Raw milk health risks significantly outweigh any potential benefits

The Conversation
June 21, 2024 

Milk Cow (JUSTIN SULLIVAN/AFP)


Despite an ongoing outbreak of bird flu in dairy cows, the popularity of raw milk has only risen. Advocates claim raw milk has superior health benefits over pasteurized milk. There is little evidence to support these claims, however, and the risk of serious illness is much greater.

Mississippi State University food scientists Juan Silva and Joel Komakech and nutritionist Mandy Conrad explain the difference between pasteurized and raw milk, addressing common misconceptions about the health risks and purported benefits of consuming unpasteurized milk. These questions are more important than ever, since cattle can shed viral material into their milk. Not only can pathogens end up in milk, but at least three farmworkers reportedly have contracted H5N1, the virus that causes avian influenza, in 2024. Farmworkers can get sick by handling infected animals or their byproducts, such as raw milk.

What is pasteurization? Does it destroy nutrients?

Pasteurization is a process that involves heating beverages and foods at high temperatures – over 145 degrees Fahrenheit (62.78 degrees Celsius) – to kill harmful microorganisms, such as bacteria, viruses and parasites. This reduces the total number of microorganisms in the product and also inactivates enzymes that could contribute to spoilage.

The taste, nutritional value and quality of pasteurized products aren’t significantly affected by the process.

While pasteurization can lead to some nutrient losses, the changes are generally minimal and outweighed by the benefits. Pasteurization typically causes minor denaturation of proteins and has little effect on fats and carbohydrates. While water-soluble vitamins such as vitamin C and some B vitamins, usually not abundant in milk except vitamin B2, can be partially degraded during pasteurization, fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E and K, found in significant amounts in milk) are more heat stable and suffer minimal loss.

Thus, nutritional losses in milk due to pasteurization are generally small compared with the significant benefits of reducing foodborne illnesses and spoilage.
Is raw milk healthier than pasteurized milk?

Studies have compared the benefits of raw milk with pasteurized milk and have found little evidence that raw milk is superior to pasteurized milk. The perceived advantages of raw milk are outweighed by its health risks.

First, raw milk does not improve lactose intolerance.

Raw milk also does not have more vitamins than pasteurized milk. Milk is not a good source of vitamin C or other heat-sensitive vitamins, and pasteurization does little to reduce vitamin B2 or riboflavin, which is not as sensitive to heat. Moreover, Vitamin D is added to pasteurized milk to enhance your body’s ability to absorb the calcium in milk.


Pasteurized milk is fortified with vitamin D and other nutrients. 

Burke/Triolo Productions/The Image Bank via Getty Images

Fortified milk replaces nutrients that may be lost in the pasteurization process. Vitamin D is added to milk to enhance uptake of the calcium found in the milk. No single food is perfect, so it is OK for milk to lack some nutrients, as these can be obtained from other foods.

Some people believe that probiotics – foods or supplements that contain live bacteria beneficial to health – are more prevalent in unpasteurized milk and products made from raw milk. However, raw milk is generally lacking in probiotics and has significantly more harmful bacteria. Probiotics are added to many dairy foods such as yogurt after pasteurization.

Furthermore, a 2011 review of the available research on the health benefits of raw milk found that many of these studies were conducted with poor methods, meaning their results should be interpreted with caution.
What are the health risks of consuming raw milk?

The health risks of consuming raw, unpasteurized milk come from the harmful microorganisms that may be present.

Raw milk has been associated with hundreds of foodborne disease outbreaks. Between 1998 and 2018, 202 outbreaks resulted in 2,645 illnesses and 228 hospitalizations. More recently, from 2022 to 2023, there were 18 outbreaks and recalls associated with raw milk. A number of outbreaks and recalls associated with pathogens in raw milk have already occurred in 2024. In all cases, pathogens in the raw milk that cause human diseases were directly responsible for these illnesses.


Pathogens from infected cattle can be found in their raw milk. 

Tunvarat Pruksachat/Moment via Getty Images

Some illnesses from the pathogens in raw milk can have serious long-term effects, including paralysis, kidney failure and death.

Researchers found that areas where raw milk was legally sold in the U.S. from 1998 to 2018 had over three times more outbreaks than areas where selling raw milk was illegal. Areas where raw milk was allowed to be sold in retail stores had nearly four times more outbreaks than areas where sales were allowed only on farms.

Is it safe to eat foods made from raw milk?


Many, if not all, dairy products made from unpasteurized milk are not safe to eat. A number of products can be made from raw milk, including soft cheeses, such as brie and Camembert; Mexican-style soft cheeses, such as queso fresco, panela, asadero and queso blanco; yogurt and puddings; and ice cream or frozen yogurt. Pathogens in raw milk can survive the processes involved in making these types of dairy products and thus be unsafe for consumption.

Only products that undergo a process to inhibit or kill harmful microorganisms may be safe enough to be made from unpasteurized milk. However, the potential for cross contamination of raw and cooked food as well as the survival of pathogens from inadequate processing is high when products are made with raw milk.

Can pasteurized milk still get you sick?

The few reported outbreaks associated with pasteurized milk can be traced to contamination after pasteurization. When handled properly, pasteurized milk is a very safe product.

The U.S. government requires farmers to destroy milk from herds infected with avian influenza. As of June 2024, 12 states have reported herds positive with H1N5, the virus that causes bird flu.

There is currently no evidence that consuming pasteurized milk from infected cows causes illness in people. Based on the evidence available, the Food and Drug Administration currently states that pasteurization is able to destroy or inactivate heat-sensitive viruses such as H5N1 in milk.

Consuming raw milk, however, may pose a risk of disease transmission to people.

Can you gain immunity from H5N1 from drinking raw milk?

Some people believe that drinking raw milk can strengthen their immune system. However, there is no scientific evidence to support that drinking raw milk can improve immunity against disease.

Vaccines train your body to protect itself from future infections without actually getting sick from that infection. They do this by exposing your immune system to very small amounts of dead or significantly weakened pathogen.

Bird flu is spreading among dairy cows in the U.S.

Raw milk contains live H5N1 virus, meaning it could still infect you and make you sick. Rather than contributing to your immunity, raw milk exposes you to the virus at its full strength and can result in severe illness. Any protective antibodies that may be present in raw milk are likely degraded in stomach acid.

Moreover, people who contract bird flu from raw milk run the risk of transmitting it to other people or animals by giving the virus a chance to adapt and improve its ability to spread between people. This increases the risk of more widespread disease outbreaks.

Juan Silva, Professor of Food Science, Nutrition and Health Promotion, Mississippi State University; Joel Komakech, Assisstant Professor of Food Science, Nutrition and Health Promotion, Mississippi State University, and Mandy Conrad, Assistant Clinical Professor in Nutrition and Dietetics, Mississippi State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

‘Flying blind’: CDC has 1M bird flu tests ready —but experts see repeat of Covid missteps

Amy Maxmen, KFF Health News
June 23, 2024 

Photo by Arib Neko on Unsplash

It’s been nearly three months since the U.S. government announced an outbreak of the bird flu virus on dairy farms. The World Health Organization considers the virus a public health concern because of its potential to cause a pandemic, yet the U.S. has tested only about 45 people across the country.

“We’re flying blind,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health. With so few tests run, she said, it’s impossible to know how many farmworkers have been infected, or how serious the disease is. A lack of testing means the country might not notice if the virus begins to spread between people — the gateway to another pandemic.

“We’d like to be doing more testing. There’s no doubt about that,” said Nirav Shah, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC’s bird flu test is the only one the Food and Drug Administration has authorized for use right now. Shah said the agency has distributed these tests to about 100 public health labs in states. “We’ve got roughly a million available now,” he said, “and expect 1.2 million more in the next two months.”

But Nuzzo and other researchers are concerned because the CDC and public health labs aren’t generally where doctors order tests from. That job tends to be done by major clinical laboratories run by companies and universities, which lack authorization for bird flu testing.

