Raw milk fans plan to drink up as experts warn of high levels of H5N1 virus - eviltoast
  • Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    6 months ago

    The institute’s founder, Mark McAfee, told the Los Angeles Times this weekend that his customers are, in fact, specifically requesting raw milk from H5N1-infected cows. According to McAfee, his customers believe, without evidence, that directly drinking high levels of the avian influenza virus will give them immunity to the deadly pathogen.

    Looks like it’s going to be a fun flu season this year 🫠 Every day I feel more justified in my decision to relentlessly mask with an N95 every time I’m indoors in public.

    • Grass@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      didn’t cats already get the virus from drinking the raw milk? honestly at this point if only they wouldn’t end up infecting a bunch of other likely non-retarded individuals, I’d be inclined to just let them kill themselves with this and pass on beleiving that they proved their point. More realistically, they will probably spread it and kill a bunch of other people that way then still act like they have uncovered some great fucking secret, while somehow being the only survivors of the incident.

  • MyOpinion@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    These raw milk fools never learn. Raw milk has always been dangerous. Now even more dangerous. Avoid raw milk.

      • Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        You say that like it’s a way to get infections from Campylobacter, E. coli, Listeria, Salmonella, Brucella, and Cryptosporidium

        • Tarquinn2049@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          That’s just a bunch of big science words for “exotic”, doesn’t exotic milk sound delicious? I’ll drink my wild and untamed milk that is free from all the rules society uses to make it boring and safe. And since even I’m not sure if this is coming across sarcastic, /s. And for good measure, /poe’s.

        • The_v@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Don’t forget Baccilus cereus and Clostridium perfringens.

          Although the abdominal cramps and extreme diarrhea might be considered a normal day for those morons.

          • Noodle07@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            That’s not the virus, that’s my lactose intolerance when I’m eating a liter of ice cream

      • capital@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Commenters in here fully on board with advocating against raw milk because they don’t drink it.

        As soon as you advocate against something which is the source of many of our zoonotic diseases they downvote because they do not want to stop eating animals.

        People who would downvote the above comment: we see you like you see raw milk drinkers.

      • halferect@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Kinda, it’s regulated because it can be so unsafe and even then you are kinda risking a bad time drinking raw milk. There is a reason we pasturise it.

        • Aux@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Well, that’s the point of regulations - to make food good and safe.

          • halferect@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            Yeah I understand but the regulations are basically to protect people from being exposed to it. So it’s still unsafe but because it’s so regulated you have to find sources for it and those sources have to prove they don’t have sick cows to sell you raw milk I assume a lot of not safe milk gets through so I would argue that it isn’t safe to drink raw milk ever no matter what unless you are a baby cow and even them it still might kill you… they banned it in Scotland since its dangerous and you can’t buy it in any markets anywhere in the uk

            • Aux@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              That logic can be applied to literally everything. You can’t just sell random shit and say it’s food. Not sure why you’re arguing. The point is that raw milk is safe, food in the US is not.

  • FirstCircle@lemmy.ml
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    6 months ago

    The California-based Raw Milk Institute called the warnings “clearly fearmongering.” The institute’s founder, Mark McAfee, told the Los Angeles Times this weekend that his customers are, in fact, specifically requesting raw milk from H5N1-infected cows. According to McAfee, his customers believe, without evidence, that directly drinking high levels of the avian influenza virus will give them immunity to the deadly pathogen.

    By all means, drink up, morons, get the hell out of our gene pool, we’ve got enough troubles without your Dimwit DNA.

    • CareHare@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      I know there are also conspiracy theories around pasteurization. Supposedly it doesn’t work and you don’t need it. Oh and viruses are a hoax. Or at least that’s what my very self educated husband of my cousin believes.

      • 8ender@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Can we just call this what it is as likely troll farm activity to sow discord in western society. I’m tired of it now being called out.

          • the_third@feddit.de
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            6 months ago

            Nah, I think it’s more like: people that have constantly experienced being second row in everything suddenly have something they can feel smarter than everyone about. So they do.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        “Viruses are a hoax” seems to have been growing ever since COVID. I never encountered it before that, now I’ve encountered it multiple times. There was a guy in the skeptic sub on Reddit who came in to argue like mad that viruses didn’t exist.

          • RGB3x3@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            People were lined up around street corners to get the polio vaccine when it came out because they all knew just how horrible polio was.

            And now that we’ve had decades of basically no polio because of the vaccine, people think vaccines aren’t needed, are dangerous, and that diseases are a hoax.

