Milk is Milk Blog by Alex Avery

This week Virginia lawmakers responsibly enacted legislation to protect public health AND protect dairy producers by requiring that milk and other dairy products be pasteurized. Sounds simple enough. Pasteurization ensures that children, the largest consumers of dairy products, are protected against potentially deadly bacteria and viruses that can find their way into unpasteurized dairy products. But pure food nuts are up in arms over this sensible public health policy. Other states, like Colorado, are actually moving forward with the agenda of these food fanatics to allow unpasteurized milk - also called “raw milk” - to be sold.

Here in the United States we’ve been restricting the sale of raw milk products since the 1940s. Dr. John Sheehan, Director of the FDA’s Division of Dairy and Egg Safety says drinking raw milk is “like playing Russian roulette with your health.” In 1986 a judge went so far as to order the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to ban the interstate shipment of raw milk. Why? Because people, especially children or others with weak immune systems, can die from consuming dairy products tainted with bacteria commonly found in raw, unpasteurized dairy products: Campylobacter jejuni, Escherichia coli O157:H7, Salmonella (over 1600 types) and Listeria monocytogenes. People, this stuff isn’t for kids or anyone else, unless you enjoy muscle pain followed by diarrhea (sometimes bloody), acute kidney failure, high fever, headache, nausea, vomiting, meningitis, spontaneous abortion (in pregnant women) or death. Those are just some of the symptoms associated with the types of food poisoning that can be caused by drinking raw milk.

An article co-authored by Senator Rudy Boschwitz points out that the U.S. Public Health Service says four of these bacteria (Campylobacter jejuni, Salmonella typhimurium, Listeria monocytogenes and E. coli O157:H7) are the most serious foodborne pathogens in America. Five kids in Vancouver, Canada, were poisoned by drinking raw milk from a cooperative farm; two suffered permanent liver damage. In the 1990s, Massachusetts even reported two incidents of potential mass raw-milk exposures to rabies! Two different cows in different herds were diagnosed with rabies, and 80 people who drank their raw milk had to take the painful series of rabies shots. In Wisconsin, some 70 people got sick from drinking illegal raw milk tainted with campylobacter bacteria.

And still, the pure food nuts are pressuring legislators to end decades-long protections so they can sell and promote raw milk. Some poorly informed lawmakers are even listening! In Colorado, dangerous legislation is currently moving forward to allow more public access to raw milk. This is being promoted by a Washington, DC-based activist group called the Weston A. Price Foundation and other extreme organic agriculture purists. This group bases its reputation on the teachings of Weston A. Price, a dentist working in Cleveland in the 1930s who claimed that raw milk is healthier.

Bunk! Extensive nutritional and medical research discredits these claims. Further, in 1989 the California Superior Court ruled against Alta Dena dairy, who was selling and promoting raw milk as healthier, and found that: (a) “overwhelming evidence proved that Alta-Dena’s raw (unpasteurized) milk frequently contains dangerous bacteria that can cause serious illness”; and (b) the company must stop its false advertising. So why are activist groups like Weston A. Price and the Organic Consumers Association promoting raw milk and spreading false claims?

The Weston A. Price Foundation is lead today by Nancy Fallon, a frequent speaker at organic conferences and other holistic health and alternative agriculture events. The Price board includes a wide-range of alternative health industry representatives and reports that it receives financial support from for-profit alternative-health and products companies. These are some of the same people who are telling cancer patients to ignore physicians and treat themselves with non-commercially harvested organic seaweed and that microwave ovens and digital alarm clocks are poisoning us with their electromagnetic signals. Can you say “nut jobs”? Unfortunately, this alternative health and products industry generates hundred of millions of dollars from people scared into buying their products. They may be nut jobs, but they’ve got big moneyed interests behind them. Heck, they even have a “raw milk” t-shirt and coffee mug concession - that should instill confidence by consumers and misguided legislators following their advice!

Dr. William Jarvis of The National Council Against Health Fraud addresses the issue of raw milk effectively and to the point: “The evidence is clear. Milk is a wholesome food, but there is nothing to be gained from drinking it in its raw, natural form. (Raw milk) poses a serious health risk to significant segments of the population. Only pasteurized milk should be sold for general public consumption.”

It’s time for regulators, nutrition and medical professionals to step up and inform these apparently ill-informed legislators promoting the agendas of these radical pure food zealots about the dangers they present to our children and to our very important dairy trade in this country. Dairy producers and retailers also need to be heard on this matter. How much damage to overall dairy sales do they think the first child death linked to consuming raw milk will cause? Every legislator sponsoring and voting to enable raw milk sales should be held accountable - don’t let them say they didn’t know.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 31st, 2005 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.