H5N1 prevalence in milk suggest US bird flu outbreak in cows is widespread
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Of some diseases. It also prevents other diseases. Isolating animal species, specifically separating their waste, prevents cross-contamination. Google the stories of people getting parasites from lettuce grown on a "small organic farm" downhill from the pig sty. Want to eat raw lettuce and undercooked steak without getting sick? Those privileges come from factory farming techniques.
(I grew up in an area where we washed vegetables in diluted bleach. And I still prefer my meat very well done, burned, because that's how meat must be cooked in parts of the world that don't have western-style factory farming.)
Outbreaks of E. coli, listeria, giardia, etc. are common in factory farmed bagged lettuce. Dole certainly isn't some small artisan operation; https://www.cdc.gov/listeria/outbreaks/packaged-salad-mix-12...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/16/ecoli-str...
"'There are more and more people wanting products like triple-washed bagged lettuce, but bagged salad is a great vector for E.coli growth,' he said. 'And farms have expanded closer and closer to animal feedlots and dairies, and these are now more prone to flooding.'"
Farm workers pooping in the fields because they're not allowed to walk 15 minutes to a port-a-potty doesn't help, either. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB888948983807436500
> And I still prefer my meat very well done, burned, because that's how meat must be cooked in parts of the world that don't have western-style factory farming.
That's more likely to speak to a lack of food safety regulation in the supply chain, from farm to slaughterhouse to store to table. It's entirely possible to properly process an artisanly raised organic cow in a way that avoids spreading E. coli all over it.
Common, in that millions of people eat the food and a vanishingly small number get sick during the rare outbreaks. Compare pre-industrial farming, where nearly everyone got sick on a somewhat regular basis. Read British history. Everything was boiled for a reason. Today we can get away with lightly washing our food. Most everyone opens a salad and eats without question. That is new. That is because of modern farming practices.
It's because of a multi-factorial societal shift involving vaccines, sanitation, germ theory, hand washing, water treatment, safety regulations, inspections, refridgeration, etc.
Pretending it's all because of factory farming is just silly.
The key to being able to eat rare meat is not to smear cow shit all over it and store it at 65 degrees for a day in an alley market. The key to being able to eat a salad is washing and cold storage of a product that inevitably gets exposed to pathogens in farm fields unless you raise it hydroponically in a hermetically sealed warehouse.
Just for general interest, they've got quite the colonial banana rebulic oligopoly history (in surges).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dole_plc
The OG Dole brothers were part of breaking the back of traditional rule in Hawaii.
No comment or implication here other than, gosh, history heh?
Not even close to true. The act of isolating (concentrating) animal species, pumping them full of antibiotics, and concentrating their waste is a significant danger to human and animal health alike. It breeds antibiotic resistant strains of disease and the waste is never isolated - it always gets into the soil, air, and groundwater of the surrounding communities increasing the risk of cross-contamination downstream. These are well-documented, peer-reviewed, large scale impacts that you somehow ignored when googling for n=1 anecdotes to confirm your bias.
It sounds like the problem is maybe farming of animals in general? Obviously a farm being small and organic doesn't automatically equate with everything being fine. Even on factory farms animal waste seeps into groundwater and can cause tons of environmental issues, which reminded me of a report from last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNutjzkXDqY
A slightly more on topic, and more generous interpretation of GPs comment removes any contradiction.
Modern industrial farming has been the greatest source of limiting disease, parasites and sickness. Before modern industrial farming, human life was rife with food-born parasites, disease and sickness. So much so that it severely limited people's physical and intellectual development.
> Of course we can thrive with less meat consumption or none.
We can survive without meat. But being omnivores, we probably need meat to thrive. Though too much of a good thing can be harmful.
> How is that even a question?
As a self-proclaimed rationalist, why does that surprise you? Rational people question things.
A sweeping statement, that betrays ignorance of the many people that are tremendously helped or healed from terrible illnesses by eating more meat (or even, only meat). I'm not advocating everyone eat only meat, nor do I think most people would want to, but there are also MANY people who would fall gravely ill if they did so.
