41 replies to this topic

[qa_maddy]

I'm not sure if this ProPublica article has made it's way around yet, but this is currently such a problem in the United States (and admittedly due to a variety of factors -  culture vs. regulation vs. misinformation).

 

I'm consistently so frustrated by bad actors like this in the food world because it feels like a slap in the face to all the people I know that want to do good work, and want to make sure they food we produce is safe. 

 

And then there's this monster who knows he's selling contaminated product and couldn't care less because it manages to line is his pockets, and I'm not even going to talk about toothlessness of the FDA (that's entirely it's own problem that we're all familiar with). 

 

It just baffles me how the Peanut Corp. Of America has two execs behind bars for decades for doing something and now it's just all shrugged shoulders. *sigh*

 

https://www.propubli...lk-recalls-maha

 

 

[Scampi]

People forget, laws are to protect you from stupid people          they are not (nor have they even been) created to "monetize an non existent issue" as McAfee suggests (among other tin foil hat types)  So instead, McAfee is monetizing via fear mongering  aka committing to the lowest common denominator 

 

And this suggests that pathogen testing isn't being done at all or at least, not willing/able to discuss the actual lab results

"In California, they require it to be sampled and tested monthly for pathogens. Raw Farm is in good standing, according to the Department of Food and Agriculture, consistently meeting standards for sanitation and cow health."

 

And then in an example of utter stupidity (that laws are meant to protect some people from themselves)

"I’m seven months pregnant, and I drink raw milk because that’s how God has created it to be,” said Lindsay Espinoza, 34, reclining on a bale of hay with her husband and young son. “There’s so much fear behind raw milk, but it makes sense to us.”

If you believe in god, that same being also is responsible for the science of pasteurization.........

 

Good luck ----------going to take a lot more than a GFSI audit to fix this mess

[TimG]

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I want people to be free to make their own decisions based on science/facts. Are there plenty of facts out there about the dangers of raw milk? I believe there are, with pretty minimal googling skill. Heck, typing FDA RAW MILK top of the list is Raw Milk | FDA. If you still want to drink it, knock yourself out. 

On the other hand, being a guy who has 3.5 hours from walking in the door after I get home from work, to when I need to be lights out, I also understand it's hard to find the time to research things like that and I expect everything I buy from a grocery store in this country to not send me to the hospital.

[Scampi]

No research needed---------pasteurization is more than 100 years old        created to solve a problem

 

DONE

 

We're supposed to believe the average person (from any country) is smarter than Louis Pastuer?

https://en.wikipedia...i/Louis_Pasteur

[TimG]

No research needed---------pasteurization is more than 100 years old        created to solve a problem

 

DONE

 

We're supposed to believe the average person (from any country) is smarter than Louis Pastuer?

https://en.wikipedia...i/Louis_Pasteur

That wasn't the argument. My firsthand argument is that if people want to do stupid things (smoke, not wear their seatbelt, not wear a helmet, eat raw cookie dough, drink raw milk) it's their call.

[SQFconsultant]

Imagine if we all went back to the original intention of cow's milk - simple, Mama Cow makes milk for her babies - her milk was never intended for human consumption.

 

And yes, I used to drink cows milk, preferring raw - however the process of making that milk available to humans and the suffering that Mama Cows and their babies go thru just flat out won out.

[TimG]

I eat cookie dough and lick the spoons after cake batter is mixed. Not just pillsbury in the pack cookie dough that's probably safe to eat; the 'my gf just put 3 raw eggs into it, and it could have salmonella' cookie dough. I do it because of present bias vs delayed gratification, and probably just habit by now. It's not the same as buying something over the counter that has been proven to be risky, I get that. 

One thing that is not helping Mr. McAfee's argument: “I’ve put a couple kids in the hospital, and they have been sick, but they recovered,” McAfee acknowledged before my visit. “But here’s the thing: I’m a pioneer...."

 

Yikes!

[GMO]

It's a funny old world isn't it. But I'm going to get philosophical here. 