As the outbreak grows — with at least 114 herds infected in 12 states as of June 18 — researchers said the CDC and FDA are not moving fast enough to remove barriers that block clinical labs from testing. In one case, the diagnostics company Neelyx Labs was on hold with a query for more than a month.

“Clinical labs are part of the nation’s public health system,” said Alex Greninger, assistant director of the University of Washington Medicine Clinical Virology Laboratory. “Pull us into the game. We’re stuck on the bench.”

The CDC recognized the need for clinical labs in a June 10 memo. It calls on industry to develop tests for the H5 strain of bird flu virus, the one circulating among dairy cattle. “The limited availability and accessibility of diagnostic tests for Influenza A(H5) poses several pain points,” the CDC wrote. The points include a shortage of tests if demand spikes.

Researchers, including former CDC director Tom Frieden and Anthony Fauci, who led the nation’s response to covid, cite testing failures as a key reason the U.S. fared so poorly with covid. Had covid tests been widely available in early 2020, they say, the U.S. could have detected many cases before they turned into outbreaks that prompted business shutdowns and cost lives.

In an article published this month, Nuzzo and a group of colleagues noted that the problem wasn’t testing capability but a failure to deploy that capability swiftly. The U.S. reported excess mortality eight times as high as other countries with advanced labs and other technological advantages.

A covid test vetted by the WHO was available by mid-January 2020. Rather than use it, the United States stuck to its own multistage process, which took several months. Namely, the CDC develops its own test then sends it to local public health labs. Eventually, the FDA authorizes tests from clinical diagnostic labs that serve hospital systems, which must then scale up their operations. That took time, and people died amid outbreaks at nursing homes and prisons, waiting on test results.

In contrast, South Korea immediately rolled out testing through private sector laboratories, allowing it to keep schools and businesses open. “They said, ‘Gear up, guys; we’re going to need a ton of tests,’” said Frieden, now president of the public health organization Resolve to Save Lives. “You need to get commercials in the game.”

Nuzzo and her colleagues describe a step-by-step strategy for rolling out testing in health emergencies, in response to mistakes made obvious by covid. But in this bird flu outbreak, the U.S. is weeks behind that playbook.

Ample testing is critical for two reasons. First, people need to know if they’re infected so that they can be quickly treated, Nuzzo said. Over the past two decades, roughly half of about 900 people around the globe known to have gotten the bird flu died from it.

Although the three farmworkers diagnosed with the disease this year in the United States had only mild symptoms, like a runny nose and inflamed eyes, others may not be so lucky. The flu treatment Tamiflu works only when given soon after symptoms start.

The CDC and local health departments have tried to boost bird flu testing among farmworkers, asking them to be tested if they feel sick. Farmworker advocates list several reasons why their outreach efforts are failing. The outreach might not be in the languages the farmworkers speak, for example, or address such concerns as a loss of employment.

If people who live and work around farms simply see a doctor when they or their children fall ill, those cases could be missed if the doctors send samples to their usual clinical laboratories. The CDC has asked doctors to send samples from people with flu symptoms who have exposure to livestock or poultry to public health labs. “If you work on a farm with an outbreak and you’re worried about your welfare, you can get tested,” Shah said. But sending samples to public health departments requires knowledge, time, and effort.

“I really worry about a testing scheme in which busy clinicians need to figure this out,” Nuzzo said.

The other reason to involve clinical laboratories is so the nation can ramp up testing if the bird flu is suddenly detected among people who didn’t catch it from cattle. There’s no evidence the virus has started to spread among people, but that could change in coming months as it evolves.

The fastest way to get clinical labs involved, Greninger said, is to allow them to use a test the FDA has already authorized: the CDC’s bird flu test. On April 16 the CDC opened up that possibility by offering royalty-free licenses for components of its bird flu tests to accredited labs.

Several commercial labs asked for licenses. “We want to get prepared before things get crazy,” said Shyam Saladi, chief executive officer of the diagnostics company Neelyx Labs, which offered covid and mpox tests during shortages in those outbreaks. His experience over the past two months reveals the types of barriers that prevent labs from moving swiftly.

In email exchanges with the CDC, shared with KFF Health News, Saladi specifies the labs’ desire for licenses relevant to the CDC’s test, as well as a “right to reference” the CDC’s data in its application for FDA authorization.

That “right to reference” makes it easier for one company to use a test developed by another. It allows the new group to skip certain analyses conducted by the original maker, by telling the FDA to look at data in the original FDA application. This was commonplace with covid tests at the peak of the pandemic.

At first, the CDC appeared eager to cooperate. “A right of reference to the data should be available,” Jonathan Motley, a patent specialist at the CDC, wrote in an email to Saladi on April 24. Over the next few weeks, the CDC sent him information about transferring its licenses to the company, and about the test, which prompted Neelyx’s researchers to buy testing components and try out the CDC’s process on their equipment.

But Saladi grew increasingly anxious about the ability to reference the CDC’s data in the company’s FDA application. “Do you have an update with respect to the right of reference?” he asked the CDC on May 13. “If there are any potential sticking points with respect to this, would you mind letting us know please?”

He asked several more times in the following weeks, as the number of herds infected with the bird flu ticked upward and more cases among farmworkers were announced. “Given that it is May 24 and the outbreak has only expanded, can CDC provide a date by which it plans to respond?” Saladi wrote.

The CDC eventually signed a licensing agreement with Neelyx but informed Saladi that it would not, in fact, provide the reference. Without that, Saladi said, he could not move forward with the CDC’s test — at least not without more material from the agency. “It’s really frustrating,” he said. “We thought they really intended to support the development of these tests in case they are needed.”

Shah, from the CDC, said test manufacturers should generate their own data to prove that they’re using the CDC’s test correctly. “We don’t have a shortage such that we need to cut corners,” he said. “Quality reigns supreme.”

The CDC has given seven companies, including Neelyx, licenses for its tests — although none have been cleared to use them by the FDA. Only one of those companies asked for the right of reference, Shah said. The labs may be assisted by additional material that the agency is developing now, to allow them to complete the analyses — even without the reference.

“This should have happened sooner,” Saladi told KFF Health News when he was told about the CDC’s pending additional material. “There’s been no communication about this.”

Greninger said the delays and confusion are reminiscent of the early months of covid, when federal agencies prioritized caution over speed. Test accuracy is important, he said, but excessive vetting can cause harm in a fast-moving outbreak like this one. “The CDC should be trying to open this up to labs with national reach and a good reputation,” he said. “I fall on the side of allowing labs to get ready — that’s a no-brainer.”

Clinical laboratories have also begun to develop their own tests from scratch. But researchers said they’re moving cautiously because of a recent FDA rule that gives the agency more oversight of lab-developed tests, lengthening the pathway to approval. In an email to KFF Health News, FDA press officer Janell Goodwin said the rule’s enforcement will occur gradually.

However, Susan Van Meter, president of the American Clinical Laboratory Association, a trade group whose members include the nation’s largest commercial diagnostic labs, said companies need more clarity: “It’s slowing things down because it’s adding to the confusion about what is allowable.”

Creating tests for the bird flu is already a risky bet, because demand is uncertain. It’s not clear whether this outbreak in cattle will trigger an epidemic or fizzle out. In addition to issues with the CDC and FDA, clinical laboratories are trying to figure out whether health insurers or the government will pay for bird flu tests.

These wrinkles will be smoothed eventually. Until then, the vanishingly slim numbers of people tested, along with the lack of testing in cattle, may draw criticism from other parts of the world.

“Think about our judgment of China’s transparency at the start of covid,” Nuzzo said. “The current situation undermines America’s standing in the world.”

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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Political Violence Is Surging, But There’s A Playbook To Counter It

By Hardy Merriman, George Lakey 

June 22, 2024

Source: Waging Nonviolence


Trump or Death flag unveiled during Yankee's game. (Photo: Dion Cini)



Last month, the New York Times published a broad overview of rising political violence in the United States, noting that, “By almost all measures, the evidence of the trend is striking.” According to one poll, more than 80 percent of local officials said they had been threatened or harassed.