Again, it's fine to voice an opinion, but this kind of categorical statement that isn't supported by empirical evidence is not. I'm very well acquainted with the subject myself, having dealt with severe autoimmune issues, and if I was forced to eat only plant matter, my health would be completely compromised. It's something I have heard from thousands of others, and if you are so interested I will provide links. There is also "scientific" data to support this, though as someone who has lived through it, I don't care for it, but it exists. Anecdotes, again, by the thousands, many with ex-vegans for whom a plant-based diet took a huge toll.
In both cases you know exactly where the brush fires are.
Of course, life with less meat consumption has a lower quality, and life with no meat consumption is utter misery.
Cities are an aggravating factor for the spread of disease, but I’d hardly argue that they should all be dissolved: the benefits are worth the costs. Likewise with meat. Eating meat fulfills one aspect of our natures as humans; a life without meat is thus a less humane life. No thanks.
Lifestyles and civilization doesn't significantly change if we all halve or eliminate need for factory animal farms in developed countries.
I have personally been helped by a diet of mostly meat (and frozen raspberries) which I stayed on for a few years. It helped me to stay somewhat productive while I slowly recovered from a complicated illness state.
These years I get most of my protein from beans and almonds, but those foods do subtle cumulative damage to my gut (even if I pre-soak, pressure-cook, then refry the beans and blanch, then toast the almonds) so once a year or so I take a break from them, and since I cannot handle eggs, grains or dairy protein, and since I seem to need a lot of protein, during the breaks I eat a lot of grass-fed lamb.
If I lost access to meat, I would be less healthy.
Those words require “as proven by” and then the sentence that follows.
The claims you make are so trivial as to almost be tautological. You make no quantitive claims except “none” for meat consumption. The most extreme possible position.
Rationalists put forward measured testable arguments that can be defeated by fair reason. Rationalists don’t frame the arguments for what they oppose in purely negative terms and what they support in purely positive terms.
Factory farming has had massive benefits to the health and well-being of humans on the planet. It is undeniably cruel. No meat consumption for many would lead to mental and physical health issues for many. It would also end some of humanity’s cruelest practices.
People get worried about serial passage "gain of function" experiments in a lab with a dozen lab animals being involved. Meanwhile in farming a virus can get passed through millions and millions of animals in nice compact bioreactors.
But it’s also not a question of if we’re going to, we won’t. Meat consumption goes up a little every year (on average) and we’ve known these things for a long time, so clearly we’re not convinced.
As to the benefits and drawbacks of factory farming, there are a lot of both. It’s overly-simplistic to call it a problem.
You might be thinking about beef cattle which are treated different from dairy cows. Though even then antibiotics can only be given with a vet prescription. (a change as of several years ago)
The incidence of bronchopneumonia in feed lots is 14% of the animals. Infection is very common.
Crab/fish meal. Which is to say leftovers after processing, dried and ground. https://www.feedipedia.org/node/664
At the end of the day, non-pasture food animal raising boils down to getting enough nutrients and time into them to hit your target slaughter weight, subject to feed conversion ratio for the species.
Cheaper nutrients = higher margins or lower product prices
So there's a lot of repurposing of sanitized animal byproducts. At the end of the day, as Cyberpunk 2020 quipped, "Parts is parts. Dead is dead. Dead guys is parts."
Anyone who's not comfortable with that should either go vegetarian or raise / buy into local meat.
Cows are herbivores. Feeding them meat is abhorrent.
As others are noting, it's the wacky industrial modernity doing its grossly myopic hyper-optimization thing that's the problem (and not just in animal husbandry or agriculture...).
One weirdo from the herd showed a preference for it one time. Whereas if you threw it among your dogs they'd likely fight over it. That's the difference.
"Meat" is a relative term though.
If I dry carcasses with some muscle and tissue still on them, grind it up into a powder, and add that powder to grain, is that meat?
"For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return," etc.
What you described - desiccated waste meat and grain - is a dog biscuit.
Now with 50% less horse!
How can we really know what cows know? What we know is they follow a herbivorous diet when possible. Their teeth and digestive system are optimized for consuming plants.
> Why would the fact that they don’t predate on other animals in the wild make it “abhorrent” to feed them animal products in captivity?
The reason you said.
