Milk is Milk Blog by Alex Avery
This past year, we’ve seen a huge increase in people wanting to drink “raw” (unpasteurized) milk because of unspecified and undocumented health and nutrition benefits. As such, we’ve received a number of emails and letters asking us why it is that we’re so dead set against raw milk.
The answer to that question reared its ugly head just before Christmas when several children in Washington State were hospitalized in critical condition due to bacterial infections acquired from raw milk.
The article below provides the grisly details. What is left out of this and other articles is that these illness outbreaks are all too common with raw milk. This significantly higher risk for contracting illnesses from raw milk is exactly why so many health authorities mandated the pasteurization of milk starting in the early 20th century. It was around this time that the American Medical Association helped establish milk pasteurization centers in the U.S. Prior to this time the death rate of children under five years old who consumed raw milk was up to 135 per 1,000. The city of Chicago was the first to mandate milk pasteurization in 1908 to stop the spread of tuberculosis.
The problem today is that we’ve become so successful at combating and minimizing the incidence of these sometimes life-threatening illnesses that we’ve come to believe pasteurization is unnecessary. We forget that milk used to be a primary way of contracting tuberculosis, ruminant fever, salmonella, and many other nasty and potentially life-threatening diseases. We are lulled by the fact that most of us are vaccinated against many diseases that used to be transmitted in milk. In fact, some of these diseases have become so rare that we incorrectly think we can choose NOT to vaccinate our children without risk. And to some extent that’s correct. If 95% of the population is vaccinated, the unvaccinated 5% are protected by the mass of vaccinated people around them. But like so much else, when we start yanking bricks from the foundation, eventually huge holes will appear.
And so it is with raw milk. Despite the fact that raw milk represents a mere fraction of a fraction of our total milk supply, it is causing the majority of illness outbreaks from milk. In the past few years, hundreds have been sickened from raw milk. What would happen if all milk were unpasteurized, as is advocated by fanatical raw milk promotion groups like the Weston A. Price Foundation (founded by a physician who in the 1930s became convinced that modern foods were the cause of bad health after seeing lots of “healthy” people in primitive parts of the world)? There would be a massive increase in deaths and disease spread in milk, plain and simple.
While there are surely passionate and likely well-meaning people behind the raw-milk promotion campaigns, they are playing Russian roulette with your health. This is especially true for children, the elderly and pregnant women. Fortunately, it’s still a fringe product. Scarily, it is being promoted most heavily for the health of children. And when children are involved, promoting raw milk is criminal.
Why it is that anyone is allowed to sell raw milk in any state to anyone when the risks have been repeatedly shown to exist and real victims continue to pile up eludes us. Currently 23 states allow some legal sale of raw cow milk.