 

In mainland Europe and, to a great degree in the UK, I believe that "freedom" means something different from the US. So "freedom from" is seen as important, perhaps more important than "freedom to". So freedom from some of the things which could be harmful (guns, precautionary principle on MRLs etc). Whereas "freedom to" is more about I can do what I want even if it might be harmful to me.

 

That said though Covid really did a number on bodily freedoms. I remember listening to a podcast where they expressed confusion that those on the more liberal side were advocating for vaccine mandates and those of more of a right wing bent were saying things like "my body my choice". Whilst I'd count myself as on the liberal side of politics that did stop me in my tracks and I recognised my own hypocrisy. 

 

Now, to my mind, vaccines are one of the best things ever created in the world, something that genuinely prevents disease. It is not that they present no risks but the risks are miniscule. They do not and never have caused autism. I feel so very tired having to type that so very very long after (the ex) "Dr" Andrew Wakefield was struck off. And if you want to understand what a charlatan he is and was, read up on how he'd invested into separate vaccines. So his argument on MMR was never "don't have the vaccines" it was "Have Dr Wakefield's private vaccines!" But instead, after he was ridiculed in the UK, the US audience picked it up (ably helped by amplification by Russian bots and trolls) and he shacks up with Elle McPherson.

 

And no, I'm not joking on the Russian bots.

 

Weaponized Health Communication: Twitter Bots and Russian Trolls Amplify the Vaccine Debate | AJPH | Vol. 108 Issue 10

 

Anyhoo, raw milk. So. Do I think there is no sensible reason to consume it? Yep. But that said, do I sometimes eat raw milk cheeses? Also yep. Tends to be those with long maturation times and a whole heap of competitive microflora (e.g. parmesan). Do people understand that the two are not the same? Nope. Not at all.

 

Thing is if you taste milk from one farm (and I have, many times doing a desk top pasteurisation) it tastes different. Better somehow because it's different. That's because it might not be homogenised, blended with multiple dairies etc. As a result, it tastes genuinely different. And I can see why people like that. But it doesn't need to be raw for that to be the case. Just get your pasteurised milk from a small dairy.

 

When I worked in dairy I used to sign off the milk micro results. The range on hygiene indicators was enormous and having talked with dairy farmers, I am in no way confident enough of their knowledge of food safety to trust they know what they're doing to not pasteurise. And what's more if it's all the farmer doing it themself they don't have the oversight of the purchaser looking over their results, pushing them to improve parlour standards, cleanliness and making sure they're treating any mastitis and taking that cow out of circulation until they're well AND penalising their milk price if they don't.

 

For those reasons, I would not trust raw milk. And this is where I loop back to my original point. Most people who are choosing to drink raw milk do not have access to that experience and knowledge and so are trusting gut feel or a perception of health gained from people who don't have any knowledge on the subject. And that's where I think people need a bit of "freedom from".

 

But then in the US rare burgers are common and that's just as baffling to me.

[qa_maddy]

I just take issue with the fact that the advertising, and push behind Raw milk in the states is fully based on "scientific claims" that aren't verifiable.

 

If you with full knowledge, as a grown adult person, really want to take that risk? I'm likely not going to stop you - I don't practice perfect food safety in my home everyday, but I am not inflicting risk onto anyone else. 

 

This man is the pinnacle of an entire "free food advocacy" movement that's all based on bunk information - claiming that anything slightly altered from it's original state is stripped of nutrients and therefor "bad" - it's deeply stepped in white supremacy and classism to top it all off, and I just have a difficult time reconciling the fact that there's people's (especially kids') actual lives knowingly being put at risk at the end of the day. It's gross and capitalistic and as someone who really really wants to do the food safety thing right in my day to day work it's hard to watch. 

[GMO]

I just take issue with the fact that the advertising, and push behind Raw milk in the states is fully based on "scientific claims" that aren't verifiable.

 

If you with full knowledge, as a grown adult person, really want to take that risk? I'm likely not going to stop you - I don't practice perfect food safety in my home everyday, but I am not inflicting risk onto anyone else. 

