There is no benefit to raw milk or raw meat. Pasteurization and cooking exists.
CIDRAP Los Angeles County confirms avian flu in cat deaths as more cases suspected Lisa Schnirring December 19, 2024 The three cats with suspected infections don’t have any known exposure to raw milk, and investigators are examining other potential sources of the virus, including raw meat. People exposed to the three cats are under symptom monitoring and have been offered antiviral prophylaxis.
I stopped letting my cats get raw chicken about 2 years ago because of concerns. Now I just bake the bits trimmed off separately for the cats. Wearing a mask and gloves tending to a bird feeder is a good idea. As a precaution about a year or so ago I moved the bird feeders several feet further from the window with the cat tree where cats sit to watch the birds at the bird feeder.
There is no benefit to drinking raw milk – pasteurization exists for a reason. I would avoid dairy that’s not pasteurized even without bird flu. And it appears that when cats drink raw milk contaminated with H5n1 it’s fatal and absolutely not worth the risk.
Someone sent me a link to a tiktok video by a veterinarian in Michigan who says that there’s not a whole lot of guidance around cats and avian flu, and mentions how it’s pretty out there that most veterinary offices are not masking regularly, while this is a risk as well as covid and the rest of it. So veterinary offices could be a risk, when people take their infected cats there with nobody masked or maybe not even with a plan for infection control. I ask the veterinarian and the techs to mask during our visits. I wish they were regularly masked, for our safety and their own.
There is no benefit to raw when the risk is proven to be so serious.
The Oregonian – House cat in Washington County died after contracting bird flu from raw frozen pet food – Dec. 24, 2024 The food tested positive for an H5N1 strain of the avian influenza virus, and tests showed a genetic match between the virus in the raw and frozen pet food and the infected cat, according to Scholz.