            Education is critical.

            • Andonyx@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              I do work for a bunch of pharmaceutical companies and developing nation health outreach type organizations. (Don’t ask me much technical, I’m not personally on the medical side.) But I can tell you that most major pharmas, Health NGOs and Government drug safety regulatory bodies are keenly aware that “Vaccines are a victim of their own success.” They have multiple approaches to dealing with the problem that a successful vaccine campaign makes the need for the vaccines socially invisible. There are varying degrees of success, but not a lot of generalized and reliable ways to combat this kind of cognitive disconnect.

        • tal@lemmy.today
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          There was a guy in the skeptic sub on Reddit who came in to argue like mad that viruses didn’t exist.

          What did he think they were? Bacteria? People and doctors colluding to fake symptoms? Demonic possession?

          I mean, said guy has to have had the common cold at some point.

            • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
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              6 months ago

              You joke, but I have an uncle who is basically on the liberal version of the COVID conspiracies who seems to be saying exactly this now. That big pharma is engineering everything from pandemics to allergies to psychosis to sell drugs. And that we should revert to monke to survive.

          • kase@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            Good question, I would like to know as well. I wonder if he thinks that getting “sick” is something that bodies just do, no virus required. Or maybe that it’s because of the fluoride in the water. Idk, just spitballing here; my money is on demonic possession for sure.

        • Ranvier@sopuli.xyz
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          6 months ago

          The spectrum of human thought is astounding some times.

          On the one hand you have people adamant that viruses don’t even exist against all rational thought, reason, the almost daily experience of their existence, and over a hundred years of scientific research around the world learning more about them in detail and cataloguing at least 15,000 distinct species.

          While simultaneously you have people who know so much that they can manipulate viruses into becoming our own little machines to deliver working copies of genes straight into particular types of cells in someone’s body and treat their deadly genetic illness with gene therapy.

    • Aux@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I always find it interesting that Americans are scared of raw foods. No raw milk, no carpaccio or tartare, raw pork is a no-no and raw seafood is an instant death. Really tells you that the food quality in the US is very low.

        • Aux@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          It is extremely rare in the UK https://parasitesandvectors.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13071-017-2280-8

          You’re more likely to get poisoning from cooked rice. If cooked rice is ok, raw pork is more than ok.

          You should also know one thing about food in the UK - if some infection is found in the food chain, Brits tend to obliterate the whole animal stock to stop it. A lot of diseases don’t exist in the UK because Brits annihilated whole animal populations. Like tick bourne encephalitis, for example. Or rabies. Or when whole chicken farms are burned to the ground when one bird gets avian flu. We take this shit real serious.

  • Etterra@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    You know I used to think that would be great for all of these idiots to catch and die from whatever plagues they damn well like. But then I remembered that there are children in the world, And then also immuno-compromised people. Innocent people don’t deserve to be the victims of mass stupidity, especially children. If you’re stupid enough to do something terminal or life ruining, fine, just make sure that it doesn’t impact anyone else. Go destroy yourself in private.

    • pantyhosewimp@lemmynsfw.com
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      6 months ago

      It’s my hypothesis that a lot of stupid Trump voters exist because seatbelt laws prevented stupid people from killing their kids. Kids who inherited their parents stupidity and here we are today. Regarding stupid people killing their own kids thru their own stupidity, maybe we should take a Star Trek “no interference in primitive civilizations” stance.

      • Hadriscus@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        Oh, I know that “no interference” idea from Arthur Clarke, in “Songs of Distant Earth”. This was shown in Star Trek ? I haven’t watched yet

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          In Star Trek, one of their most important rules is called the “Prime Directive” and it forbids them from interfering in the natural evolution of primitive cultures (where “primitive” means anyone who hasn’t figured out either warp drive or subspace communication). The movie “First Contact” is about humanity’s first warp flight and the subsequent visit from a passing Vulcan ship that starts the transition of Earth from post-apocalyptic wasteland with continued technological advancement to the Utopia it’s shown as in the main series.

          It’s one of their few laws that gets explicitly referenced a lot. And broken a lot, though usually either by accident or because of special circumstances. They also have a similar rule in The Orville and IMO do a really good job of exploring it and the implications of both following and breaking it.

          Btw for any Star Trek fans that have passed on The Orville thinking that it must be a silly parody since it’s by one of the makers of family guy, give it a shot. It’s a comedy, yes, but it fully respects what they are doing and doesn’t try to turn it into a big joke. I hold it just below any of the Star Trek series. The writing isn’t quite as good, though I’d put the storytelling on par.

