H5N1 survival in milk

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influenza-bird-flu/study-finds-live-avian-flu-virus-raw-milk-more-1-day-room-temperature-1
Some UK workers seem to have redone research that had already been done on the US on the survival of influneza in milk, and found pretty much the same thing.  Infective virus can survive in refrigerated milk for about a week.  This has been known for for over half a year in the US. The CDC's own study indicating that the virus might survive the most common form of pasteurization got the FDA to finally try to test the milk products back in Oct 2024.
The CIDRAP claims that it has been shown that pasteurization kills the virus, but actually the proper study was never done.  All the FDA did was test several hundred samples of dairy products that they got out of retail stores and they did not find live virus in the positive samples. There was no control for how long the milk products had existed after pasteurization.  The CDC found that the virus would stay infective for at least 4 days.  The FDA announced that they were going to do more testing of pasteurized milk after the CDC research was published in Oct. 2024, but their "Silo Study" never got off the ground, and no results were ever published on what they found if they had even tried.  The last report on the study had them looking for volunteers (milk processing plants and dairy farms), but apparently they didn't get any takers.  It was a stupid study design that likely would not have answered the question effectively.  They needed to go to processing plants accepting infected milk and test the milk before processing and at various points during processing, but that was never done.  The Missouri patients and one California child's only contact with dairy cows was the dairy products that they ingested, but they never tested the processing plants involved.
Ron Okimoto
Ron Okimoto