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  • 30 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 7th, 2023
  • AlpacaChariot@lemmy.worldtoWorld News@lemmy.ml•New tests confirm milk from flu-infected cows can make other animals sick — and raise questions about flash pasteurizationEnglish
    11·
    7 months ago

    The questions I had are:

    • Do we use flash pasteurisation in the UK?
    • How high is the residual risk for flash pasteurised milk?

    Yes we do use flash pasteurisation in the UK.

    https://www.dairycouncil.co.uk/who-we-are/ni-dairy/field-to-fridge/pasteurisation

    Residual risk for flash pasteurised milk is high enough to be concerning, but the study didn’t follow exactly the same process as industry does during pasteurisation, and those extra steps may also help to kill the virus. So we probably need another study to add in those other steps and see if the virus survives or not.

    Not ideal though.

    Heating the milk to 72 degrees Celsius, or 181 degrees Fahrenheit, for 15 or 20 seconds — conditions that approximated flash pasteurization — greatly reduced levels of the virus in the milk, but it didn’t inactivate it completely.

    Milk samples heated for 15 or 20 seconds were still able to infect incubated chicken eggs, a test the US Food and Drug Administration has called the gold-standard for determining whether viruses remain infectious in milk.

    “But, we emphasize that the conditions used in our laboratory study are not identical to the large-scale industrial treatment of raw milk,” senior study author Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a virologist who specializes in the study of flu and Ebola, said in an email.

    That’s a good reason not to panic over the study findings, said Lakdawala.

    Lakdawala said that commercial flash pasteurization involves a preheating step, which wasn’t done here. It also involves homogenization, a process that emulsifies the fat globules in milk so the cream won’t separate. Both of those steps would probably make it harder for the virus to survive, but she adds that the results of this study suggest full process of commercial flash pasteurization should be done “with all the steps in place.”

  • AlpacaChariot@lemmy.worldtoWorld News@lemmy.ml•Dutch woman, 29, granted euthanasia approval on grounds of mental sufferingEnglish
    15·
    7 months ago

    I don’t know about your personal situation, and it may be different for whatever you are suffering with, however the part you quoted is true for a lot of cases.

    Having just looked after my wife through a period of ~3 years really severe depression I’ve seen it first hand, it completely changed her personality and outlook and she was saying all kinds of stuff she’s quite embarrassed by now. She genuinely couldn’t think straight at all or see any way out, and in that moment if offered the choice to die she might have taken it (a fact she is quite scared by now, having mostly recovered).

    Similar story with my brother, who has bipolar… when he’s manic he has an absolute inability to hold a train of thoughts together for longer than 30 seconds. When he’s depressed it’s absolutely awful. He’s now stable and enjoying his life.

    I’m not arguing that this shouldn’t be an option for some very extreme chronic conditions, but it’s obviously complicated.

  • AlpacaChariot@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.ml•Brits: Salt is a spiceEnglish
    5·
    9 months ago

    Well in this case the reputation for “warm beer” is true and I’m willing to die on this particular hill.

    Proper cask ale should be served at between 8 and 12C, AKA cellar temperature, cool but not cold. Nothing beats a traditional pint of ‘best bitter’ in an old pub!

    Plenty of people in the UK drink lager and other styles of beer that are more highly carbonated, stronger ABV, and served colder. Personally I’m not a fan but each to their own.

    I live about an hour from London in a rural area with loads of great pubs but I find it difficult to find a nice beer in most parts of London. It’s much easier to keep a keg of carbonated beer under pressure than a cask ale that you have to finish within a few days of tapping, which is why when a certain proportion of a pub’s clientele start drinking other styles it just isn’t worth it for the pub to keep real ale. Hopefully it won’t become a niche thing.