20 Percent of Retail Milk Samples Positive for Bird Flu: FDA

Regulators have refused to disclose key details about the tested samples.

A dairy cow at a dairy farm in Ohio, on December 12, 2014. Aaron Josefczuk/Reuters

One in five samples of milk from grocery store shelves tested positive for the highly pathogenic avian influenza, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced late April 25.

In a brief 237-word update, the FDA said that initial results from a national commercial milk sampling study “show about 1 in 5 of the retail samples tested are quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR)-positive for HPAI viral fragments, with a greater proportion of positive results coming from milk in areas with infected herds.”