Rant: Legacy media sucks shit. I’m not an epidemiologist and I need context but 74% seems really fucking bad to me.

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I googled but only Twitter and Bluesky have info. The page is at usda.gov and the data stuff doesn’t load for me. There’s a “Download Data” link at the top if you have the same problem.

I based my headline on this Bluesky post.

H5N1 Bird Flu Spreads Rapidly Through California Dairy Herds

The USDA has confirmed that five more dairy herds in California are infected, bringing the total number to 732.

As of now, 74% of the state’s dairy herds have tested positive for the virus.

[Bluesky link deleted]

  • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    Just for the benefit of future historians, I have to mention Colorado- H5N1’s primary origin- and its feral approach to dairies every time I see a story about it.

    Obviously raw milk is bad. If you have a counterargument, fuck you I don’t care. It’s bad and the most rudimentary public health enforcement understands it as such. You can’t sell raw milk in Colorado because that’s enabling multiple epidemics.

    The industrial dairies that can’t legally sell raw milk circumvent this law by selling “shares” of a “cow”. All of a sudden you’re a simple homesteader drinking from your family cow, even if it’s raised in the same conditions that enable bird flu using the most infectious methods. A herd fed chicken shit from the same industrial poultry farms that gave us the first case of human transmission after prison slaves were used to cull infected flocks. Every reactionary and granola liberal I know swears by their raw milk supply from these dairies, by and large also antivaxxers and COVID denialists. After seeing this epidemic in the form of a lake full of dead geese, allowing this to happen is the most disgusting thing I’ve personally witnessed. When people you care about begin dying of this, Colorado’s state government manufactured it to benefit their agribusiness donors. It is entirely intentionally created.