My favorite fact is that animals are allowed a certain percentage of plastics in their feed, and it’s not a tiny percentage. It’s a significant number.
Are the influenza virus targets in cows similar to those of humans, that adaptations for one host would be useful for the other?
Is the large population size (millions of cows) worrisome for viral evolution, with the high cumulative volume of mutations?
Do governments not consider mass culling an option here, the way they routinely apply it to chicken farms? [0] Or is it too late already?
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/02/science/bird-flu-aid-anim...
The article debates the safety of virus particles in pasteurized milk, but what are regulators currently doing about unpasteurized milk?
The real worry is pigs.
If it makes its way to pigs, we are in trouble. From what I understand, pigs contain a mix of avian and human receptors that make them the ideal mixing ground for crossover. Cows do not.
Scratch that. The question is how many days or weeks until it does make that leap.
Then the two next questions are what's the likelihood of any given pig serving as an incubator for a recombinant virus that attaches to human lung epithelial cells, and how deadly is that virus. Run that experiment every day for six months at a few farms and you might get lucky. Run it everywhere in the country and we're S.O.L.
https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/news/20240408/cdc-issues-...
With pigs...the risk is a mutation occurs within a pig that then transmits to humans that allows humans can transmit to other humans.
But even if we did, it would still be factory farming (though of course with fewer outbreaks and antibiotic resistance) with other things that people would find problematic for plenty of equally valid reasons.
Also if anything, obesity would skyrocket. Meat isn’t the big cause of that, carbs are, and if you cut out meat you get more carbs. Most people gain weight when they go vegetarian.
Sure, avoid the highly refined carbs, like white flour and sugar, but substituting dairy and meat for nuts and legumes is going to only be an improvement for your health and the health of the planet.
Vegans and vegetarians are more health conscious than non-vegans and vegetarians so you can’t compare them like that. It’s like when they said that Diet Coke makes you fat because the average Diet Coke drinker is fatter than the average Coke drinker. But it’s really just because skinny people don’t worry about drinking calories.
Most people don’t switch from meat to nuts and legumes, they switch to baked goods.
There is also no scientific evidence whatsoever that switching to plant-based diets is good for your health. You should read outlive by Dr. Peter Atilla. As he points out, the only thing we know for sure is too many calories is bad. For almost anything else, it’s impossible to tease out correlation from causation.
I don't think half of the planet is overweight or obese due to meat consumption.
If anything, take away the meat (or make it more expensive) and it'd probably lead to even more obesity.
It's not like eating meat multiple time a day or even every day was a pre requisite for human life. I don't remember last time I ate meat and I'm fitter than 90% of people I meet in my day to day life
But also, dairy products can be thrown in this discussion too.
But they weren't obese. The person I was responded to claimed obesity is because of less meat.
> and died of a lot of diseases that we now survive easily, so by your logic, I should eat more meat
I didn't know you got your measles vaccine from a plate of pork chops. I got mine via a hypodermic needle, from a nurse who studied anatomy, biology, and germ theory for several years, and washed her hands.
That's not to say that there aren't alternatives to meat that also satiate and are nutritious, but most people don't consider them to be equally delicious and therefore they are not as likely to be consumed if meat isn't available.
> fries, sugared beverages...which is likely to be consumed when one doesn't feel satiated (e.g. due to meat consumption).
You know what goes really well with a juicy hamburger or a steak? Crisp fries, and a cool, refreshing, tall glass of Coke (maybe not the Coke so much with a steak), or a frosty milkshake.
So... if you take the meat out what does that leave you with?
People eat junk food because it tastes good. Period. Not because they didn't get enough meat or some BS like that. Meat-eaters eat fries. Vegetarians eat fries. Everyone eats fries. They're delicious.
If you take the meat out there's a whole world of nutritious and delicious foods out there. You just have to broaden your culinary horizons. I'm not even a vegetarian or vegan, have no plans to be one, and I still recognize this.
But most people will not find, enjoy or choose food with both of those qualities, not to mention that they are a minority over what's commonly available -- and even if they are available, they'd probably become too expensive if consumption increased significantly.
Most of the time they'd have to choose between "delicious foods" or "nutritious foods", but not both, and you know they'd choose the former.
