According to the US health authority CDC, there are now more than 130 registered H5N1 infections in a dozen US states. Available data on transmissions is still scarce and countermeasures are being implemented only slowly. However, four transmissions to humans have already been registered. The US Food and Drug Administration, however, is reassuring consumers.
Pasteurizing cow’s milk reliably inactivates the bird flu virus, the FDA said Tuesday during tests on highly contaminated milk.
It has been known for about 15 years that influenza viruses type A(H5N1) can be dangerous for the poultry sector and also for humans. But for a long time it was assumed that the transmission via feces literally went from ‘bird to bird’, in rare cases with intensive contact from poultry to humans.
Sudden infection of cows
But that changed in March of this year when H5N1 infections were suddenly discovered in cows in several US states. In addition, there have been three cases of illness in humans, people who worked on farms to milk cows, etc. “The US authorities have so far failed to stop the H5N1 epidemic among cows. According to the current figures of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 56 illnesses have been found in seven states in the past thirty days,” the German Medical Journal wrote on Monday.
A spread of the A(H5N1) virus strains, which also affect cattle, would of course be an international problem. At least now the all-clear should be given for milk from the refrigerated section of the supermarket. Initially, Erica Spackman of the US Department of Agriculture and her co-authors were able to detect viral genome parts of the pathogens in 60 of the almost 300 milk samples using PCR tests. However, this says nothing about the contagiousness because the entire live virus is always needed for an infection.
Raw milk tested before and after treatment
Spackman and her colleagues therefore conducted further tests at the request of the FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. First, they tested raw milk from 275 samples for intact pathogens. Nearly a quarter of the samples contained intact pathogens.
The scientists therefore built a pasteurization system in the laboratory that is used in commercial dairy farming. Milk samples were then artificially contaminated with five million viruses and pasteurized. According to the medical journal, the milk was then free of infectious viruses.
Source: Krone
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