A health alarm was raised across the United States after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Tuesday (April 23) said that they had found fragments of the bird flu virus in a few samples of pasteurised milk in the United States.

A health alarm was raised across the United States after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Tuesday (April 23) said that they had found fragments of the bird flu virus in a few samples of pasteurised milk in the United States. Although the agency has maintained that the milk is safe for consumption, it emphasised that it is still waiting for the results of the test to confirm this. The findings of the FDA emerged less than a month after the H5N1 strain of bird flu was discovered for the first time in dairy cows in several states. Since then, the flu has been detected in herds in eight states. Also Read: Experts flag potential Bird Flu epidemic as '100 times worse than Covid' The FDA has been working to investigate the outbreak with the US Department of Agriculture and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. Commercial milk supply is safe, says FDA The FDA said that the fragments of the virus were discovered when the pasteurised milk samples were tested. The testing method used is called PCR testing which looks for bits of genetic material. If the result is positive, that doesn't mean they have found a live, infectious virus. Watch: USDA reveals bird flu updates, Cattle movement implicated in bird flu outbreak “Based on available information, pasteurisation is likely to inactivate the virus, however, the process is not expected to remove the presence of viral particles,” said the agency in a release that it plans to make public on Tuesday. “To date, we have seen nothing that would change our assessment that the commercial milk supply is safe. Results from multiple studies will be made available in the next few days to weeks,” added the agency. Specifically, the FDA is looking at whether bird flu in cow milk is inactivated by pasteurisation. The findings will be available in the “next few days to weeks,” it stated. The FDA in its testing will use egg inoculation tests, which are seen as the gold standard to determine if a sample is infectious. In this test, they inject a chicken egg with a small amount of infected milk and observe if the active virus starts to replicate. (With inputs from agencies)

FDA traces fragments of bird flu virus in pasteurised milk, detailed report awaited

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US: FDA traces fragments of Bird Flu virus in pasteurised milk

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