If you take out meat, you'll simply reduce the pool of available (good) choices. You'll have a strictly worse outcome than what you had before (except for the animals, admittedly).
Only if we forced everyone to give up meat at gunpoint. Most people who choose to go meat-free, and stick with it, end up finding tasty and nutritious food that works for them.
> even when they are available, they are usually too expensive to become a common staple.
People automatically assume that giving up meat means salads and tofu all day, bought in 2oz packages from Whole Foods while wearing Lululemon yoga pants. And you gotta throw in the $10 artisan kombucha while you're at it.
Beans, lentils, and green peas are far cheaper and healthier than any meat or Impossible burger. You can get them at your local Indian or Mexican grocer for less than $1/lb. Or tofu and seitan from Costco or 99 Ranch Market. A little soybean paste or mushroom broth adds a blast of umami. That's what I mean by "broadening your culinary horizons".
And no beans can never become more expensive than meat, even if more people start eating them. It's simple thermodynamics. Look at the poorest countries on Earth - I guarantee you they eat more beans and lentils than meat. That's what a "common staple" is. If they can afford it, anyone can.
I'll only add that when promoting vegetarianism or veganism, I find most such sources to be akin to propaganda, i.e. they always talk about the benefits but rarely talk about the disadvantages. I suspect this might be because veganism is often tied to political preferences (and certain cultures).
As an example, here's something Wikipedia mentions that you will not usually see entirely discussed in articles promoting such diets:
> [Vegan diets tend to be lower in] omega-3 fatty acid, vitamin D, calcium, zinc, and vitamin B12. As a result of the elimination of all animal products, a poorly planned vegan diet can lead to nutritional deficiencies that counteract its beneficial effects and cause serious health issues, some of which can only be prevented with fortified foods or dietary supplements
This might partly explain why it's about as common to find a vegan bodybuilder as a flying cow... it might not be impossible to find one, but it's about as unnatural. And there are probably good reasons for this, including availability and easy absorption/digestibility of all the essential amino acids, which is important for muscle growth and maintenance, which in turn is very important for health especially in middle and old age.
It could also explain why when I see a random vegan person, they tend to "look" unhealthy more often than a random non-vegan person, although I concede that I may be biased, of course -- I've also seen sources claiming vegan people live longer, although I suspect that if it's true, it may be because vegans tend to be more health-conscious and choose their diet and sources of nutrition more carefully, not necessarily because of the lack of meat itself.
But of course, as long as all such information is reported in an unbiased and accurate fashion, I see nothing wrong with it.
Me as a kid. Best parts of the meal.
That's a disgusting fast-food derived dietary preference. Healthy meat-centric diet does not look anything like that.
(And I'll quibble about it being entirely fast-food derived. Steak-frites is classic French and Belgian food.)
Kind of like, instead of feeding the cows a bunch of soy and then eating the cow, just eat the soy as tofu or edamame instead.
Of course a lot of people prefer eating meat, but that's besides the point.
In my country, most of the food that goes into feeding animals is imported, and I can assure you they are not importing soccer fields.
You're obviously taking my argument in bad faith.
There's reason that life on Earth exists in a food chain. In this case many of the animals humans eat consume and digest things we cannot. This particular discussion was about cattle and humans deriving nutrition from the milk they produce and the meat they yield. From that perspective, cows and steers as intermediaries provide such a distinct advantage that genetic mutation that allows some humans to digest cow milk drove the flourishing of those civilizations.
Grazing animals, properly fed (this is what we need to fix), eat mostly grass. We need that middle step. Just like we need the intermediate steps of plants extracting nutrients from the soil and turning sunlight into usable calories for us. We can't eat dirt and drink sunshine, either. Of course those aren't the only things to eat. But that's the argument I was responding to.
The "cut out the middle man" argument really doesn't work. The argument should be "here are better alternatives."
I guess it could be seen that way to someone who doesn't know cows mostly eat grass?
HN guidelines say: Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> > > > cows mostly eat grass
All those addicted people will be able to satisfy their food addiction at significantly lower costs and consumption of resources by switching to a plant based diet.
Drastically reduced spread of diseases, reduced overuse of antibiotics, environmental benefits are just bonuses.