Such news is hardly surprising, given that Donald Trump has already refused to rule out violence should he lose in November. In one interview, he said, “It always depends on the fairness of the election.”

Fortunately, history reveals many times and places where pro-democracy movements were able to overcome threats and assert decisive power through the use of strategic nonviolent struggle. One person well versed in these cases is Hardy Merriman, president of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict in Washington, D.C.

Merriman has been researching methods of nonviolent struggle for two decades, with particular interest in what works when dealing with the threat of dictatorship. Four years ago he published the widely-downloaded online manual “Hold the Line,” a guide that prepared Americans for the possibility of a Trump coup attempt.

In this conversation, Merriman develops a big picture understanding of how to defeat a power grab, showing the importance of targeting the opponent’s base of support, finding common ground for unlikely alliances and making repression backfire.

What is the likelihood of violence being part of the mix if Trump were to return to the presidency?

We’re already amidst political violence. You can define it in different ways, but I include threats and intimidation as acts of political violence. I don’t just think actual physical political violence is the only way to look at this. There’s a whole range of behaviors online that function as political violence, including doxxing and swatting. If past is prologue, then they would increase under a new Trump administration.

Just to give a sense, the number of threats received by the U.S. Capitol Police in the last couple of years is about double what it was prior to 2016. So, we’re already living in a surge — and we’ve got a new, maybe stable, baseline that’s quite a bit higher than it should be. I don’t see how, if Trump is elected, it wouldn’t go up again.

Could you say more about the forms Trump-inspired violence might take?

One of the things I’ve observed about political violence in the U.S. is that you don’t need a lot of physical political violence to make the threats seem credible. Threats can do a vast amount of damage. They’re actually very hard to prosecute and curtail — and when there are occasional acts of political violence that are physical, people fear the threats even more. So, I imagine threats would skyrocket. I imagine there being heightened physical political violence. But the point is: Even if the physical political violence only rises a bit, combined with the threats, that’s enough to do vast damage anyway.

So far, what we’ve seen is that political violence tends to be targeted significantly at office holders, local officials at the municipal and county level, people in the state legislatures and election workers. Then you have heightened threats against women versus men, heightened threats of people of color versus white people and, generically speaking, anyone who’s made news. I would expect to see all of those lines continuing. We’ve already seen threats to people ranging from teachers to librarians to business owners to health care workers to bureaucrats to politicians, and then, of course, ordinary civilians. No one seems exempt these days. But it’s not equally distributed: It will be even harder for some folks than others, and that very much concerns me.

What are some historical examples of political violence — or the threat of it — backfiring?

The backfire framework can be applied very well to many of the campaigns in the civil rights movement, where there were certain keys that really helped amplify outrage and mobilization in response to violent repression. Since people know those cases fairly well, I’ll focus on a different one instead: the United Farmworkers in the 1960s.

These were Mexican Americans and Filipino Americans, predominantly very poor, organizing in California, particularly trying to unionize grape vineyards. At one point, a sheriff in Southern California tried to outlaw the word “huelga,” which is strike in Spanish. Of course, he couldn’t do that, constitutionally, but he tried. Cesar Chavez and the other brilliant organizers who worked with him planned an action where they were going to violate that sheriff’s decree. They called the press and read a Jack London poem about the evils of strike breaking. Then they started yelling “huelga” and got arrested in front of the cameras.

Meanwhile, Cesar Chavez [who wasn’t at the reading] went to University of California campuses and reported on the news of the arrests, to the students, practically as it happened. The students at that time were very concerned with free speech, among other things. Chavez told them, “This is a free speech issue, and it’s going on in California.” They got lots of donations and student volunteers. That action allowed them to bridge brilliantly from being seen as primarily a movement of poor Mexican and Filipino Americans to a movement bridging to Catholics, to students, to unions, to also a movement about free speech. It really increased their power and spread their reach dramatically.

That’s a great example. Do actions like that reduce the chance of violence being acted out?

Sometimes the best defense is a good offense. And by offense, I don’t mean actually attacking people — I mean the ability to impose costs. The calculus of those who threaten and use violence is often pretty simple. Beyond the person or institution being threatened, the real audience is often everyone else, the onlookers. The people issuing threats get their strength from their ability to spread fear to everyone else.

Part of what we have to do to ultimately deter that behavior is change the cost-benefit calculus for those folks — to say, “When you do that, increasingly, what’s going to happen is you’re not going to get the fear response from people. You’re going to actually get people actively mobilizing to stop your political objectives. When you threaten that business and try to shut it down because of whatever it did — maybe because it held a drag story hour — more patrons are going to shop there.”

There’s actually an example like this from Italy, where there was a movement against the mafia called addiopizzo. Pizzo was the protection money paid to the mafia, and students started this addiopizzo movement, which means “goodbye pizzo.” At one point, members of the mafia threatened a bar that had agreed to stop paying pizzo. The students said, “Everyone needs to go to that bar.” Students from all over came and basically said, “Look, we’re going to show solidarity here. We’re not going to be afraid. We’re going to react in exactly the way you don’t want us to.”

Over time, that deters violent behavior. It can take a few cycles for the calculus [of those who threaten] to shift, but I think you have to impose costs. You have to make it less profitable for them politically, economically and psychologically to do these things if you really want to deter over the long term.

In cases like that, how did people prepare themselves to handle a potentially violent response?

Anticipating what the other side is probably going to do is actually helpful because the fear of the unknown is often paralyzing — and people succumb to confusion, and then demobilization. I so admire the scholar Brian Martin and others who have done research into what makes repression backfire. They point to the five steps perpetrators use to try to inhibit outrage:

First, they cover it up, deny it ever happened and try to prevent knowledge of it from spreading.

Second, they devalue the victim and try to reduce their social standing in the eyes of onlookers.

Third, they reinterpret the abuse that happened by claiming it was necessary — that the police, who may have done something totally unlawful, were actually just trying to keep order or do their jobs. Or they were just a few bad apples.

Fourth, if they have to, they’ll say they’re going to launch an internal investigation. They like internal investigations that are closed doors, because they give the appearance of justice and take time. People demobilize frequently when they see an institutional process is underway.

Finally, they offer threats and rewards: threats against people talking out and rewards for people who stay silent.

That’s the playbook. It’s used by authoritarians. It’s used by governments and businesses. It’s used at a micro personal level. It’s used at a macro level.

How can organizers respond to these moves?

The backfire framework tells us what we need to do to counter all that. There’s five R’s:

1. Reveal what happened. Counter attempts to cover up.

2. Redeem: value the victim, humanize the victim, don’t let them be othered and cast aside.

3. Reframe and say “Actually, what’s going on is systemic, deeply abusive, corrosive and actually the tip of the iceberg. It’s indicative of a much deeper problem.

4. Redirect: If there is an institutional process, you may participate in it, you may not, but you don’t depend on it. You continue to mobilize. You continue to use that institutional process as a mobilizing opportunity.

5. Resist threats and bribes, and possibly turn them into new forms of backfire.

What I like about Martin’s framework is that — in addition to telling us what we can do — he tells us what the other side is going to do. We can anticipate the ways they’re going to devalue. We can anticipate the ways they’re going to try to provoke because, when they provoke, they can devalue even more. They catch you in a bad moment, or they try to provoke violence, or they catch you saying something that’s inflammatory. We know the kind of reinterpretation they’re going to do. When you know that, you can prepare.

In backfire campaigns, in particular, the group bonds need to be strong because solidarity is important. In that example of addiopizzo, if they hadn’t rallied around that restaurant, the campaign would have been over. That was the first battle there. They went on and did all kinds of other things, but if they didn’t win that first battle, that was it.

So when we do backfire campaigns, we need to be really solid with each other. Some of us might feel better suited to frontline roles. Some of us might not. There are many different onramps to organizing and being a team. We can do all kinds of things about working with different people skills, capacities, time commitments and risk tolerance. But we do have to stand together when we commit to it, and I think that — plus training — can help people prepare.


But what about when repression efforts are driven by irrationality, as they often were during the civil rights movement, with white people attacking Black people at lunch counters?