 

This man is the pinnacle of an entire "free food advocacy" movement that's all based on bunk information - claiming that anything slightly altered from it's original state is stripped of nutrients and therefor "bad" - it's deeply stepped in white supremacy and classism to top it all off, and I just have a difficult time reconciling the fact that there's people's (especially kids') actual lives knowingly being put at risk at the end of the day. It's gross and capitalistic and as someone who really really wants to do the food safety thing right in my day to day work it's hard to watch. 

 

Agree. Those are all good points. And when you actually engage with some people who are pro raw milk advocates, most seem very unaware that pasteurisation does not kill all bacteria and how mild a process it is.

 

This will make you laugh. I once was reading some comments on another forum about raw milk. I had one of those moments. "Shall I wade in?" Turned out the woman who was swearing that she only drank raw milk actually boiled and cooled that milk at home. 

 

I didn't know whether to laugh, congratulate her, or cry. 

 

The level of misinformation nowadays is astonishing. And the ability for people to gauge what is a trustworthy or untrustworthy source is diminishing. I don't want that statement though to hang there as an "aren't people stupid?" claim. We're all susceptible to it and the confirmation biases we have internally are being magnified multiple times by social media. Watch one video about the benefits of raw milk? Here's 10 of them and none about the dangers! We will all have fallen for one piece of misinformation or another. None of us is immune. And as the post I shared earlier on attests, there are hostile states trying to amplify division so how could we possibly get it all right?

 

If you ever want to listen to a fascinating podcast on this, listen to "who trolled Amber". It's not really about Amber Heard but about how every one of us probably has a view on her. And it's worth stopping for a second and thinking "why? Because that's a bit odd isn't it?" You don't need to have a positive or negative view on her to find it interesting. But simply having a view at all is noteworthy.

 

Who Trolled Amber?

 

Then of course we will have a cross section of society entering our food factories. People who think raw milk is good for you will have to follow high care boundaries and may not believe in them. People who think climate change is a hoax will have to follow food waste rules and won't believe in them. It was an eye opening experience to talk about sustainability with a new Technical Manager I'd just recruited to find he was an absolute climate change denier.

 

Facts, even facts established by the majority of experts on the planet, are no longer good enough for the average Joe on the street, even the above average Joe on the street.

 

Now try and get compliance with that cultural backdrop...  

[MDaleDDF]

 it's deeply stepped in white supremacy and classism 

Interesting addition to your point.  Care to extrapolate?    

[qa_maddy]

Interesting addition to your point.  Care to extrapolate?    

I'm going to preface this by saying this is an incredibly America-centric take - so your mileage may vary if you're outside the states. 

 

The rise of the "food freedom" movement and Specifically Mark Mcafee's flavor of "Food Freedom" and advertising started with the elite of LA and California. The people that can afford the "healthy" and "wholesome" foods touted by these kind of influencers (Gwyneth Paltrow a la GOOP) and grifters (to be fully honest) tend to fall on the political right. These foods are inaccessible to those fall below certain socioeconomic status (Hello Erewhon) and then they're demonized for not "giving their families the best" (the control of WIC and SNAP benefits is a good example) -  it becomes or morality factor. Can you give your family the best? 

 

The political right is also consistently using food as a dog whistle in their own culture war and banking on the general distrust of the regulatory bodies, and the general lack of knowledge of how the food system works overall. On top of that there's an entire component within white supremacy to "return to tradition" - Trad wives, masculine men, and a return to gender roles they way they "should" be. This also leaches into the food culture - we should go back to when things were "natural" and "unprocessed" and "unaltered"- untainted the way God intended (hint hint) and anything other than that is a problem and toxin and bad for you. 

 

Juxtapose this when a lot of cultural practices of brown and black communities that still use "natural" or "traditional" methods of cooking, processing, and preparing their own foods - but it's not the European standard that white supremacists idealize and therefore it's seen as "dirty" or "savage" when in essence it's still the same. And this was generally looked down on for a handful of generations when convenience foods were all the rage, but only the white middle class could afford them. Working with whole foods, preparing things from scratch, even working on farmland (owning a hobby farm is idealized - being a farmhand is something immigrants do). has basically been coopted by white wealthy people as something to idealize when it's still very a much a way of survival for many black and brown communities in this country. Cloak that all in bad science and misinformation and MAHA and the wellness movement which is basically just a right-wing pipeline at this point and you have a very charged environment where this isn't quite as simple as "people don't know raw milk is bad for them". 