  • kinther@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    If we all have to endure another pandemic that will further worsen our overall health… we really do live in the dumbest timeline.

    • HessiaNerd@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I think I may have long COVID or something… I got COVID in November, recovered, then caught a cold in January and have been sick since. I just want to be healthy. Why do the stupidest among us have to fuck everything up?

      • Poik@pawb.social
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        6 months ago

        Good luck. Don’t catch covid again if you can help it. Repeated exposure makes it worse. Pretty sure that’s where I’m at. At least I’ve been up to date with vaccines or it could have been much worse, likely.

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      6 months ago

      When someone catches it from drinking raw milk with the virus in it, it might affect other people too.

      What we really do not want to happen is for human-to-human transmission to start, and every time a human gets infected, it helps create a risk for a mutation that starts that going. We know that the virus is in the milk supply right now, so it’s not just some distant hypothetical.

      If you remember, we had a lot of criticism for China over the role that wet markets with live animals might have played in starting the jump to humans on COVID-19. I’d rather not turn right around and have us be responsible for creating a window for a new pandemic due to doing something similar.

    • No_Eponym@lemmy.ca
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      6 months ago

      Probably how the raw milk sinkers think of themselves too. Super-powered, misunderstood, fighting an oppressive government, actually the hero.

      The reality? Bit-character, backwater hicks.

  • MrEff@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    It’s all milky fun and games with a side of creamy fat until someone gets a case of brucellosis.

    • JovialMicrobial@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      I’m kinda ashamed of this, but I used to prefer the raw milk from a local dairy farm because it comes with all the fat and cream(you have to shake it before drinking) and it tasted soo freaking good. They vaccinate their cows and only have about 8 of them.
      However, I will not be buying that anymore and go back to buying pasteurized all the time. The taste isn’t worth risking h5n1. I know it’s a pretty stupid thing to do since other illnesses can happen from raw milk, but I guess it’s better late than never to stop doing that

      • melisdrawing@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Dude, you were taking a calculated risk before, and the calculations have changed. Good on you for adapting to this very real threat to our collective well-being.

        • JovialMicrobial@lemm.ee
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          6 months ago

          Thanks for saying this, I hadn’t thought about it that way. I still feel foolish for taking any risk in the first place, but h5n1 is just messed up levels of scary.

      • lagomorphlecture@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        Yeah you can totally get unhomogenized milk that is pasteurized. They sell one brand at my local grocery store. Look for some in your area.

        Edit: they would refer to it as cream top most likely.

        • JovialMicrobial@lemm.ee
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          6 months ago

          Thank you! I didn’t know that was available as a product and will keep my eye out for it. Probably just as good too

      • Andonyx@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        As Melisdrawing made clear, never feel bad about using new information to make a better decision.

        • JovialMicrobial@lemm.ee
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          Thank you, I still feel a kinda dumb, but a little less so now. I appreciate the quote and will be saving it for use in the future

      • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
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        6 months ago

        Milk is gross. You are an adult human not a baby cow. What a great time to break a weird habit.

  • InternetUser2012@midwest.social
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    6 months ago

    Biden should tell everyone NOT to drink raw milk. Farmers will make tons of money and love him for it, and darwin will take over costing tRump votes. The end result will make for a better America.

    • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      At this point Biden could summon a genie to grant everyone in America three wishes and people would still blame him for not giving them six wishes.

  • Red_October@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Can we just skip to producing a vaccine for this now? If they’re that intent on giving it every possible chance to jump to humans, and we obviously can’t stop them, let’s at least try to contain it before we get Pandemic 2: Electric Boogaloo.

    • Ranvier@sopuli.xyz
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      6 months ago

      We have made H5N1 avian flu vaccines many times before. We have one developed as recently as 2020 that’s been approved by the FDA for use in humans, not sure how great it is against the current incarnation though. Flu is quite good at evading vaccines, hence the need for frequent updates.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/H5N1_vaccine

      The US government funds vaccine development for viruses that might become a problem at some point. There’s also work into expanding rna vaccine technology, which can allow for very quick updates as viruses change. We need way more work and funding on pandemic prep and surveillance. We’ve all seen how devestating a global pandemic can be. Even if the vast majority developed never end up needing use, one of them may save millions of lives.

      https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/vaccine-makers-are-preparing-for-bird-flu/

      Anyways, if an H5N1 pandemic started tomorrow, there’s a vaccine that would probably be helpful already made. Would need to be scaled up massively in production of course though.