Cooking Hamburgers Properly Kills H5N1
May 17, 2024
The USDA says it’s confident that your hamburger is safe to eat, announcing results of tests showing that cooking patties to an internal temperature of 145 or 160 degrees – medium and well-done – killed the H5N1 virus.
Medium and well-done burgers had no virus, but officials said after cooking at 120 degrees, “there was virus still in the cooked hamburger patty, although at much, much reduced levels.”
USDA is also testing beef muscle samples from culled dairy cows and will share those results as soon as they are available.
To date, bird flu has been found in dairy herds in Michigan, Idaho, Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Kansas and South Dakota.
USDA’s chief veterinarian, Rosemary Sifford, said that the evidence USDA has so far shows that the “spillover event” – where wild birds infected dairy cows – likely occurred in late 2023 in the Texas panhandle, and the virus has spread through movement of those herds, including not just the animals but “the movement of equipment or other items.”
Source: Agri-Pulse