There’s multiple roles that are played in the political violence ecosystem. There are inciters who do all the polarization, all the toxic rhetoric and othering. They paint the other side as an existential threat and prime their base for political violence. But those who incite generally don’t perpetrate the physical violence. They’re too busy getting a following and actually being sort of entrepreneurial, trying to build their profile and following. This position of the inciter is really tricky because they generally don’t get taken to task for that role. So they can do a ton of damage, incite all kinds of bad things and then be like, “Well, it was those people who did it. I was just doing my show.”

There might be some more irrationality when it comes to threatmakers. But they also have a rationale to them because, generally, they operate with relative impunity — if they know what they’re doing. The First Amendment protects so much of their speech. So the threatmakers actually do have quite a rationale.

Then you have those who actually perpetrate the physical violence, who I do feel are often irrational. But the irrational aspect is partly triggered by those who are quite rational and very deliberately strategic with what they’re doing. Ultimately, the state also will usually try to prosecute those who do physical political violence. At least, we’d like to think they would. But it’s actually upstream where the costs also need to be imposed a lot more, and community involvement makes it much more possible.

Could you think of an example of that? What would that look like?

There are things you can try to do to those who incite. You can try to de-platform them. You can try to get advertisers to stop advertising. In other words, you can have some kind of economic impact on them. The other thing is isolating them. I’m thinking of the spectrum of allies, which consists of active opposition, passive opposition, neutrals, passive allies and active allies. If you can get their passive allies to start to become more neutral by exposing their political objective, you’re doing pretty well.

To give an example, there’s a case of a town in eastern Germany, where, as I recall, there were gatherings of hate groups, honoring Rudolf Hess, who was buried there. They would march and the town would protest them, and it didn’t have an impact. Then, at some point, the town said, “Okay, we’re going to turn your march into a walk-a-thon. We’re going to paint a start line, a finish line, and for every meter you march, we’re going to donate to causes in Germany that help pull people out of the toxic right-wing to undermine you.” This was more effective [than the counter-demonstrations] and whoever organized that march was rational enough to see it was really backfiring.

It sounds like the focus of deterrence should be on Trump’s allies and finding material interests — or other kinds of interests — that would sway them to not back up their guy.

One of the really interesting things I’ve learned is that Republican politicians and leaders are being threatened at an equal rate to Democrats. This is actually something that is a deep source of dissatisfaction for them. Except with them, the threats appear to be working. There have been people who have complained about the threats. For example, there are reports of members of Congress who privately and anonymously admitted that they voted not to impeach Trump because they were too afraid of the threats. You have accounts of that, and it makes sense because what the violent groups are trying to do is drive out moderates. If you’re moderate, you either have to get to the right, be quiet or get out. That’s the dynamic, and I think there’s a ton of dissatisfaction there.

The other thing that’s interesting to me is that public opinion polls of Americans are totally bipartisan — people don’t like political violence. It’s not like the Democrats are a lot higher than the Republicans on this. Democratic, Republican, independent voters all abhor the idea of political violence at a fairly high level. One poll I looked at was averaging about 85 percent in total for all three groups against political violence. So there’s a huge mass of power here and we know largely how they feel, but they’re not being asked or offered ways to get involved.

So, the question facing the country is: Are we going to let a very small minority of the population intimidate us because they don’t like elections, or the results or whatever it is? Are we going to let them functionally destroy democracy from the inside out? Because they can do an enormous amount of damage if enough people are just confused and think this is someone else’s problem to solve.

This research you’ve mentioned is very helpful and supports your main point, which is: Don’t go after the perpetrator, take away their base.

I think the bipartisanship comes because the damage is so evident. In the last four years in this country, we’re lost about 20 percent of the local election workers who really make our elections function. That’s a huge exodus. It’s hit a number of western states particularly hard. So it doesn’t really matter whether you’re a Republican or Democrat in Arizona, Nevada or elsewhere. Republican county clerks are getting harassed and threatened as well, and they’re saying, “This is intolerable.” It’s not a partisan issue anymore. It’s actually functional: Like can we even run elections if this is allowed to continue? And that creates the ability for bipartisanship and a certain breakthrough. It’s a huge opportunity.

Any other examples from the U.S. of meeting violence in nonviolent ways?

There’s a case in Whitefish, Montana, where — in 2017 — there was talk of hate groups leading a march. The town organized and, ultimately, the march never even happened. There was just an outpouring of creativity from the town. It wasn’t just about countering hate, it was about honoring love and honoring being welcomed. One of the organizing pillars in the town was actually a group called Love Lives Here.

What was interesting about this case is that businesses got on board. When a town becomes known for having an intolerant element to it, it’s not good for business, especially if the business is tourism. So there were opportunities for businesses to get involved and to counter political violence in some interesting ways.

In some countries, during struggles with dictators, the labor movement played a really important role. I’m curious about your view of labor in the U.S. when it comes to fighting a Trump dictatorship.

I think they would play an incredibly important role. The role that most people associate laborers as having is obviously the ability to exert economic leverage as an organized force — and that, of course, matters enormously. Another value that they’d have, though, is their structure. In a backsliding democracy, as institutions get attacked, they become less reliable. If you’re trying to mobilize opposition to that, you need some structures. And if your structures aren’t going to come from within the state, they’re going to have to come from outside the state.

If you have mass mobilization, but don’t have the ability to be structured and negotiate, labor unions provide that structure. When that opportunity comes, labor can take over and bring things over the finish line. That’s a role labor has played in other countries as well. They can show up in ways that a movement might not be able to, particularly around the idea of negotiating demands. I would see them as an incredibly important node, organizationally, as well as in terms of leverage, when it comes to stopping certain acts that are a violation of our Constitution.

If things look worse and worse, I’m imaging there will be groups working to organize a Plan B, should Biden not win the election. Most people, however, will still be working on the Plan A of getting Biden elected. Do you have suggestions for ways that Plan B organizers can reach out to Plan A organizers to get involved?

We should be doing as much bridge building as possible. Even if we don’t descend into full democratic breakdown and become basically an electoral autocracy, we still need to get out of this really hellish cycle we’re in as a country, where, frankly, every two years feels existential. When the guardrails of our system are really transgressed, people can form a negative coalition and be like, “You can’t steal that election” or “You can’t do that.” But the underlying conditions driving the toxic polarization remain, and they require more than just a negative coalition that’s against election theft or against political violence. They’re going to need a positive coalition that says, “Here are some major conditions that must be changed through policy to get us out of this situation.”

It depends on your analysis, but I would certainly think that socio-economic policies would be part of that. Really bad wealth inequality and really bad income distribution tend to exacerbate practically any social problem, including the toxic polarization we have. You’re going to need people building the coalitions to do that work to get us out of this mess. I’m not sure political leadership — unless there’s a ton of pressure — actually has the vision to do it right.

There needs to be a big push of voters saying: “This is not optional. Yes, we need to protect elections in the meantime. But the way out of this is a policy set that actually creates a new kind of deal, a new sort of social contract.”

We pulled that off in the 1930s. So that might be reassuring for the gloom and doom people to hear.

While it might alienate some potential allies to have a strong policy set, it might get other folks to join up. It’s hard to motivate folks to protect a democracy that they don’t think protects or takes care of them. So there might be other issues we could speak to that are part and parcel of getting out of this backsliding — and might speak to many more people.

Lastly, could you speak to your experience during the 2020 election cycle and your work with “Hold The Line?” Are there takeaways or lessons from that that might be helpful this time around?

I learned so many things from doing “Hold The Line,” but one particular lesson was: Organize based on where the ball is going, not on where the ball is.

When we started working on it in June of 2020, the conventional wisdom was: If people just turn out in the 2020 presidential election by significant numbers, there’s no way Trump will try to steal this election. People I respect — who I think are good analysts and I consider allies — were like, “You’re barking up the wrong tree. Don’t divert people from electioneering. And if you talk about how Trump might try to steal the election, you’re gonna make him seem more powerful than he is — and that might demobilize people.”