Not to mention the fact that your grandkids won’t think you’re moral monsters for torturing and murdering sentient beings.
People can either eat straight up plant-based food, or alternatively go for lab grown meat. There's no need to go through all the inefficiency and suffering of factory farms.
I haven’t looked to see if studies have been done to look at the nutritional profile of lab grown vs normal meat. I’d be curious about that as well before I tried it.
So we have these animals, which eat plants and generate fuel (poop) & food (meat). Our bodies are adapted to eating them, our bodies need the same nutrients, and we’re programmed to enjoy the food. The input to this process is mostly grass and grain, both generated via solar power.
Now instead… we take grain, highly process it and make someone few people enjoy, with less nutrients, and likely some unforeseen by products. They can then sell it at a higher price.
At the end of the day, we know what works. It doesn’t make sense to try and reinvent the wheel without benefit.
The more interesting part, is imo there will be a lot of nutrition we miss
A lot of time, energy, and land goes to just keeping the animal alive and metabolizing. And you’re left with the problem of a lot of the parts of the animal are of low value.
Lab grown meat could, in theory, be much more efficient. Just quickly grow the muscles people actually want to eat.
There are also a lot of potential ethical issues with the way meat is raised at scale.
However the comment implying it’s an option currently is ridiculous. It’s nowhere near ready for scale. Might as well cite that Star Trek meal thingy (replicator?).
This is just for beef, of course. It is hard to overstate how reliant most developed countries are on chicken and, especially, basically every part of a pig.
In reality it is the poor who are most affected by climate change, diseases, lack of food safety... If the people really cared about poor folks they would be arguing for more regulations, higher taxes, against credit card programs and lots of other things which effectively end up transferring wealth from the poor to the rich.
Over in Scotland their national dish is haggis, which is a bunch of organ meats minced up, and then they add in some oats to bulk it up and make it go further.
There are solutions to use more of the animal and stretch it. I almost never hear about people eating organ meats in the US anymore. People just find factory farmed cuts at rock bottom prices.
The invention of fire revolutionized eating, the invention of agriculture revolutionized access to food at a fundamental level, the invention of refrigeration and freezing vastly expanded the reach and safety of food from point of harvest to dinner table, and the past century or so has dramatically democratized the kinds of food a person can choose to eat.
This notion of sacrificing Quality of Eating(tm) is therefore a non-starter, humanity demands and strives for better eating. Any proposal to change how we produce food must accept it must co-exist with continued improvements to eating.
With 70% of the west being obese or overweight I think the pendulum swung way too far.
> This notion of sacrificing Quality of Eating(tm) is therefore a non-starter
When did factory farms meat become quality ?? I think you're mistaking quantity and low price for quality.
You'd have to be blind to not see how the quality of food decreased in the past decades, my grandparents ate much less meat but almost everything was local
The computers we have at home and in our pockets are inferior in quality to enterprise servers and mainframes, but everyone has computers and nobody is willing to go back to simple Casio calculators and slide rules.
The meats we have at home are inferior in quality to artisan meats, but everyone has meats and nobody is willing to go back to eating other people's refuse (I'm aware organ meats are perfectly fine food, but let's be real for a moment) and porridge every day.
Our access to food today is nothing short of utterly insane to people just a century ago, and rightfully noone is willing to let it go.
> and rightfully noone is willing to let it go.
A cancer also won't let go even if it means the death of its host.
Your analogy is plain wrong because there is 0 trade off in your example, the right analogy would be to trade your $1500 iphone for five $100 backdoored chinese phones of much lower quality and pretend you're happier because you have more
It's not easy to feed so many people so many different kinds of food at a price most people can afford. When I said the past century dramatically democratized our diets, that was achieved by improving the efficiency of production and transport of food to such an extent that was only possible with modern industrial innovations.
>Also you're completely ignoring the externalities and the long term consequences both on the environment and on human health,
And likewise I would argue you guys are ignoring the benefits to and desires of humanity.
>if the question was just about having meat or not having meat we wouldn't have this discussion.
Except that usually is ultimately the question, because inevitably the discussion degenerates into "we can eat <X> instead of <Y>". I'm saying that such conversations will convince noone because it ignores the reality of humans desiring to eat something and whatever else specifically.