 

It becomes a status symbol, a dog whistle, and another tool in the toolbox of white supremacists.  

this video does a solid breakdown if you've got an hour or so and is slightly less rambley than my explanation. 

 

[jfrey123]

CDC has like 1 death per year traceable to raw dairy.  I'm not sure I'm ready to be concerned or play into this raw dairy culture war that seems to be getting stirred up.  Their cherry picked information and science has some merits, but it is clear that common pasteurization practices are better for society as a whole.  Fight bad information with good information.  US law doesn't even prohibit sale of raw milk, just the interstate transport of it, and given the data it's not as if raw milk is automatically positive for pathogens and must be pasteurized, just seems to be best practice given the slightest mishandling of raw can lead to widespread problems in a manufacturing environment.

 

Now don't get me wrong, I do tend to be "food freedom" minded, yet wouldn't ever consider going to work in places that practices these alternative outside-the-new-normal food safety practices.  I just think it's kind of silly that "regulation" is almost always attributed to safety and preventing harm amongst consumers.  Alcohol is heavily regulated by US Feds and still accounts for about 178,000 deaths a year.

 

I have doubts that this raw dairy push will affect more than a slim segment of the populations.  I do not think your most common and average families are going to bypass the normal pasteurized grocery store milk.  If they do, then fine on them, but the dairy industry will survive.

[GMO]

It's probably less than 1 per year. But even so, should we not worry? About 3-4% of US adults drink raw milk. It's still not common. I think the problem is as use in vulnerable groups grows and the risk of outbreaks grow. I'd also be pretty upset if "only" one person had been killed by my product. Especially if it was easily preventable.

 

I also think alcohol needs to be better controlled everywhere. As much as it makes sense to avoid the nonsense of prohibition anyway. Look, it's not everyone but there are correlations with violence, cancer, mental health etc. Everything against it looks pretty harmless so by using it as a framing to risk for raw milk? It's just going to always make any food safety risk look meaningless isn't it? There are about 150-200 US deaths p.a. due to food allergies. Does that mean they're not worth bothering about?

 

 (As an aside, considering you need to consider chronic, not just acute health impacts in HACCP, how tf would you write a HACCP plan for alcohol?!)

[TimG]

 

 

I also think alcohol needs to be better controlled everywhere.

 

This is how you can tell the difference between someone raised in the EU vs the USA. Not that there's anything wrong with that! But you probably won't hear you average American or Canadian say that (unless it's age/driving related which is already pretty heavily regulated as it should be).

[kfromNE]

"Now don't get me wrong, I do tend to be "food freedom" minded, yet wouldn't ever consider going to work in places that practices these alternative outside-the-new-normal food safety practices.  I just think it's kind of silly that "regulation" is almost always attributed to safety and preventing harm amongst consumers.  Alcohol is heavily regulated by US Feds and still accounts for about 178,000 deaths a year."

 

 

Comparing milk vs. alcohol laws is like comparing driving a car to plane license laws. You can't. Drinking excess milk won't cause liver disease, etc. or someone to become unsafe to drive a car because they drank too much. 

[GMO]

This is how you can tell the difference between someone raised in the EU vs the USA. Not that there's anything wrong with that! But you probably won't hear you average American or Canadian say that (unless it's age/driving related which is already pretty heavily regulated as it should be).

 

Ah the UK is not the EU, sadly. But you won't hear many Brits saying it either. We have a pretty unhealthy alcohol culture here too but it's changing. A lot of people are giving it up nowadays or cutting back, even in older age groups. That said, I still think per capita the countries in the EU and UK are pretty heavy drinking nations overall.

 

But anyhoo... very off topic.

