@QuietLurker@mastodon.social

I'm never offended by questions, although I'm definitely not an expert. Just someone with a science background who reads a lot, and used to have a head cheese maker roommate for years :)

I know you didn't really ask about eggs, but, you mentioned them. I put eggs and chicken in the same category for now, personally. I don't see any substantial change in their situation just because cows got H5N1. There's something like 430 billion birds in the world and 90 million cows in the US. It's not a huge reservoir overall, although, any new viral reservoir can lead to new and often unpredictable mutations.

Sour cream's a great question and I don't have a great answer beyond making sure it's made with pasteurized milk/cream.

I did read somewhere recently that a lot of Mexican-style soft cheeses are sometimes allowed to use unpasteurized milk. I haven't dug into the subject deeply, but, if that's true, I'd say the same thing about your cheese. Just make sure it's from pasteurized milk.

Somewhere in the thread above was a mention that something like 4% of people supposedly drink raw milk more than 1 time per year. If that's true, that would be something like 13 million people. That seems impossibly large to me, but, let's assume it's correct for the moment. If even 10% of them were currently sick with bird flu, that would be over a million people. I think we'd know. I'm not saying that there's no risk at all. Clearly, we've made some changes just to be on the safe side, but, to date, I don't see any evidence that there's a lot of people with bird flu, unless it's simply not distinguishable from COVID.