>Your analogy is plain wrong because there is 0 trade off in your example,
The trade off is having a limited diet, possibly enforced from the top down. As I said previously, humanity has striven to widen its diet for as long as humanity has existed. This is a trade off that simply will not receive consensus.
…rightfully noone is willing…
I don’t believe this is right in the moral sense or in a global optimization sense. The world’s people are getting richer and as the world’s population begins to live more and more like Americans the world becomes exponentially more polluted. This will eventually affect us all. The world is becoming a toxic shithole. The right thing to do is to make changes now. But for the reasons you stated this isn’t going to happen. As a species we are local optimization machines and we don’t seek to find the global optimum.
I would strongly advise easing off on your intake of mainstream news media, the real world is quite pleasant out here.
Isn’t it a mathematical fact that if Americans consume exponentially more resources than others then as more people gain wealth commensurate with Americans then exponentially more resources will be consumed? Or do you think Americans are especially greedy in this respect? I had not considered that possibility.
https://www.foxnews.com/health/forever-chemicals-found-us-dr...
https://www.foxnews.com/world/india-new-delhi-air-pollution-...
https://www.foxnews.com/health/contaminated-beach-water-coul...
https://www.foxnews.com/world/global-air-pollution-persists-...
None. Go out there and enjoy life, life is way too short to be spending it listening to so-called journalists peddling anger and fear.
EDIT: Looking at your past comments it’s clear you do consume news! What a surprise given your comment.
And human health didn't recover for thousands of years
Out of the 5 vegan and 8 vegetarian options, only the soy protein is cheaper than meat.
I might replace one meal a week with the soy protein, but I'd be concerned about long term effects of phytoestrogen, especially on growing children? Mind you many foods have some hidden soy 'bulk' nowadays.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/soy/ relates to understanding of health benefits/detriments of soy.
Moreover, it is well established research that most modern western diets contain too much animal products. If you think that living vegetarian causes so much problems, you need to explain how many cultures who live almost exclusively vegetarian (e.g. In some areas of India) without significant health problems.
How about beans, lentils, and frozen peas?
That said, I merely posted this data because I looked it up and found it interesting as a comparison.
This likely wont happen in my lifetime. It will only change when the change is forced. When we’ve made too much of the planet a toxic waste dump then people will be forced to change.
It is ultra processed in name, not nutrition.
By the way, humans are the only species drinking the milk of another animal, or after childhood.
That said, plenty of oil free alt milks out there.
Even pigs know when to stop eating
Cows milk is also cooked, and homogenised.
(and cow milk often has similar additives, so this isn't supporting the original claim)
It has 15g of protein per 500ml, a ton of calcium and 350ish calories.
Super nutritious.
It has 18g of protein per 480ml, 60mg of calcium, and 200 calories. (Also 2.4mg of iron and 860mg of potassium)
The only ingredients are water and soybeans.
That's also 1/3 of your saturated fat in a single glass.
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob...
Do you also complain about peanut butter ? There is no butter in peanuts
So yeah, plants. It's painful, but we've gone beyond what we can do on this planet.
Any increase in size is coming from deforestation, which is devastating to our planet. [2]
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use
[2] https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/deforestat...
You are discounting civilizations ability to adapt and invent by an absolutely incredible margin that is not supported by our own history of human events.
The distribution of resources in the world is grossly unfair and it is not sustainable that 8 billion people live the way Americans live.
As it stands now the world is already becoming a pollution infested shithole. Imagine what happens when 7 billion more people live like us.
For every rich and wasteful person in the world there is a poor person that lives in scarcity and „offsets“ the wasteful lifestyle. So we’re kind of at a limit when you want to make a genuine effort to continue fighting poverty.
Let's start with treating animals with respect, don't feed them (literal in some cases) trash and take hygiene way more seriously. We have a pretty good idea how disease spreads, and still there is a large fraction of farms, feed and livestock processing facilities that are absolutely disgusting by any standard.
It's not just gross, it greatly facilitates the spread and crossings of disease. We simply can no longer allow these facilities to exist: too dangerous for consumers, and food security as a whole. And the animals themselves of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Feedlot-1.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Confined-animal-feed...
