EBN- The California Department of Public Health in America recently warned in a statement of the necessity of avoiding consuming raw milk infected with bird flu, as a precaution and due to the continued spread of bird flu among cows and poultry , and the presence of cases of infection among humans, according to the website today.
California the epicenter of the avian flu outbreak in cattle, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned that raw, unpasteurized milk could expose people to germs and pose serious health risks.
Consumers don’t realize that the raw milk they’re buying isn’t from one cow, but rather from many cows , said Dr. Ian Lipkin, professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. If one cow in that group has avian influenza, the virus will spread to a much larger number of people.
California health officials have warned that drinking raw milk containing the bird flu virus could lead to infection with the disease, and touching the face after touching the contaminated milk could lead to infection with the disease. They stress that pasteurized milk is safe to drink because pasteurization kills the bird flu virus and other germs.
It is worth noting that almost all bird flu patients have had contact with infected animals, but three cases are of particular interest because it is not known how they were exposed to the virus: the child in California, the teenager in Canada, and the person in Missouri.
Could bird flu cause a global pandemic?
“We have already seen an outbreak of human infection with the virus,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and a spokesperson for the Infectious Diseases Society of America. “The CDC says the current public health risk from avian influenza is low, and the CDC’s influenza surveillance systems show no signs of unusual influenza activity in humans, including H5N1, or any unusual flu-related trends in emergency department visits.”
How is bird flu transmitted?
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, bird flu can be transmitted to humans when the virus gets into a person’s eyes, nose, or mouth or is inhaled. The severity of the illness can range from mild to severe and can be fatal. Human cases of infection in the United States have been relatively mild, perhaps because people are most often infected through their eyes. This can happen when a dairy worker milks an infected cow.
When the infection is transmitted through the eyes and not through the respiratory system, it is less dangerous than inhaling the virus through the respiratory system, where it can be transmitted to the lungs.
Is bird flu a global health emergency?
The World Health Organization does not currently classify the avian influenza outbreak as a global health emergency. Epidemics that fall into this category include COVID-19, cholera, dengue fever, Marburg virus and monkeypox.
Could bird flu turn into a global pandemic?
Experts say this strain of bird flu is unlikely to cause a global pandemic because it does not have the ability to spread effectively between humans. Adalja points out that the bird flu virus has been infecting humans since 1997, so it has had time to evolve, but it still cannot be easily transmitted from person to person.
What is bird flu?
Birds, like humans, can get the flu, and the avian flu viruses that make birds sick can also infect other animals, such as cows, and rarely infect humans, the National Library of Medicine explains.
The H5 virus has nine subtypes, including H5N1, the strain responsible for the recent illnesses, and nearly all of the patients in the United States had contact with infected livestock or poultry. The only two exceptions are a patient in Missouri and a child in California — neither had known contact with animals, and no person-to-person spread has been confirmed.
