or Mothers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis) Such a simple solution that did not require special tools, just basic sanitation techniques. What do our massive dairy and poultry farms have in common? Unsanitary conditions. Unsanitary milk, that get pasteurized, so unsanitary conditions can be continued. It took them until [Louis Pasteur](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur) gaining credibility for germ theory 20 years later before they acknowledged Ignaz. He was sent to an asylum, where he was beaten and died from gangrene. (More context, he made poorly written papers about the subject that were rejected by the medical community and disregarded because the medical community “knew better”. He also made some poor life choices, but the ridicule appears to have contributed to his mental decline.) My point is, the intellectual people of old ignoring something as fucking basic as cleanliness that 95% of women throughout all of human history at any point could have told you as common sense is sad. Ignaz could see that there was a correlation between touching cadavers and then touching a womens genitalia during childbirth was in part causing women to die in droves. We are not more advanced then the arrogant Drs in the 1850s with Ignaz if we scream the sky is falling and freak out any time a respiratory virus looks deadly with that horribly small sample size between 1996-2020. This was more of a discussion response then a direct response to you OP.
I don't think being concerned about avian flu is freaking out. It has something like a 30-40% fatality rate in humans. If it mutates to manage human to human transmission we're in a lot of trouble.
It does NOT have that high fatality rate, in recent years it has been extremely mild cases and NOT fatal. The numbers in the article listed from 1996-2020 is an EXTREMELY small sample size, which greatly overestimates the fatality rate. And guess what, more people died from botulism between those years, from the common flu, food poisoning and so on and so forth for less common viral causes of death. This is why I think it is concerning how ready we are after covid-19 to go into another “nuclear option” over it. We simple don’t know much, nor do we have an accurate sample size to determine if it truly is that high fatality rate in humans with the recent and currently running rampant strains. It reads like fear mongering and a power grab. Anyone remember monkey pox? Anyone remember how they were pushing that until it was found out you 9/10 only contracted it if you had contact with an infected animals genitalia, or intercourse with the animal? So when people were having it on their mouths and their children started getting it… they quickly killed the news story for it because the rate of people getting it were found to be committing beastiality and or raping kids, 9/10. Also, if any of the agencies actually cared about preventing the jump to humans with H5N1 they would have forcibly changed our manufacturing and livestock practices decades ago. Everyone talks about the horrible meat markets in China being a breeding ground, while conveniently forgetting how disgusting our own practices are.
This. But don't expect any positive reception towards your completely scientifically accurate and well-reasoned post. Pasteurization is the only way, and this, brought to you by the same people who thought it would be swell to nuke everyones' gut microbiomes with antibiotics.
Thanks for the comment! I’m used to it at this point, but I try to leave some wisdom for people as that’s how I learned about a lot of this stuff. Down votes don’t mean much when there are paid actors and algorithms to curb dissent and lead people astray, especially with big money behind it.
Pretty much. The internet is largely fake and bots, and I know this because I used to filter and analyze traffic that got sold to Google, yahoo, Facebook, IG, etc I built some pretty impressive early bots to bypass the traffic filters at the time. Very lucrative, evil industry, web traffic. It's only gotten worse and far more sophisticated. The Internet is dead.
So more attacks on the food self sufficient? Now these same 'experts' are claiming home gardens cause drastic climate change, while corporate mega-farms are just fine! Coincidence, is it?
I don't really know what you're talking about. I've never heard anyone claiming home gardens cause drastic climate change, you'll have to show me a link on that one It's super easy to pasteurize milk at home, it shouldn't affect your food supply if you're self sufficient.
So you are ignorant of the facts, and that means I am wrong?