[liberator]

I loved the comment, "They wanted nutrients that didn’t exist in “boiled to death” milk. They wanted to drink it “the natural way." The lack of understanding of the pasteurisation process is not surprising - ohhh scary science.

 

Pasteurisation is making "ultra processed food." I have a friend who knows nothing of food science, and he was telling me about UHT milks and how they are full of chemicals and preservatives etc etc. I told him, nope, it's just milk that's heated to a high temp then rapidly cooled and packed under aseptic conditions, and that's why it last so long on the shelf, there's no preservatives!

 

Then I had an old school friend, who's completed his BA Science, a very smart guy, yet he was drinking colloidal silver and undergoing reiki and had all of his teeth fillings removed because they were a mercury amalgam and then refilled with resin compounds. Resins safe, right? I guess you can believe what you want, I don't believe raw milk is safe. It's possibly safer than it was when i was a kid, (standards are so much higher) yes, I used to drink it, but that was before I knew better.

 

The woman pregnant drinking raw milk, wonder who she'll blame if things go wrong, vaccines, ultra processed foods, the milk, nah can't be the milk, it's safe.

 

This is why we have warning labels on things nowadays, caution hot, don't iron while wearing...

[jfrey123]

Comparing milk vs. alcohol laws is like comparing driving a car to plane license laws. You can't. Drinking excess milk won't cause liver disease, etc. or someone to become unsafe to drive a car because they drank too much. 

 

My comparison was focusing on the aspect of regulation.  Raw milk is higher risk than pasteurized milk, but those risks appear relatively low given CDC outbreak tracing and yet there's a cry in this thread for harsher regulation and a bare fear of groups merely discussing it.  Warning labels on the raw milk are common, from what I've seen.  This thread appears to want to stop people from consuming raw milk.

 

Yet a heavily regulated industry like alcohol kills almost by design.  If you ran a whiskey maker's safety plan to the same scrutiny of food, we'd probably demand serving sizes on the back along with warnings.  But nope, nothing warns the end user to not grab a couple of 1.5L handles and drink themselves to death in one sitting.

 

I went with booze because it was easy to pull numbers, but we could have fun and figure out how many illnesses and deaths come from the heavily regulated and monitored USDA meat industry.  We've already concluded in multiple threads that having USDA on site daily and actively writing up reports did not prevent deaths...

[GMO]

It's valid to raise it Jfrey because I do believe alcohol harms are normalised, but difficult. Mostly because banning addictive substances does little to reduce use. In fact, what happens is that the addictive substance becomes more concentrated because more concentrated forms are easier to smuggle. We've seen this in prohibition where it was whisky not beer smuggled and we're seeing this now with opioids. I also think the prevalence of alcohol related addiction is vastly underestimated. "Need" a drink at the end of a hard day? Think about it.

 

But that's about an addictive substance. Raw milk is not addictive. If it's banned, yeah, sure there will be the odd person who flouts the law but it's unlikely that a smuggling ring to bring raw milk across the border is about to start up. People will just switch to pasteurised or UHT milk.

 

For the meat example, I think that's different again. The laws are clear, albeit badly applied currently. Doesn't mean the laws are wrong, it means the regulation of them is.

[GMO]

Sorry to add to my previous post. Nobody thinks alcohol is "healthy" (or if they are, well it's baffling). But there are also vast numbers of people who genuinely believe that raw milk is healthy and there are multiple influencers pushing that narrative. A ban would make it clearer that it's not. I also think every life is worth saving. So even one life is. And there is a lot of illness (and let's face it, in the US, a lot of cost) which comes with consequences short of death. I dread to think how much treatment for HUS would cost, especially if you then need a kidney transplant.

