A new study from Stanford University reveals that bird flu virus can remain infectious in raw milk for up to five days, even when refrigerated. This finding raises concerns about the potential for transmitting the virus to humans through consumption of raw milk.
may remain infectious in raw milk days after it has left a warm body, according to new experiments at Stanford University, raising concerns about the potential spread of avian– a subtype of the influenza A virus – and kept it at a relatively standard domestic refrigeration temperature of 4 °C (about 39 °F), they found it took the pathogen 2.3 days to reach a 99 percent reduction in infectivity.
Alarmingly, a small fraction of the virus particles remained in a transmissable state for up to five days. The recommended shelf life of refrigerated raw milk is between five and seven days, meaning even under ideal circumstances milk containing the virus could transmit the flu to a consumer. Thankfully, pasteurization resolved the threat. When researchers heated infected milk to 63 °C for 30 minutes, they successfully inactivated the infectious influenza A virus. 'This work highlights the potential risk of avian influenza transmission through consumption of raw milk and the importance of milk pasteurization,'Boehm and her colleagues say they could find no other study that has investigated how long viruses can remain infective in raw milk. Theirs is the first, and it comes at a critical time. In a world first, an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in the US has officially made the jump from birds to cows, infectingThe H1N1 virus is often used as a surrogate for the H5N1 virus in research, so these results from Stanford confirm the idea that pasteurization protects the public against flu-infected milk. While this particular strain of bird flu has yet to be observed spreading from human to human, it can jump from animal to human, andAt this point, it seems the H5N1 virus can infiltrate a cow's mammary glands and infect dairy farm workers who handle raw milk or milking machine
AVIAN IN FLUENZA RAW MILK PASTEURIZATION FOOD SAFETY PUBLIC HEALTH
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