why is cows milk affected by bird flu?
In: Biology
Bird flu can jump species. We’re having an outbreak that mostly hits water fowl but also raccoons. It’s why the combination of pigs, poultry and humans can make for wild flu variants as they get handed from species to species and mutate along the way.
The current problem with cows/cattle in the US is the gross practice of feeding used poultry litter to them. Broiler chicken are kept in large halls. Some stables can hold 50.000 chicken at once. The chicken are kept on the same litter all their (short) lives, and spill feed into it. Why waste chicken feed when you can feed it to cows, along with 40days worth of chicken shit (and the occasional dead bird).
Flu viruses don’t survive long outside their hosts and chicken die like flies when they catch it. So the poultry litter is not sooooo terribly contaminated, but that’s the best guess what’s the source of the problem, because it doesn’t happen elsewhere with saner regulations.
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