 

I do think you're alluding to something important though. Education style approaches with the public have failed for years but they feel like they're particularly failing now in some social groups. There is a distrust of scientists and not just in the US (famously a politician in the UK said during the Brexit campaign that people have "had enough of experts".) Why is that? Well perhaps for good reason, especially around food. If you look at advice on food in the US, and to a degree in the UK, I'm not sure that you could genuinely say that's a healthy diet. Who knows on the new version for the US which I cannot honestly understand. Is red meat and butter now good? Is skimmed milk bad? Fried eggs are good now? What? But if you look at the previous versions there was, to my mind, far too much emphasis on (potentially) refined carbohydrates. The UK retains this focus on carbs with a little asterisk to choose wholegrain versions rather than, to my mind, the far healthier approach of choosing far more vegetables on your plate and don't get me started on the advice on "oils and spreads" being one group and where pulses sit (they're only protein foods? Really?) I could go on about my frustrations with this but I've probably said enough.

 

Eatwell Guide

 

So if you take that into account and anyone with google being able to debunk that advice pretty easily, is it any wonder people start to ignore experts? Especially when it comes to food?

[MDaleDDF]

I'm going to preface this by saying this is an incredibly America-centric take - so your mileage may vary if you're outside the states. 

 

The rise of the "food freedom" movement and Specifically Mark Mcafee's flavor of "Food Freedom" and advertising started with the elite of LA and California. The people that can afford the "healthy" and "wholesome" foods touted by these kind of influencers (Gwyneth Paltrow a la GOOP) and grifters (to be fully honest) tend to fall on the political right. These foods are inaccessible to those fall below certain socioeconomic status (Hello Erewhon) and then they're demonized for not "giving their families the best" (the control of WIC and SNAP benefits is a good example) -  it becomes or morality factor. Can you give your family the best? 

 

The political right is also consistently using food as a dog whistle in their own culture war and banking on the general distrust of the regulatory bodies, and the general lack of knowledge of how the food system works overall. On top of that there's an entire component within white supremacy to "return to tradition" - Trad wives, masculine men, and a return to gender roles they way they "should" be. This also leaches into the food culture - we should go back to when things were "natural" and "unprocessed" and "unaltered"- untainted the way God intended (hint hint) and anything other than that is a problem and toxin and bad for you. 

 

Juxtapose this when a lot of cultural practices of brown and black communities that still use "natural" or "traditional" methods of cooking, processing, and preparing their own foods - but it's not the European standard that white supremacists idealize and therefore it's seen as "dirty" or "savage" when in essence it's still the same. And this was generally looked down on for a handful of generations when convenience foods were all the rage, but only the white middle class could afford them. Working with whole foods, preparing things from scratch, even working on farmland (owning a hobby farm is idealized - being a farmhand is something immigrants do). has basically been coopted by white wealthy people as something to idealize when it's still very a much a way of survival for many black and brown communities in this country. Cloak that all in bad science and misinformation and MAHA and the wellness movement which is basically just a right-wing pipeline at this point and you have a very charged environment where this isn't quite as simple as "people don't know raw milk is bad for them". 

 

It becomes a status symbol, a dog whistle, and another tool in the toolbox of white supremacists.  

this video does a solid breakdown if you've got an hour or so and is slightly less rambley than my explanation. 

 

Thank you, I enjoyed reading that and the vid.    

The reason I kind of asked, is that from my pov, people on the left are actually the ones I think of when it comes to raw milk, those kinds of foods, etc, which is funny that you see it as the right.    Don't get me wrong.   I, like all of us, have seen what the current admin has been kind of pushing with the maha thing, some of which I definitely agree with (like killing off artificial colors).    But around me, it's all left leaning hippies that are into the kind of food safety trends we think of nowadays, ie:   raw milk, all natural products, gluten free products, etc, and are the ones who see big pharma/food as evil.   I know this, lol, because nearly all my buddies are left leaning hippies.   (comes with being a musician.  all my buddies are musicians almost, so....)   Myself, I'm a centrist-in no way political hippie/hillbilly, so I really don't care about a person's politics.   I lean toward common sense, or I would like to think I do anyways.   I see good and bad in both sides.

