At least the effects are small compared to poultry farming. Slightly less milk production and reduced feed intake for cattle; they survive.
“Unlike affected poultry, I foresee there will be no need to depopulate dairy herds […]USDA confirmed that there is no threat to human health and milk and dairy products remain safe to consume. Pasteurization (high heat treatment) kills harmful microbes and pathogens in milk, including the influenza virus,"
Raw milk drinker here. We've been drinking raw milk for some years now. What makes it work is that the milk comes from a farm (which we can visit), which has a small number of cows and follows modern best practices when it comes to milking procedures. Each teat is washed and disinfected before milking. Additionally, the first few squirts of milk are milked by hand, which gives a visual indication of whether that teat is infected or not. If it is infected, it is milked into the ground by hand, and further treatment may be pursued as needed. If, for some reason, something was missed, a small number of people will be affected.
Contrast that to a large dairy operation. Several hundred cows mean higher pressure to get through them all, and a higher chance that the farmer misses something. Half of all cows are in herds of over 900 animals, which means that many operations are now completely automated, removing the visual inspection that a farmer in a small-scale operation performs. That milk is then sent to a milk processing facility that may process upwards of 100,000 gallons per day. Any bacteria from one cow can and will be mixed with the milk from multiple other farms, and can potentially infect tens of thousands of gallons.
Anecdotaly, we have several friends who cannot digest homogenized milk, but do well with raw milk. We are not sure if this is due to the makeup of the milk fat or due to the (usually harmless) microbiota in the milk.
> Anecdotaly, we have several friends who cannot digest homogenized milk, but do well with raw milk. We are not sure if this is due to the makeup of the milk fat or due to the (usually harmless) microbiota in the milk.
I'm very interested in this, as it's true for me too! I don't have access to raw milk in my state, but I can find 'creamline' or 'cream top' milk at my farm stand, and that works great for me. Oddly, so does dry/powdered milk, of pretty much any type.
I've tried to research why homogenized milk is different (besides the obvious), but keep running into dead ends. I'd love to read any further info you have.
The recent raw milk trend is made possible by advances in science. Pasteurization was developed because we had almost no understanding of bacteria. Heating up the milk seemed to make it last longer, and safer to drink, and that was that.
Now, a more modern understanding of microorganisms has lead to an interest in preserving commensal bacteria already present in food. Milk in the cow is generally safe to drink, but cows aren't clean on the outside, and milk is often contaminated during the industrial process. So this leads to a situation where bad bacteria are occasionally mixed in with the good.
Fortunately, testing for specific species of bacteria is cheap and reliable. Milk can be tested for the kinds of bacteria we don't want. Contaminated milk can be pasteurized, and sold as regular milk. Safe milk is chilled and sold as raw milk, preserving its microbiota.
My point being that if raw milk has bad bacteria introduced from outside of the cow and it is not pasteurized, that bacteria has been shown to be harmful for us
These success of these avian flus are a direct result of mega factory farms ("concentrated animal feeding operations", or CAFOs) [0]. These massive operations are actually a relatively new thing since the 1990's [1].
We need to stop concentrating large numbers of animals at single sites.
The only way to change these practices is to make it more profitable by doing as you suggest (which I agree needs to be done). What are the carrots and sticks that could be used in such a situation?
You don't "carrot and stick" the construction industry to make buildings that are safe and accessible, the airplane industry to build and maintain safe planes, the auto industry to have have safe cars, and so on. Laws and regulations dictate certain levels of quality, and people follow them or go to prison. This has been incredibly effective and is the simple solution to this problem. It would be preferable for everyone to win, but it doesn't have to be more profitable - the dangerous behavior simply has to cease.
Bluntly, you don't carrot and stick criminals not to commit crimes. You make the behavior illegal and you punish criminals.
Carrots (in this case) would be subsidies and possible regulatory easements that might lesson relevant burdens if they are overly broad or excessively painful to follow (i.e., paperwork).
Industrial farming has largely destroyed the effectiveness of our old antibiotics, and every new one that is developed, they get their hands on and start destroying the effectiveness of them, too. It's already biting us.
A slight correction here. Beef production and the growth of corn and feed stock for beef production is the one that is responsible for extensive release of GHG.
Algae grows ridiculously easily - If there was a market for this (likely one driven by mandates to eliminate methane), you could have thousands of tons of algae within months and millions of tons within years.
We need better ways to deal with viruses. There really should be a CRISPR/mRNA way by now to immediately cure this stuff like antibiotics for bacteria by now.
Yeah, that’s why I said vector generation. We need to be able to mass produce vectors that can be immediately injected into the human body to act on cells.
We should consider ourselves lucky to even have the medicines we do now, considering the complexity of biology. Even immediately curing bacterial infections is not a given.
Nobody even knew CRISPR existed until the late 80s, and nobody realized that you could use it (with Cas9) for gene editing until the 10s. They're not exactly writing a new JS framework here.
Interestingly, CRISPR started out as a way for bacteria to fight viruses. So if we just put CRIPSR in animals, it will protect them. The problem is that influenza can probably mutate faster than we can update the CRISPR-engineered animals.
Loading up a multicellular eukaryotic organism with the CRISPR mechanisms wouldn’t work. Bacteria, as single cell organisms, have an entirely different immune system than animals.
Mammal immune systems are much more complex with dedicated cells and mechanisms.
Yep. In nature, the "writing" aspect is actually writing down a chunk of the virus's sequence to know what to attack in the future.
It's a little 'ol immune system for yogurt bacteria!
The mRNA covid vaccines were essentially chosen directly, not tested against other proteins on the virus. It took a few hours once the virus was sequenced, I guess based on experience with other coronaviruses.
That's just the first stage of testing; you also need in vivo and human safety trials.
Which we did do, it's just there's normally a bigger gap while we think about the results, go looking for funding for the next stage.
With covid (based on reporting at the time, Gell-Mann Amnesia applies), we were building the factories to make the vaccines before we knew which vaccine would be made in that factory.
I think it was more like ensuring the capacity to do it was in place. Things like bioreactors aren't overly specialized.
As well as it went, it wasn't overly ambitious. A few billions of dollars probably could have accelerated widespread availability by months (I'm thinking mostly about producing earlier, with the risk that the production would end up as waste if the vaccine didn't prove out).
You might have heard of it - antibiotics are less and less effective these days. So, you can never rest and stop research. Pathogens adapt by necessity.
Viruses that transmit between different species and not individuals in the same species are a thing. Sometimes they evolve to spread in the new host species, sometimes not.
Unless you're wearing it tight enough to leave a mark around your mouth and nose, it's not doing anything for you.
My wife, an ICU nurse, spent a year reusing N95s because people who didn't need them bought them all up, only to wear them in a way that didn't seal properly and provided no protection.
“Unlike affected poultry, I foresee there will be no need to depopulate dairy herds […]USDA confirmed that there is no threat to human health and milk and dairy products remain safe to consume. Pasteurization (high heat treatment) kills harmful microbes and pathogens in milk, including the influenza virus,"