The Topline: Bird flu in Midwestern milk

Welcome to The Topline, a weekly roundup of the big numbers driving the Minnesota news cycle, as well as the smaller ones that you might have missed. This week: bird flu in milk; soil erosion; expensive cigarettes; longevity; and visits to Minneapolis.

Bird flu detectable in nearly 40% of Midwest milk products sampled

A veterinary epidemiologist at Ohio State University collected 150 milk products from store shelves in multiple states across the Midwest, STAT News reports, and tested them for DNA from the H5N1 bird flu virus. Fifty-eight of the samples came back positive.

The viral DNA was almost certainly inactive, likely killed off by pasteurization. Tests are underway to verify that now. But the initiative underscores that bird flu is almost certainly more widespread among dairy herds than previously thought, and spreading in potentially unpredictable ways.

Scientists in Texas, for instance, have documented five H5N1 deaths among cats on two dairy farms, either from drinking unpasteurized milk or eating birds infected with the disease.

Some experts are worried the federal government is making the same mistakes it did in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, with sluggish testing and a lack of urgency. So far only two humans have come down with the flu in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They’ve suffered only mild symptoms, and the agency says the virus doesn’t spread readily between people.

But viruses are capable of changing over time, and an unchecked pandemic raging among birds and now cattle gives H5N1 a lot of chances to roll the genetic dice and potentially turn up a mutation that’s more threatening to people.

It’s soil erosion season in the Red River Valley

The National Weather Service Grand Forks recently shared this video of thick clouds of topsoil blowing across roadways near the city and creating hazardous driving conditions. It happens all across the Midwest this time of year: Strong dry winds blow huge quantities of soil off traditionally tilled fields, while rains wash away additional amounts.

“U.S. farms are currently losing twice as much topsoil to erosion per year as the Great Plains lost in a typical year at the height of the 1930s Dust Bowl,” the Union of Concerned Scientists noted in 2020. The average American crop farm loses about 2 tons of soil from every acre to wind every year, and another 2.7 tons to water, the group estimates.

All that soil is laden with pesticides, fertilizers and other chemicals that foul the country’s waterways and pollute the air, and it’s expensive to farmers to replenish the treatments that they lose to erosion. 

Minneapolis is #1 (in expensive cigarettes)

Last week the Minneapolis City Council unanimously adopted an ordinance raising the minimum price of cigarettes to $15 a pack, which is likely the highest price in the nation, MPR News reports. In pricey New York City, for instance, a pack of smokes will set you back only $13.

Cigarettes are highly addictive and cause a panoply of horrible health conditions, including “cancer, heart disease, stroke, lung diseases, diabetes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease”, according to the CDC. They cause about half a million deaths each year, and cut short the lives of the people who use them by an average of 10 years.

Research has consistently shown that simply raising their prices is the best way to reduce consumption.

Living around college grads makes you live longer, regardless of your own education level

Smoking features prominently in the next finding, which comes from a National Bureau of Economic Research paper released last week: People who live in areas with larger proportions of college graduates live longer, healthier lives, regardless of how much education they’ve individually received.

The researchers attribute this primarily to social spillover effects on obesity and smoking rates. Smoking, in particular, is more stigmatized in highly educated areas, and people living in those areas are more likely to work in smoke-free workplaces. 

The correlation has gotten stronger over time, and is especially strong for rural and Hispanic people.

Minneapolis saw biggest increase in visitors of any major North American city

“Despite seemingly half of Minnesota vowing never to set foot there, Minneapolis saw the biggest increase in downtown visitors over the past year out of any North American city,” wrote Bring Me The News in a fantastic tweet highlighting this finding.

The data comes from a cell phone study by researchers at the University of Toronto who found that foot traffic to Minneapolis increased by 45% from March 2023 to February 2024. Big events, like Taylor Swift concerts and the Pride Festival, are likely driving some of this.