 

As far as "cultural practices of brown and black communities that still use "natural" or "traditional" methods of cooking", I would say I do not see that around me.  Where I work, I'm one of the few white folks.   I have many black friends, and hang out often, and in general the eating habits I see are tragically American in nature:   Way too much fast food, processed crap like pizza rolls, etc.    I see the same among folks of all races around here.   In general, many Americans eat like isht imho.   My family eats extremely healthy in comparison to most of my kid's buddy's families.   And you can...uhhhh....tell when we're standing next to them, if I may say so without sounding rude.    If you want the harsh truth:   They're fat.   Most of the people I know, are fat or drastically out of shape for their age.   I'm not judging, I understand it's hard to find time to cook, exercise, etc.   You either make time, or you don't.   I get up at 5 am every morning to run and work out because it is important to me.   But I also smoke and drink whiskey, so what the hell, lmao.....

Anyhow, just funny.   I definitely see your point.   Maybe it's a regional thing somewhat who prefers 'perceived' healthy foods?   But the folks I do hang out with that are conservatives are not into health in that way.   More hard drinking type folks.   Which I also like.....

[Scampi]

Interesting to hone in on the 1 death/year reported and not discuss this research for the 2009-2014 years as if death is the only metric worth exploring

 

 In the United States, outbreaks associated with dairy consumption cause, on average, 760 illnesses/year and 22 hospitalizations/year, mostly from Salmonella spp. and Campylobacter spp. Unpasteurized milk, consumed by only 3.2% of the population, and cheese, consumed by only 1.6% of the population, caused 96% of illnesses caused by contaminated dairy products. Unpasteurized dairy products thus cause 840 (95% CrI 611–1,158) times more illnesses and 45 (95% CrI 34–59) times more hospitalizations than pasteurized products. As consumption of unpasteurized dairy products grows, illnesses will increase steadily; a doubling in the consumption of unpasteurized milk or cheese could increase outbreak-related illnesses by 96%.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm...les/PMC5443421/

 

Or this

In conclusion, we find that access to unpasteurised milk continues to result in outbreaks in the United States. Most outbreaks occurred in states where the sale of unpasteurised milk is expressly allowed by law, and children were more affected compared with other age groups. Pasteurisation is a critical step in eliminating pathogen contamination of milk, even when good sanitation practices are in place. 

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm...les/PMC5443421/

 

Idaho’s Department of Health and Welfare (DHW) said it’s investigating a spate of illnesses tied to raw, or unpasteurized, milk. Since May 15, department officials said almost 60 people have been identified as having illnesses after drinking raw milk, and at least 45 of those people tested positive for campylobacteriosis, a bacterial infection.

Most of the sickened people reported getting raw milk from two different milking operations, one in northern Idaho and one in southern Idaho. 

https://www.cidrap.u...ilk-consumption

 

IMHO we should be doing the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people and raw milk simply isn't that

[MDaleDDF]

Interesting to hone in on the 1 death/year reported and not discuss this research for the 2009-2014 years as if death is the only metric worth exploring

 

 In the United States, outbreaks associated with dairy consumption cause, on average, 760 illnesses/year and 22 hospitalizations/year, mostly from Salmonella spp. and Campylobacter spp. Unpasteurized milk, consumed by only 3.2% of the population, and cheese, consumed by only 1.6% of the population, caused 96% of illnesses caused by contaminated dairy products. Unpasteurized dairy products thus cause 840 (95% CrI 611–1,158) times more illnesses and 45 (95% CrI 34–59) times more hospitalizations than pasteurized products. As consumption of unpasteurized dairy products grows, illnesses will increase steadily; a doubling in the consumption of unpasteurized milk or cheese could increase outbreak-related illnesses by 96%.

 

These stats pretty much say it all....

[GMO]

I think it's fair to point out though that some unpasteurised cheeses, matured appropriately, with dairies that know what they're doing, are not going to be a significant risk to you if you're not in an immunocompromised or at risk group. There are plenty of unpasteurised cheeses which are widely eaten in Europe but rarely cause illness because of the competition, especially if we're talking hard cheese where the pH will rapidly drop.

 

BUT, farmers with the attitudes that "raw = good" starting up dairies with little awareness of vat monitoring etc scare the hell out of me. Especially if they're then choosing to make blue or brie type cheeses.