I heard it all, I wrestled with it all, and I just disagreed with it all. I thought, “No, there’s going to be a big freakout about this, and I’m organizing for when that comes.” I wasn’t sitting there thinking “How can I be at the right place?” It just so happened that, in June of 2020, Trump did some really outrageous things: clearing Lafayette Square and calling up the National Guard. That for me was the trigger, but I also realized that it was the quiet before the volume would get turned up in September. So we cranked out “Hold The Line” and dropped it on Sept. 7, 2020.

People told me it was too long and too complicated. “How will folks understand this?” And that was also wrong. People loved it. We had a promotion budget of zero, and it got downloaded over 75,000 times between Sept. 7 and November. We weren’t trying to earn media — media came to us. It was unreal. Things were just skyrocketing, and that’s because we organized for where things were going, not for where things were.

There’s a profound hunger and worry in this country, and I think it leads to demobilization if people don’t get guidance. Confusion plus a sense of disempowerment is a bad combination. But you can turn that around if you actually write something and do something that speaks to folks and reminds them of their genuine power.

If you can show them that the barriers to entry don’t actually have to be that high and you can start by getting the word out to your friends, you can do really great things. You have to believe in what you’re doing, and we did that. So it worked out, and it was very validating.

Bird flu is highly lethal to some animals, but not to others. Scientists want to know why

Mike Stobbe
Fri, June 14, 2024 


NEW YORK (AP) — In the last two years, bird flu has been blamed for the deaths of millions of wild and domestic birds worldwide. It's killed legions of seals and sea lions, wiped out mink farms, and dispatched cats, dogs, skunks, foxes and even a polar bear.

But it seems to have hardly touched people.

That's "a little bit of a head scratcher,” although there are some likely explanations, said Richard Webby, a flu researcher at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. It could have to do with how infection occurs or because species have differences in the microscopic docking points that flu viruses need to take root and multiply in cells, experts say.

But what keeps scientists awake at night is whether that situation will change.

“There's a lot we don't understand,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, a former CDC director who currently heads Resolve to Save Lives, a not-for-profit that works to prevent epidemics. “I think we have to get over the 'hope for the best and bury our head in the sand' approach. Because it could be really bad."

Some researchers theorize that flu viruses that originated in birds were the precursors to terrible scourges in humans, including pandemics in 1918 and 1957. Those viruses became deadly human contagions and spread in animals and people.

A number of experts think it’s unlikely this virus will become a deadly global contagion, based on current evidence. But that's not a sure bet.

Just in case, U.S. health officials are readying vaccines and making other preparations. But they are holding off on bolder steps because the virus isn't causing severe disease in people and they have no strong evidence it’s spreading from person to person.

The flu that's currently spreading — known as H5N1 — was first identified in birds in 1959. It didn’t really begin to worry health officials until a Hong Kong outbreak in 1997 that involved severe human illnesses and deaths.

It has caused hundreds of deaths around the world, the vast majority of them involving direct contact between people and infected birds. When there was apparent spread between people, it involved very close and extended contact within households.

Like other viruses, however, the H5N1 virus has mutated over time. In the last few years, one particular strain has spread alarmingly quickly and widely.

In the United States, animal outbreaks have been reported at dozens of dairy cow farms and more than 1,000 poultry flocks, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Four human infections have been reported among the hundreds of thousands of people who work at U.S. poultry and dairy farms, though that may be an undercount.

Worldwide, doctors have detected 15 human infections caused by the widely circulating bird flu strain. The count includes one death — a 38-year-old woman in southern China in 2022 — but most people had either no symptoms or only mild ones, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There's no way to know how many animals have been infected, but certain creatures seem to be getting more severe illnesses.

Take cats, for example. Flu is commonly thought of as a disease of the lungs, but the virus can attack and multiply in other parts of the body too. In cats, scientists have found the virus attacking the brain, damaging and clotting blood vessels and causing seizures and death.

Similarly gruesome deaths have been reported in other animals, including foxes that ate dead, infected birds.

The flu strain's ability to lodge in the brain and nervous system is one possible reason for "higher mortality rate in some species,” said Amy Baker, an Iowa-based U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist who studies bird flu in animals. But scientists "just don’t know what the properties of the virus or the properties of the host are that are leading to these differences,” Baker said.

Unlike cats, cows have been largely spared. Illnesses have been reported in less than 10% of the cows in affected dairy herds, according to the USDA. Those that did develop symptoms experienced fever, lethargy, decreased appetite and increased respiratory secretions.

Cow infections largely have been concentrated in the udders of lactating animals. Researchers investigating cat deaths at dairy farms with infected cows concluded the felines caught the virus from drinking raw milk.

Researchers are still sorting out how the virus has been spreading from cow to cow, but studies suggest the main route of exposure is not the kind of airborne droplets associated with coughing and sneezing. Instead it's thought to be direct contact, perhaps through shared milking equipment or spread by the workers who milk them.

Then there's the issue of susceptibility. Flu virus need to be able to latch onto cells before they can invade them.

“If it doesn't get into a cell, nothing happens. ... The virus just swims around,” explained Juergen Richt, a researcher at Kansas State University.

But those docking spots — sialic acid receptors — aren't found uniformly throughout the body, and differ among species. One recent study documented the presence of bird flu-friendly receptors in dairy cattle mammary glands.

Eye redness has been a common symptom among people infected by the current bird flu strain. People who milk cows are eye level with the udders, and splashes are common. Some scientists also note that the human eye has receptors that the virus can bind to.

A study published this month found ferrets infected in the eyes ended up dying, as the researchers demonstrated that the virus could be as deadly entering through the eyes as through the respiratory tract.

Why didn't the same happen in the U.S. farmworkers?

Some experts wonder whether people have some level of immunity, due to past exposure to other forms of flu or to vaccinations. However, a study in which human blood samples were exposed to the virus indicated there's little to no existing immunity to this version of the virus, including among people who'd had seasonal flu shots.

A more menacing question: What happens if the virus mutates in a way that makes it more lethal to people or allows it to spread more easily?

Pigs are a concern because they are considered ideal mixing vessels for bird flu to potentially combine with other flu viruses to create something more dangerous. Baker has been studying the current strain in pigs and found it can replicate in the lungs, but the disease is very mild.

But that could all change, which is why there's a push in the scientific community to ramp up animal testing.

Frieden, of Resolve to Save Lives, noted public health experts have been worried about a deadly new flu pandemic for a long time.

“The only thing predictable about influenza is it's unpredictable,” he said.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Mike Stobbe, The Associated Press

Former CDC director predicts bird flu pandemic

Lauren Irwin
Sat, June 15, 2024 




Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield said he predicts a bird flu pandemic will happen, it’s just a matter of when that will be.

Redfield joined NewsNation Friday to discuss the growing concern for bird flu, as the virus has been detected in dozens of cattle across the country and the World Health Organization identified the first human death in Mexico.

“I really do think it’s very likely that we will, at some time, it’s not a question of if, it’s more of a question of when we will have a bird flu pandemic,” Redfield said.

He also noted that bird flu has a “significant mortality” when it enters humans compared to COVID-19. Redfield predicts the mortality is “probably somewhere between 25 and 50 percent mortality.” NewsNation noted that the death rate for COVID was 0.6 percent.

At the end of May, the CDC identified the third human case of someone diagnosed with the virus since March. None of the three cases among farmworkers were associated with one another. Symptoms have included a cough without fever and pink eye.

There is no evidence yet that the virus is spreading between humans. Redfield said he knows exactly what has to happen for the virus to get to that point because he’s done lab research on it.

Scientists have found that five amino acids must change in the key receptor in order for bird flu to gain a propensity to bind to a human receptor “and then be able to go human to human” like COVID-19 did, Redfield said.

“Once the virus gains the ability to attach to the human receptor and then go human to human, that’s when you’re going to have the pandemic,” he said. “And as I said, I think it’s just a matter of time.”

Redfield noted that he doesn’t know how long it will take for the five amino acids to change, but since it is being detected in cattle herds across the country, he is a bit concerned.

