Update: that "bird flu in milk" panic thread got the pasteurization science backwards, and I can prove it
Last week I saw a thread here with 2,000 upvotes saying live bird flu virus was found in grocery store milk and that pasteurization doesn't kill it. That's flat wrong, and it's the exact kind of mix-up that makes every other theory on this board look bad. The FDA and USDA tested samples from stores in Ohio and Texas back in April 2024, and they did find viral fragments, but fragments are just dead pieces of RNA, not live virus that can infect you. The real study everyone quotes came out of a lab at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and it showed that heat treatment at 145 degrees for 30 minutes knocked the virus down to undetectable levels, which is exactly how milk is treated. People keep sharing screenshots of the word "positive" from those tests without reading the next sentence that says no live virus was grown from any sample. I know this because my sister works at a dairy co-op outside Madison and walked me through the actual lab reports line by line. So before you post that milk is dangerous, check whether the source says fragments or infectious virus, because those two words mean totally different things. Has anyone else noticed how often a real test result gets twisted into something way scarier than what it actually says?