Noah McCrory
Results of tests conducted by the Food and Drug Administration show that pasteurization is working to kill bird flu in milk and other dairy products, the agency says.
“In addition to preliminary results released late last week on an initial set of 96 retail milk samples, these results reaffirm our assessment that the commercial supply of milk is safe,” the FDA said in a statement. declaration Tuesday.
The FDA’s findings come after the agency disclosed that about 1 in 5 retail milk samples it surveyed nationwide tested positive for highly pathogenic avian influenza, or HPAI H5N1. The US Department of Agriculture also ordered testing requirements on cows in response to the outbreak, which has affected an increasing number of birds It is dairy cows.
So-called positive PCR tests in milk could occur as a result of harmless fragments of the virus left over after pasteurization, officials and experts said, prompting additional experiments to see whether or not the virus found in milk was infectious. These tests found that it was not.
The FDA said it also tested dairy samples of cottage cheese and sour cream, which can be pasteurized differently than milk.
“We’re aware, because there are so many different dairy products, there are probably a few more products that we would like to look at just to make sure we have a good national sample,” said Don Prater, acting director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, told reporters
Although health officials have said that milk from visibly sick cows is being discarded before it enters the supply chain, officials have acknowledged the possibility that cows could be spreading the virus in your raw milk without symptoms or after they have apparently recovered. It is still unclear how traces of H5N1 ended up in the milk supply chain.
“The FDA is working with our federal partners to analyze the initial data we collected through this retail milk survey. We recognize that processors may receive milk from hundreds of different farms, which may cross state lines,” Prater said.
The FDA said it also tested several samples of powdered infant formula and retail infant formula, which the agency said were all negative for the virus.
No beef cattle have been detected with the virus, USDA said he said. The department has also completed collecting ground beef samples from warehouses in states with sick cattle, which will be tested for the virus.
Until here, just a human infection it was reported this year in a person who had contact with dairy cattle in Texas.
While there is increasing evidence confirming the safety of pasteurized milk, it also remains an additional challenge for health authorities as they face the possibility that dairy workers could be inadvertently exposed to the virus.
Different birdsthat die quickly or are slaughtered after H5N1 infections, cows largely recover after a month or two.
Other animals also didn’t fare as well during the outbreak: the USDA he said that deaths and neurological illnesses have been “widely reported” in cats on dairy farms. Authorities said that suspicious cats was drinking leftover raw milk from infected cows.
“We know that illness in cattle can last for several weeks. This puts workers at ongoing risk. And so the monitoring period will be longer,” Sonja Olsen of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told reporters.