More than 40 cattle herds nationwide have confirmed cases of the virus. The CDC is tracking wastewater treatment sites to pinpoint where the virus is but the agency said the general public’s current risk of contracting the virus is low.

Since cattle live close to pigs and the virus is able to evolve from pigs to humans, there is cause for concern. Still, he argued, there is greater risk for the disease to be lab-grown.

“I know exactly what amino acids I have to change because in 2012, against my recommendation, the scientists that did these experiments actually published them,” he said. “So, the recipe for how to make bird flu highly infection for humans is already out there.”

Top CDC officials warns US needs ‘more tests’ in face of bird flu fears

Melody Schreiber
Fri, June 14, 2024 

Dr Nirav Shah in Augusta, Maine, on 28 April 2020.Photograph: Robert F Bukaty/AP


There is not enough testing for bird flu among people and animals in the US, says Dr Nirav Shah, principal deputy director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – but he is wary of pushing the issue and damaging fragile trust among farm workers and owners.

“We would like to be doing more tests,” Shah said. “We’d like to be testing particularly not just symptomatic workers, but anyone on a farm who is exposed.”

But, Shah said, “right now we want to be in a role where we’re building trust with farms and farm workers.”

For the general public, the risk is still low, the CDC says. But the risks are elevated for agricultural workers in close contact with animals – and potentially the people around them.

The CDC is “preparing for the possibility” that the virus could evolve to spread more easily among people, according to a report published on Wednesday.

Shah encouraged the use of personal protective equipment, but stopped short at promising shots for farm workers, who are now the most at risk for getting and spreading H5N1, a highly pathogenic bird flu.

US officials announced last week that a third person tested positive – a farm worker in Michigan who worked closely with sick cows.

Unlike the previous two cases, where conjunctivitis (or “pink eye”) was the only symptom, this patient experienced respiratory symptoms typical for the flu – a cough, congestion, sore throat and watery eyes.

Related: Avian flu said to hit over 40 cattle at Minnesota farm: ‘Only a matter of time’

Shah was quick to point out these symptoms don’t mean the virus is changing. Symptoms like these have been common in the 888 people who have tested positive for H5N1 since 2003.

“This virus, like many viruses, can present in more than one way. And for that reason, we should remain alert, not alarmed,” he said.

But having respiratory symptoms means the individual has more opportunities to pass the virus on to other people, he said, making monitoring and testing even more important than before.

Yet only 44 people have been tested in 2024, according to the CDC.

While officials believe there are probably cases flying under the radar due to the lack of testing, they are closely analyzing data from influenza monitoring systems, and no red flags have been observed yet. “We have not detected any differences in markers, like emergency room visits, in areas with affected herds compared to areas without affected herds,” Shah said.

“Our influenza infrastructure is strong, and it’s notable to discuss the ways in which it differs from our Covid infrastructure,” he said. There are tests available throughout the country, there is a good vaccine candidate for this strain currently being manufactured and the virus monitoring system is already well established.

“That said, we’d love to be doing more,” he continued.

Some states are now testing the blood of dairy farm workers to see how many people have antibodies against H5N1, which would give scientists a better idea of how much the virus is circulating. “We’ve done these studies in poultry [workers] over the years. We’d like to replicate them now in dairy farm workers,” Shah said.

Officials have also expanded the ways people can be tested for H5N1, including eye swabs in test kits to check for conjunctivitis. These eye swabs may now be tested at local labs instead of being sent to the CDC.

“Now we don’t wait until these tests are confirmed [by the CDC] before public health action is taken,” Shah said.

H5N1 continues spreading among farms, including poultry operations, with 4.2 million egg-laying chickens killed on a farm in Iowa after the virus was detected.

In Idaho, alpacas tested positive on 16 May after an outbreak among poultry on the same farm – a sign that the highly pathogenic flu may be spreading from cows to poultry to other livestock, potentially accumulating mutations.

The second person to test positive in the US bird flu outbreak this year showed a mutation that may make the virus spread more among mammals, genetic sequencing revealed.

No genomic analysis of the third case has been announced yet.

While the US Department of Agriculture announced another $824m in funding to protect livestock last week, health officials have not announced additional funds for this outbreak beyond the $101m for the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration (USDA) announced in May.

Part of the USDA funding has included up to $2,000 a month to farms for providing personal protective equipment, or PPE, such as N95 respirators, face shields and goggles.

The CDC has asked states to distribute personal protective equipment to farm workers from their existing supplies as well as from the strategic national stockpile.

“Thankfully, there’s quite a lot of PPE available out there. Now the task is just connecting those who have PPE with those who need it,” Shah said.

But officials are mindful of the inherent difficulties of wearing, for instance, an N95 mask while working on a farm – from the wet nature of dairy farming to summer heat.

“We want our workers to be maximally protected, while at the same time not compromising their health and safety because they’re overheating,” Shah said.

US officials have ordered 4.8m doses of an H5N1 vaccine they say seems well matched to this strain. It takes several months to create flu vaccines, and new formulations like this then go through regulatory processes for authorization or approval.

Officials have shied away from saying who might be prioritized for the vaccines.

“There is not right now a recommendation to vaccinate farm workers,” Shah said. “Of course, it’s under discussion. As scientists, as scientific organizations, we are always discussing what might be coming next and evaluating the pros and cons of that.”

Shah highlighted the importance of community trust in public health, especially since H5N1 is an emerging disease in livestock. Poultry producers, for example, have built up relationships with officials and regulators over decades of bird flu outbreaks.

Trust is “the most important tool that you have in your toolbox in an outbreak setting”, Shah said.

“When H5 became a phenomenon in the poultry industry, it was not overnight that poultry farm owners, operators, as well as workers were ready to work with public health entities – that relationship took time to develop,” Shah said. “The same thing is under way here.”

That means being clear about what testing does and doesn’t entail, and assuring the privacy of workers, he said.

“It’s not something that happens overnight, but we have made progress with farms and farm owners. We want to continue that, rather than trying to overplay our hand and shatter the trust that we’ve created so far.”


From chickens to foxes, here's how bird flu is spreading across the US

Dinah Voyles Pulver, USA TODAY
Sat, June 15, 2024 

A bird flu outbreak that has infiltrated six continents and is wreaking havoc in U.S. farms is among a group of avian influenza flu viruses first described in Italy in 1878 as a "fowl plague."

This outbreak, from a strain that emerged among poultry flocks and wild birds in Europe in the fall of 2020, has been the most pervasive in the U.S. and Europe. Once the highly contagious strain – H5N1 – was identified, it quickly began spreading across Europe and into Africa, the Middle East and Asia. By October 2022, it had been declared the largest avian flu epidemic ever in Europe.

As it spread around the world, it forced the deaths of tens of millions of chickens and turkeys and has killed or sickened thousands of birds, as well as land-based mammals and marine mammals. For now, the risk to people remains low, but the longer it lingers, researchers say, the risk increases that it could evolve into a virus that has greater impact on human health.

Here are some of the key events in the transmission and spread of the virus.
May – July 2021

Wild fox kits at a rehabilitation center in the Netherlands test positive for the virus during an outbreak in wild birds.


Virus found in great skuas – a type of seabird – on Fair Isle, Scotland.
November – December 2021

H5N1 first detected in North America, in poultry and in a great black-backed gull in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.


Four ducks harvested by hunters North and South Carolina test positive for the virus, the first bird flu infection among wild birds in the U.S. since 2016.
January – February 2022

An avian flu infection is reported in an 80-year-old man in England, with no symptoms who raised ducks that became sick in late December.


On Feb. 9, 2022, an outbreak was reported among turkeys at a U.S. commercial poultry facility.


Poultry outbreaks occurring worldwide.


Sea lions dying in Peru test positive for the virus


Virus detections begin occurring at other commercial poultry facilities in the U.S.

Diseases of chickens and other poultry are the focus of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory in Athens, Georgia.
April – September 2022

U.S. reports first human case, possibly the result of contamination of the nasal passages rather than actual infection in a worker culling chickens on a Colorado farm.


