Federal regulators announced Wednesday that additional testing of milk and other dairy products sold in grocery stores shows that pasteurization kills a highly pathogenic strain of bird flu - a finding they say reaffirms their assessment that the nation’s milk supply is safe even as the disease has begun spreading among dairy cattle.
“Findings from the U.S. government partners, as well as academic researchers, do not change our assessment of the safety of the milk supply,” PraterEarly results last week from an ongoing effort to test 297 samples of retail dairy products from 38 stateshad viral fragments of the H5N1 virus. The presence of genetic fragments of the virus in milk was not unexpected, since the pasteurization process generally does not remove genetic material.
The effort to reassure the public that the milk supply is safe underscores the vast unanswered questions about the virus, which has never before been seen in U.S. dairy cattle. A highly virulent bird flu was first detected in cows in Texas and Kansas in late March, and is known to have spread to 36 total herds and seven other states. On April 1, federal officials announced that a dairy worker in Texas was being treated for H5N1, marking only the second human case in the United States.
So far, the outbreak has had minimal impact on international trade. Colombia is the only country known to have put import restrictions on U.S. beef.worry about the virus potentially spreading to more animals. On some of the earliest affected dairy farms in Texas and Kansas, cats also became sick and died after being fed colostrum and milk from affected cows.
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