Thought experiment time:
Raw milk consumption seems to be widespread and this virus seems to be present in some form in ~20% of the commercial sampled pasteurized milk products in the country. 46 infected herds have been documents. At what point do we expect to see raw milk drinkers indisputably coming down with this? If, after a few months we don't see a wave of infections (possibly not transmitting onward) affecting raw milk drinkers, what can we conclude?
1. Gastrointestinal infection with this virus isn't easy in humans.
2. Animals such as cats, baby goats, etc are either being infected via some other route or drinking more or less direct from an infected animal is important in some way.
3. Something in milk itself renders the virus inert after a certain period (ph or something) and only "straight from the cow" is dangerous from the perspective of this virus.
Some other factor? If so, what?
From what I know, you're right on the money. Milk making contact with respiratory cilia/oral & nasal mucosa might be relevant for fresh milk/straight-from-the-cow scenarios, but even in cats -- given the autopsy data from Texas -- it doesn't look like gastrointestinal infection occurred. Airborne is almost certainly being downplayed and will almost certainly continue to be downplayed
@currentbias Right now I don't have a horse in the race. We've got a very incomplete picture imo and I there are so many questions which would be so easy to answer from simple experimentation. If those experiments are being done, they're not being released to the public. You could sequester a couple dozen cats away from each other and bring them warm milk direct from an infected cow and see how many get infected. That would provide a strong indication of milk as an infectious route.
This team:
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/14/7/07-1468_article
are doing testing of the samples in Germany right now.
There's just not a lot of BSL-3 labs that are equipped to deal with cattle and there's a lot of rules and regulations involved.