I assure you, wild birds are around.
Diary cows are kept inside and isolated from everything else since if the cow is sick you have to treat it and dump all milk obtained for a month afterwards.
("The cows never get to see the sun" doesn't really sell me on factory farming, either.)
Side note: The second photo is noted as a dairy on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dairy_farming#Concerns.
Why should "huffing aerosolized pathogenic virus/bacteria in an enclosed space can be bad for you" be controversial?
Milking parlors tend to be pretty enclosed, and dairy farms being all enclosed was your original claim. Even the ones that let cows out to pasture or use external feed lots may have barns for winter, bad weather, safety at night, etc.
> If we grant an enclosed space then we can also apply air filters.
We could barely be bothered for COVID, let alone here.
So virus that can be cultured into existence of out of milk presents a possible vector for that. Hence they are testing to see if they can grow the virus from milk samples.
If each person drinks milk from one cow, and there are 1 million of each, then you have 1 million chances.
A chance is higher if a cow has a few mutations in its viruses, or if a person has a slightly different receptor or immune system...
But if you put all the milk from the 1 million cows in a mixing vat and then distribute it to the same 1 million people, now there are 1 trillion chances, and the slightly better mutations will end up coming into contact with the humans with slightly more receptive cells.
This is one of many reasons I think we should limit the fanin/fanout of food production. Ie. you may only mix animal products in say batches of up to 10,000 cows, and that batch may only be split up amongst up to 10,000 humans. Then you have to clean the production equipment before the next batch.
There is no live virus in the milk.
> The results show that at 54.5 °C, the virus [SARS-CoV-2] half-life was 10.8 ± 3.0 min and the time for a 90% decrease in infectivity was 35.4 ± 9.0 min. [1]
At 8.5 degrees hotter, I'm sure stuff happens quicker, but I doubt very much it kills them all. This study is in air - in liquid I imagine they would survive to a higher temperature.
It's far from clear that all virus particles are inactivated by pasteurization. Remember the main purpose of pasteurization is to kill most bacteria, to increase shelf life.
The OG Vaccine was rubbing pus from cowpox pustules into a scratch on your body.
Seems that way!
Now do anti-microbial resistant pathogens appearing at factory (fish and other) farms.
Plus, don't run experiments on your own body.
Rapid inactivation of rotaviruses by exposure to acid buffer or acidic gastric juice: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2999315/
The annihilation of the virus and the absorption of all of the wreckage is what gives humans immunity without actually becoming infected.
Generally speaking, the only viruses that make it past the stomach do so in people who already have an illness or are taking medications that raise stomach pH.
Many "stomach viruses" that are transmitted orally actually infect the body at the pharynx and then make their way down to the intestines where they go wild.
Do you have a source for that claim? "Wreckage" would be sufficiently different from the live virus to not elicit an immune response.
The live polio vaccine infects the person with an attenuated virus. The target of the polio virus is intestinal epithelial cells.
There are hundreds of diseases that infect the lower digestive tract (both viral and bacterial) that clearly result from these infectious agents passing through the stomach unaltered.
It may be true that many viruses are destroyed by stomach acid, but you only need a few unaltered viruses to make it through.
Studies show that viruses bound to surfaces can survive stomach acid. Viruses can be bound to food or other particles which can protect them from stomach contents.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019567012...
"FCV survived in synthetic gastric fluid at pH values as low as 2.5 and in some cases as low as 1.5 for at least 30 min when associated with certain materials."
So how does food poisoning happen?
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/environment/article/2024/04/24/bir...
The one with the later expiration was $4 more a pound.
Is this inflation or something to do with the H5N1?
- "The researchers expect additional lab studies currently underway to show that those samples don’t contain live virus with the capability to cause human infections"
There does seem to be confusion on this reporting. NY Times claiming FDA confirmed just fragments, others saying they did not.
No live virus.
https://www.fda.gov/food/alerts-advisories-safety-informatio...
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/avianflu/candidate-vaccine-virus.htm
I suspect with the apparent extinction of the B/Yamagata line, that'd free up a slot in the quadravalent vaccine.