|
|
|
|
|
|
by galangalalgol
786 days ago
|
|
|
Raw milk isn't anywhere near as dangerous as the other choices you mention except during a cow pandemic. Still, I agree, the risk/reward seems like it could throw an exception. I would like to controversially throw preservatives in bread into the same category. When we started adding preservatives to bread, the incidence of colon cancer dropped significantly. Bread mold isn't good for you, preservatives have a very long track record of being the less (but probably still) dangerous option. |
|
|
Certainly the safety of raw milk is important for the 2% of the population that drinks it, and we should add H5N1 to the existing pile of pathogens they should worry about like E. coli, salmonella, listeria and campylobacter.
The far more significant fact that we're not discussing for some reason is that H5N1 has not only jumped from birds to mammals, but it's spreading rapidly between different species of mammals. And not just cattle from coast to coast in the US, but also bears, foxes, skunks, minks, raccoons, otters, seals, sea lions, domestic cats and even at least one dolphin. And for many of these mammals, not only does it spread fast, it also has a very high fatality rate.
If the virus has mutated to spread rapidly from mammal to mammal, and it also spreads to many different species of mammal, that's a very new thing that's never been seen before with this virus.
I don't know what the probability is for this to turn in to a high-mortality human pandemic, but that probability is certainly orders of magnitude greater now than before the virus achieved mammal-to-mammal transmission.