A pasteurization approach widely used in the dairy industry proved to be effective at killing bird flu in milk after all, the Food and Drug Administration announced Friday, after an earlier federal lab study raised questions about the approach. The FDA says its new results are the latest to show that drinking pasteurized grocery store milk remains safe, despite an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza, or HPAI H5N1, on dairy farms across at least eight states . "We had a lot of anecdotal evidence.
But we wanted to have direct evidence about HPAI and bovine milk. So we began to build this custom instrument that replicates, on a pilot scale, commercial processing," Prater said. It comes weeks after researchers at the National Institutes of Health found some infectious bird flu virus was able to survive pasteurization in lab tests .
Both the FDA and the earlier NIH researchers looked at an approach called "flash pasteurization" or high temperature short time processing, which heats milk for at least 15 seconds at 161°F. Unlike the NIH study, Prater said the study with the U.S.
Department of Agriculture took longer to complete because it was designed to more accurately simulate all the steps that go into processing milk in the commercial dairy industry. The FDA said the tests show the pasteurization process was killing the virus even before it reached the final stages when milk is held at the right temperature, offering a "large margin of safety." "What we found in this .
