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Comment by quitit | Hacker News Reader

Just a few tangental facts:

The H5N1 virus currently causing havoc in the USA is also present in the dairy system (and is likely to continue spreading as it's spread by migratory birds).

On average this results in 30% of supermarket milk in the USA testing positive to H5N1. As that milk is pasteurised this doesn't present harm, however continual testing is taking place to ensure that this holds up.

However consumption of unpasteurised milk presents a risk (beyond the usual risks of Listeria, Salmonella, etc.) Normally this wouldn't be an issue but raw milk is being popularised by certain social media influencers and has also been a regular talking point of Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who frequently makes unsubstantiated health claims.

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I don’t drink unpasteurised milk but I find it disturbing that when animals get disease ridden our first thought is to kill the bacteria, not making sure animals wellbeing is taken care of (bigger spaces for them, increased animal vaccine research funding ).

It feels like a tax on the younger generation. They get worse and worse quality and they don’t even know about it.

Why do people care so much that other people want to drink (potentially unsafe) unpasteurized milk? What's the point in policing it? You can literally poison yourself a million ways, milk is the least concern.

Diseases spread and mutate, so one person becoming infected with a human H5N1 crossover now increases the odds of other people getting it. Remember when most people did not care about bat viruses, and then very quickly we saw one go global and mutate significantly?

There’s also commonly a child endangerment argument: unpasteurized milk is one of the more dangerous things you can drink, and kids can’t give informed consent but the rest of society at least used to agree that helping them reach the age where they can make their own decisions is a good thing.

I don’t care about milk, but in general we don’t want the health care system swamped by preventable things on a large scale. This an issue in Covid that was impossible to hammer into the freedom nuts and current measles fans. I say this as a physician who worked covid wards. Here there were times when there were no more icu beds or ventilators available and people with unrelated medical issues were badly affected by that.

You can make an argument against me by extending it to saying let’s ban antifreeze or whatever by my logic but that isn’t usually something that scales the same way because it’s a relatively rare but serious event someone drinks it compared to public health measures in a population level with a small change to a high frequency but variable event rate.

The counterpoint is that the vast majority of people will do their best to avoid food poisoning (among other things). The logic behind the emergency policies that apply to outbreaks have little to nothing in common with mundane day to day operations.

What's the actual incidence rate when informed people ingest raw milk on a regular basis over a long period?

I'm this case, the risk is that the more people exposed to bird flu, the more likely that a variant evolves that can pass from person to person, increasing the risk of a pandemic.

The rise of backyard chickens is probably also going to increase this risk.

Because you might not poison only yourself. You might become a breeding reactor for a new strain that more easily spreads between humans, affecting those who aren't drinking risky milk.

Same reason why people care about others not getting vaccinations for easily communicable diseases that can kill or debilitate. If they were the only ones who could be affected by that decision, fine, do what you want. But you put others at risk, a risk they may not be happy to need to burden themselves with.

A contagious virus is not "poison". It can transmit to others. Anyone who takes actions that cause them to be infected with a potentially deadly virus, and transmits it to others, potentially killing them, should be tried for the equivalent of attempted murder.

Feel free to poison yourself.

I won't condone you poisoning others by selling them poison falsely labeled as food.

I would very cynically add: but if you do poison yourself intentionally, please have the courtesy to not use shared finite social resources like hospitals dealing with the consequences so the rest of us aren’t affected by it.

You can poison yourself if you like, but the state steps in to prevent you doing the same to your children, elderly relatives and other vulnerable people in your care.

Poisoning yourself is not the same as being a participant in strengthening and spreading a virus or bacteria and encouraging others to do it.

Mainly disease/epidemiology control supposedly, but this usually rides backseat to monopoly barriers of entry.

The high temperature pasteurization makes it so you can't use products for a number of things you used to be able to do like cheese making, so its about segmenting the market in monopoly to increase profit.

To be fair, a lot of the regulations come from a time when the concern truly was about contaminated animal products, and not about trying to protect an industry. Milk, meat, eggs..etc, all suffered contamination problems as the food industry began to heavily industrialize in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

They still do. It's unavoidable. Yes you can make it much safer, but the cleanest farm is still a farm. There's no way around it.

Nobody is worried about the threat of Small Cheese lol. Pasteurization is about safety, full stop. Farm animals are literal breeding grounds for disease and plagues.

You can absolutely make cheese from pasteurized milk, and in fact the vast majority of cheese is.

You can make cheese from regular pasteurized milk.

You cannot make cheese from HTST or UHT pasteurized milk. The temperatures degrade the proteins. Most Milk today in the US is HTST or UHT, this was not always the case.

All have pasteurized in the name, but they are very different processes.

> You cannot make cheese from HTST or UHT pasteurized milk.

Saying you can't make cheese from HTST milk seems like a great overstatement. While it might not be ideal for some cheeses, it certainly works for a lot of home cheesemaking.

Here's an overview of different pasteurization methods and how it affects cheese: https://www.ecosnippets.com/cheese-making/how-do-different-p...

Do you disagree with its conclusion that while LTLT is better for Brie and Cheddar, HTST milk is just fine for mozzarella and gouda? Because I've certainly used it to make cheese I found tasty.

If I were you, I would take a grain of salt with any article on that site, and verify everything thoroughly from known good, reputable and safe sources.

It looks like the site's articles may have at least in part been partially AI generated, there is misinformation there. Just enough to make it look plausible, while neglecting the risks.

When the milk proteins degrade in these high temperature processes, the cheese does not curd well thereafter; its a one way process, and that leads to food safety issues. The proteins no longer completely separate properly, and the moisture does not get low enough during that separation and denaturing process; as it would normally. All the good bacteria have also been killed off.

Moisture leads to spoilage, and of course there is also the potential for silently dying by botulinum toxin, or illness related to fungal/mold spores that contaminate it and grow, though the latter excepting botulism, is noticeable most times but not always.

Milk is not acidic with only a 6.8pH, and the toxin produces in environments above 3.8-4pH depending on the media. The hard cheeses only get down to 5.1 and that's during the normal cheese making process without HTST milk.

You can certainly get a product that looks and may even taste like a low quality cheese, but cheese that must be refrigerated continuously after being made is not real cheese.

You gamble with your health if you treat that product like cheese.

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