Bald eagle die-off underway in the U.S.


Egg prices jump as thousands of chickens euthanized after they are infected with bird flu.


Virus found in at least 88 mammals in the U.S. , including harbor seals, red foxes, skunks and a bottlenose dolphin. Similar detections occurring in Europe and Japan.


Infected cormorants wash up on Martha's Vineyard beaches


Zoos begin moving birds indoors.
Fall 2022

Virus reported in more than two dozen mammals, including a black bear and Kodiak bear in Alaska, and in grizzly bears in Montana and Nebraska, and in a mountain lion.


Two poultry workers in Spain diagnosed with the virus.
2023

Bird flu spillover into mammals continues. Several human cases reported internationally.

By February, more than 50 million chickens have been affected in the U.S., in what has become one of the largest bird flu outbreaks in recorded history.


Study finds bird flu killing many bald eagles.


In April, wildlife officials report California condors die at alarming rate.


A dog died after chewing on a wild goose in Canada.


In December, the first detections are reported in both polar regions. A dead polar bear in Alaska tests positive for the virus, a first for polar bears and for the Arctic. Virus also found in elephant and fur seals in the Antarctic.

Endangered California condors are among the species that contracted the H5N1 bird flu. More than a dozen died before the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service oversaw development of a vaccine that was successfully used to treat them.
March – April 2024

Viral infections occur for the first time in juvenile goats on a Minnesota farm where a poultry flock tested positive.


Virus found for the first time in dairy cows, at farms in Kansas and Texas. Later research suggests it was circulating since December, likely after introduction by a wild bird to a Texas cattle farm.


Testing of food products ramps up.


Virus found in unpasteurized clinical samples of milk at two Kansas dairy farms and one in Texas.


Fragments of the virus found in pasteurized milk, but aren't considered dangerous.


A farm worker in Texas tests positive for the virus, with conjunctivitis but not a respiratory infection, after coming into close contact with infected cows. It's the second human case in the U.S. and the first reported cow-to-human spread of H5N1 bird flu.
May 2024

Michigan dairy farm worker tests positive for the virus, with conjunctivitis symptoms.


Infection reported in another farm worker in the U.S., and this time the patient has respiratory symptoms, which healthcare researchers find more concerning. It's the fourth reported human case, the third by exposure to dairy cows.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Bird flu in the US: A full timeline

The fast-food industry claims the California minimum wage law is costing jobs. 

Its numbers are fake

Michael Hiltzik
Wed, June 12, 2024

Surrounded by fast-food workers in September, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the bill raising the minimum wage in the industry to $20 an hour from $16. (Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press)

The fast-food industry has been wringing its hands over the devastating impact on its business from California's new minimum wage law for its workers.

Their raw figures certainly seems to bear that out. A full-page ad recently placed in USA Today by the California Business and Industrial Alliance asserted that nearly 10,000 fast-food jobs had been lost in the state since Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the law in September.

The ad listed a dozen chains, from Pizza Hut to Cinnabon, whose local franchisees had cut employment or raised prices, or are considering taking those steps. According to the ad, the chains were "victims of Newsom's minimum wage," which increased the minimum wage in fast food to $20 from $16, starting April 1.

The rapid job cuts, rising prices, and business closures are a direct result of Governor Newsom and this short-sighted legislation

Business lobbyist Tom Manzo, touting misleading statistics

Here's something you might want to know about this claim. It's baloney, sliced thick. In fact, from September through January, the period covered by the ad, fast-food employment in California has gone up, as tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve. The claim that it has fallen represents a flagrant misrepresentation of government employment figures.

Something else the ad doesn't tell you is that after January, fast-food employment continued to rise. As of April, employment in the limited-service restaurant sector that includes fast-food establishments was higher by nearly 7,000 jobs than it was in April 2023, months before Newsom signed the minimum wage bill.

Despite that, the job-loss figure and finger-pointing at the minimum wage law have rocketed around the business press and conservative media, from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Post to the website of the conservative Hoover Institution.

We'll be taking a closer look at the corporate lobbyist sleight-of-hand that makes job gains look like job losses. But first, a quick trot around the fast-food economic landscape generally.

Few would argue that the restaurant business is easy, whether we're talking about high-end sit-down dining, kiosks and food trucks, or franchised fast-food chains. The cost of labor is among the many expenses that owners have to deal with, but in recent years far from the worst. That would be inflation in the cost of food.

Newport Beach-based Chipotle Mexican Grill, for example, disclosed in its most recent annual report that food, beverages and packaging cost it $2.9 billion last year, up from $2.6 billion in 2022 — though those costs declined as a share of revenue to 29.5% from 30.1%. Labor costs in 2023 came to $2.4 billion, but fell to 24.7% of revenue from 25.5% in 2022.

Read more: Column: Inside the effort by two Beverly Hills billionaires to kill a state law protecting farmworkers

At Costa Mesa-based El Pollo Loco, labor and related costs fell last year by $3.5 million, or 2.7%, despite an increase of $4.1 million that the company attributed to higher minimum wages enacted in the past as well as "competitive pressure" — in other words, the necessity of paying more to attract employees in a tight labor market.

Then there's Rubio's Coastal Grill. On June 3 the Carlsbad chain confirmed that it had closed 48 of its California restaurants, about one-third of its 134 locations. As my colleague Don Lee reported, Rubio's attributed the closings to the rising cost of doing business in California.

There's more to the story, however. The biggest expense Rubio's has been facing is debt — a burden that has grown since the chain was acquired in 2010 by the private equity firm Mill Road Capital. By 2020, the chain owed $72.3 million, and it filed for bankruptcy. Indeed, in its full declaration with the bankruptcy court filed on June 5, the company acknowledged that along with increases in the minimum wage, it was facing an "unsustainable debt burden."

The company emerged from bankruptcy at the end of 2020 with settlements that included a reduction in its debt load. Then came the pandemic, a significant headwind. Among its struggles was again its debt — $72.9 million owed to its largest creditor, TREW Capital Management, a firm that specializes in lending to distressed restaurant businesses. It filed for bankruptcy again on June 5, two days after announcing its store closings. The case is pending.

Fast-food and other restaurant jobs slump every year from the fall through January, due to seasonal factors (red line); seasonal adjustments (blue line) give a more accurate picture of employment trends. The sharp decline in 2020 was caused by the pandemic. (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis)

It's worth noting that high debt is often a feature of private-equity takeovers — in such cases saddling an acquired company with debt gives the acquirers a means to extract cash from their companies, even if it complicates the companies' path to profitability. Whether that's a factor in Rubio's recent difficulties isn't clear.

That brings us back to the claim that job losses among California's fast-food restaurants are due to the new minimum wage law.

The assertion appears to have originated with the Wall Street Journal, which reported on March 25 that restaurants across California were cutting jobs in anticipation of the minimum wage increase taking effect on April 1.

The article stated that employment in California's fast food and "other limited-service eateries was 726,600 in January, "down 1.3% from last September," when Newsom signed the minimum wage law. That worked out to employment of 736,170 in September, for a purported loss of 9,570 jobs from September through January.

The Journal's numbers were used as grist by UCLA economics professor Lee E. Ohanian for an article he published on April 24 on the website of the Hoover Institution, where he is a senior fellow.

Ohanian wrote that the pace of the job loss in fast-food was far greater than the overall decline in private employment in California from September through January, "which makes it tempting to conclude that many of those lost fast-food jobs resulted from the higher labor costs employers would need to pay" when the new law kicked in.

Read more: Column: American unions have finally remembered how to win

CABIA cited Ohanian's article as the source for its claim in its USA Today ad that "nearly 10,000" fast-food jobs were lost due to the minimum wage law. "The rapid job cuts, rising prices, and business closures are a direct result of Governor Newsom and this short-sighted legislation," CABIA founder and president Tom Manzo says on the organization's website.

Here's the problem with that figure: It's derived from a government statistic that is not seasonally adjusted. That's crucial when tracking jobs in seasonal industries, such as restaurants, because their business and consequently employment fluctuate in predictable patterns through the year. For this reason, economists vastly prefer seasonally adjusted figures when plotting out employment trendlines in those industries.

