Shepherd: Cow or goat or sheep!! DO NOT DRINK RAW MILK. ANIMALS ON SMALL FARMS ARE NOT LESS VULNERABLE TO HIGHLY PATHOGENIC AVIAN INFLUENZA I DO NOT CARE WHAT THAT HIPPIE ASS BACKYARD GOAT KEEPER TOLD YOU

Cow or goat or sheep!! DO NOT DRINK RAW MILK. ANIMALS ON SMALL FARMS ARE NOT LESS VULNERABLE TO HIGHLY PATHOGENIC AVIAN INFLUENZA I DO NOT CARE WHAT THAT HIPPIE ASS BACKYARD GOAT KEEPER TOLD YOU

It's starting to look like pasteurization inactivates #H5N1 #birdflu viruses in milk. But people who drink raw milk are playing with fire right now. www.statnews.com/2024/04/29/b...

There’s never a good time to drink raw milk. But now's a really bad time as bird flu infects cowswww.statnews.com People who drink raw milk from an H5N1-infected cow could get seriously sick, scientists say.

Raw milk people always try to frame the concern as a rural vs. out-of-touch city folk thing but I grew up on a small, very rural family dairy farm in Vermont and nobody drank raw milk, ever. And my grandmother on the other side of the family got scarlet fever from it as a child.

It’s the city-bred farm-larper (or wannabe farm-larper)‘s idea of rural rather than the actual thing

[grumbles in farm-bred LARPer]

[throws a Cure Disease packet, just in case]

Ta. Saving that for an extra bad day in this hellscape people call civilization

Believe me, I wish I could toss Calm spells in real life. I mean I *could*, but people dislike having cans of beer flung at them for some reason.

I think my (very rural) gran would have blown her top if I suggested drinking raw milk as a kid. She lived before pasteurisation, and knows what's up.

Aroostook County, Maine, here. All milk got pasteurized.

Only thing I remember we (backwater livestock farm, Europe) used raw milk for was for baking sheet pan pancake that for sure pasteurized during the forty minutes it spent in a 400ish F oven; drinking milk we got from grocery stores Raw milk people leave me searching for anything polite to say

My very late mother-in-law - a countrywoman - drummed in to me the need to pasteurize raw milk over 40 years ago. Always.

Even Pregnant Amish women avoid Drinking raw milk. They know how bad it can be for a developing fetus and their own health. I can easily access raw milk, and i would still attempt to pasteurize it before drinking it

At the point where you're looking at 'this will fuck me up in some permanent way', there's no reason to risk it. ... you'd think. *sigh*

It’s such an unnecessary risk to take, drinking raw milk.

And so many seem to confuse pasturisation and homogenization. They (wrongly) think they won't be able get the cream off the top.

I like how pretty much every farmer I know is all “YOU BLITHERING MORONS” over this listen to the people who know animals!

it's because they are real farmers, not morons larping as farmers

Yeah and we're aware we're largely not communicating with an audience of other farmers and therefore do not really need to communicate with nuance here. Just don't.

It blew my mind finding out they are allowed to feed chicken bedding to cows. Like I actually thought we learned lessons from dairy farms adjacent to chicken farms.

what?! holy shit

Like, the bedding chickens have shat in??? The }\*^ !

Yep!

Yeah it does seem it's heat treated basically by partially composting it, which is definitely good, but I'm not sure how effective that is at *fully* removing pathogens, which would be pretty important for things preventing crossover of zoonotic diseases. Either way, I felt better not knowing!

They WHAT?!?

Yeah it does seem it's heat treated basically by partially composting it, which is definitely good, but I'm not sure how effective that is at *fully* removing pathogens, which would be pretty important for things preventing crossover of zoonotic diseases. Either way, I felt better not knowing!

I definitely understand the logic of it, reducing waste is very important and it saves money as well but... Still seems risky especially in very large operations. Hopefully I'm wrong and the danger is properly mitigated. Still love dairy products though so I will try to forget this 😑

HPAI can survive up to 160 days in feces so yknow if I were a beef farmer I wouldn't be using it. It's not fed to dairy cattle as there's a required withdrawal period between feeding it and products from the animal being used for food, and not typically fed to cattle intended for slaughter:

Feeding Broiler Litter to Beef Cattle - Alabama Cooperative Extension Systemwww.aces.edu The cattle-feeding industry has been built largely on the use of by-products. Most beef producers take into account the public perception of beef when they consider using waste materials as feed—and t...

(stockers are very young/small cattle, typically from weaning until they hit about 700lbs, at which point they typically go to feed lots for finishing, reaching a final weight around 1200lbs)

Between this an the rabies discourse I am begining to think someone has a serious grudge against Louis Pastour and the germ theory of disease.

Somewhere a doctor is saying "do I really need to wash my hands? I didn't touch anything in the bathroom"

Peter Hegseth of FOX News Channel said that over-the-air a few years ago. He's doubled down on it since.

I wish they'd stop getting in front of my extemporaneous joke posts, man...

Someone who thinks crystals cure cancer is gonna kill us all

The only things crystals can cure is soberness and/or our need for shiny things

Neighbors gave my kid raw milk a few weeks ago. I was incandescent.

Vaccinate their kid next time they come to visit yours? Fair's fair.

I assumed they were on the same basic science page as us, but uh maybe that's necessary?

What the HELL?

I sometimes struggle with not wanting people to drink raw milk and suffer the gastro/medical consequences and being happy they are opting out of being underfoot much longer.

I felt the same way about people that wanted to take horse dewormer for COVID.

Exactly.

The problem there is that a) they often care for perfectly innocent relatives who don't deserve being shot full of bleach and crystals. And b) without proper treatment, diseases can spread and mutate, making it a problem for even those who DO take precautions. (see Covid)

If *everyone* had gone and gotten vaccinated as soon as they could have, the pandemic would have been *done*. Instead, it spread, hit vulnerable people who *couldn't* be vaccinated, and changed enough to spread faster.

As much as it would be nice to point and laugh at their ignorance, they're putting the public at risk. If this bird flu thing jumps species, we are *fucked*. Like, completely. No joke, everyone is gonna die. And that's *without* people being knuckleheads.

In this specific case, having avian influenza jump to human transmissibility because of mutation in humans is a deeply bad outcome. Like if COVID killed over 50% of the people who got it, and burned through our animal linked food supply level of bad.

The gods did not grant us the flawed genius of Louis Pasteur just so we can say "fuck that French guy" and get bird flu from drinking raw milk, but here we are. Such a sad state of affairs.

I was just badgering our local goat farmer about this a couple days ago, and showing them your readout thread from a few weeks ago.

Thank you for the reminder to yell at my dad. I don't think he's heard the update

... honestly he's probably high risk anyway, being the guy milking the cows!--but no need to stack potential transmission routes

Yeah the one person who has gotten HPAI from an infected cow was a farmworker who got milk in his eye

I think we can safely call that a body fluid exposure and take the appropriate precautions…

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