The Wall Street Journal's figures correspond to non-seasonally adjusted figures for California fast-food employment published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (I'm indebted to nonpareil financial blogger Barry Ritholtz and his colleague, the pseudonymous Invictus, for spotlighting this issue.)

Figures for California fast-food restaurants from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis show that on a seasonally adjusted basis employment actually rose in the September-to-January period by 6,335 jobs, from 736,160 to 742,495.

That's not to say that there haven't been employment cutbacks this year by some fast-food chains and other companies in hospitality industries. From the vantage point of laid-off workers, the manipulation of statistics by their employers doesn't ease the pain of losing their jobs.

Still, as Ritholtz and Invictus point out, it's hornbook economics that the proper way to deal with non-seasonally adjusted figures is to use year-to-year comparisons, which obviate seasonal trends.

Read more: Column: It's a happy Labor Day indeed after NLRB cracks down on employer sabotage of union elections

Doing so with the California fast-food statistics give us a different picture from the one that CABIA paints. In that business sector, September employment rose from a seasonally adjusted 730,000 in 2022 to 741,079 in 2024. In January, employment rose from 732,738 in 2023 to 742,495 this year.

Restaurant lobbyists can't pretend that they're unfamiliar with the concept of seasonality. It's been a known feature of the business since, like, forever.

The restaurant consultantship Toast even offers tips to restaurant owners on how to manage the phenomenon, noting that "April to September is the busiest season of the year," largely because that period encompasses Mother's Day and Father's Day, "two of the busiest restaurant days of the year," and because good weather encourages customers to eat out more often.

What's the slowest period? November to January, "when many people travel for holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas and spend time cooking and eating with family."

In other words, the lobbyists, the Journal and their followers all based their expressions of concern on a known pattern in which restaurant employment peaks into September and then slumps through January — every year.

They chose to blame the pattern on the California minimum wage law, which plainly had nothing to do with it. One can't look into their hearts and souls, but under the circumstances their arguments seem more than a teensy bit cynical.

CABIA's Manzo said by email that the alliance's source for the job-loss statistic in its advertisement was the Hoover Institution, whose "work and credibility speaks for itself."

He's wrong about the source. Ohanian explicitly drew the number he cited in his Hoover Institution post from the Wall Street Journal; he didn't do any independent analysis.

Ohanian acknowledged by email that "if the data are not seasonally adjusted, then no conclusions can be drawn from those data regarding AB 1228," the minimum wage law. He said he interpreted the Wall Street Journal's figures as seasonally adjusted and said he would query the Journal about the issue in anticipation of writing about it later this summer.

The author of the Wall Street Journal article, Heather Haddon, didn't reply to my inquiry about why she appeared to use non-seasonally adjusted figures when the adjusted figures were more appropriate.

Ohanian did observe, quite properly, that the labor cost increase from the law was large and that "if franchisees continue to face large food cost increases later this year, then the industry will really struggle." Fast-food companies already have instituted sizable price increases to cover their higher expenses, he observed. "The question thus becomes how sensitive are fast-food consumers to higher prices," a topic he says he will be researching as the year goes on.

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

As a Latina Vegan, I’m Decolonizing a Cruel & Racist Food System

Story by Lauren T. Ornelas, As Told To Nicole Froio •

Growing up in Texas in the 1970s, I spent long periods away from my mother. My parents divorced when I was 4 years old, so my mom raised my sisters and me by herself. To make ends meet, she spent long hours at work, trying to earn enough money to feed, clothe, and house us. That meant other people in the community took care of us during the day. While my mother was away, I would watch the cows on the hillside, and I would think about how sad it must’ve been for the mother cow to come home and not find her baby there anymore. In this sense, I saw myself in these animals, and I didn’t want to be responsible for disrupting any family of cows the way capitalism was interrupting mine.

As an elementary school student, it was my innate connection to non-human animals like cows, and my understanding of the harms of raising and slaughtering calves, that moved me to become a vegetarian. But, as a kid, it was difficult for me to stick with this diet, mostly because of my family’s financial restraints. Sometimes, all we could eat was what others donated to us or what our school served us, and that often included meals with meat. I realized then that poverty prevented me from eating my ethics and that I didn’t have the freedom to eat how I wanted to.

Being Chicana, I’ve long known that food is political, even if it shouldn’t be. My mom supported the Delano Grape Strike, a labor movement the predominantly Filipino organization Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) launched against the grape growers in Delano, California, in 1965, California, to fight against the exploitation of farmworkers. She boycotted non-union grapes and taught me about the impact of labor exploitation on the bodies and minds of farmworkers. By the time I got to high school, I was getting involved in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. I learned that I could make a difference from far away, that, like my mom, one of the things I could do was boycott companies with vested interests in the apartheid regime, so I did.

For me, food, animal rights, and racialized liberation struggles have always been linked, but I learned early that not everyone recognized the interconnectedness of this violence. In 1987, I was excited to get involved in the animal rights movement. But my elation was stolen by the reality of white supremacy within the movement. My colleagues regularly brought me out as a token Latina vegan in order to shame my people into veganism or to prove that the vegan movement wasn’t only white; however, these same folks rarely listened to me when I discussed why Latines don’t always have the access to plant-based foods or the labor struggles of farmworkers. Instead, they pitted animal rights and human rights against each other, as if I couldn’t care about and work on both at the same time. For decades, I did work I believed in while feeling exploited and misunderstood by organizations and people who were supposed to be my comrades.



As a Latina Vegan, I’m Decolonizing a Cruel & Racist Food System© Provided by Refinery29

Then, in 2006, while I participated in the World Social Forum in Caracas, Venezuela, I felt seen, understood, and affirmed for the first time. I was sharing space with people who looked like me, sounded like me, and shared both my passion for the work and grievance with how it was being carried out. They, like me, understood how the lack of human rights is inherently linked to the lack of rights for non-human animals. There, surrounded by fervor and gripe, I realized that if we wanted to be a part of a movement or organization that cared deeply for all living beings, we would have to take matters into our own hands.

Later that year, I founded the Food Empowerment Project, an organization that seeks to create a more just and sustainable world by recognizing the power we have as food eaters. Through the publication of free, accessible, and culturally sensitive resources on our website, we encourage ethical food choices. We published our first big resource, Vegan Mexican Food, in Spanish and English in 2007, making Mexican recipes available to everyone looking to practice veganism without losing their cultural foods in the process. But more than just veganized recipes, this resource discusses the changes in our diets that took place due to colonization, to explain the introduction of farmed animals into the Americas, and to take us back toward a food system that is free from the exploitation of humans and non-human animals.

Education, a people-animal-land liberation politic, and advocacy are all at the root of this work. Growing up experiencing food apartheid, I know that being vegan isn’t easy for people who are lower income or who live in food deserts. I also know that many people in my community, largely impoverished migrants and people of color, work in the food industry with little-to-no labor protections. As such, we often experience the harms of the non-ethical food production practices. In terms of food consumption, Black, Latine, and Indigenous people are the most impacted by lack of access to healthy foods and, as a result, struggle with higher rates of dietary diseases. When it comes to food labor, cycles of poverty leave our communities with few career paths outside of farm work, forcing us to toil for low wages and no paid time off at companies that break labor laws with impunity.

Through the Food Empowerment Project, we see how these struggles are interconnected and fight against abuses of both human and non-human animals. Through working with community organizations, conducting original surveys and studies, and sharing our findings with local politicians, we increase access to healthy food options where they are absent. Similarly, we advance the rights of farmworkers by supporting legislative and regulatory changes as well as corporate efforts led by the laborers. And we promote ethical veganism through education, outreach, and resources.

We owe young people direct changes, as quickly as we can, to make up for the horrors that we’ve been wreaking on each other, on the planet, and on non-human animals. With the Food Empowerment Project, I am committed to pulling at all of the threads of oppression, tugging at them until everybody’s free.

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