As someone who follows closely the relentless campaign by the nation's medical and public health establishments against raw milk, I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop in the European food-borne illness disaster.
The "other shoe" is for some scientist or government public health official to seek to link the European tragedy to the battle here over raw milk.
Sound crazy? I'd say. Verge on the paranoid? Definitely. After all, among all the culprits publicly linked to the tragedy -- cucumbers, tomatoes, and, most recently, sprouts -- dairy products of any kind have been noticeably absent.
But sure enough, it finally happened, and from CNN no less. The major media outlet published an editorial that sought to elucidate lessons from the European outbreak, and the key lesson turns out to be that the U.S. should ban raw milk (and raw juices). "Though it (the European outbreak) is not a reason to panic, this incident should force us to rethink some important food safety issues," the editorial began. "One good place to start would be to completely ban the sale of raw milk and juice."
If you're going to ban any food (and I have a difficult time imagining finding justification to do that), wouldn't you think it would be sprouts, which has been most definitively linked to more than 2,000 European illnesses, and 36 deaths? But then, logic isn't the strong suit of those obsessed with depriving 10 million Americans of the unpasteurized dairy products they enjoy. (More than 3 percent of the population regularly consumes raw dairy, according to federal data [PDF].)
Nor is reasonable statistical analysis part of the argument. The author, Alex Berezow, who is identified as "a Ph.D. in microbiology," puts forward a bunch of half truths to make the CNN case.
"Unpasteurized milk has a greater chance of being contaminated with disease-causing bacteria than pasteurized milk," writes Berezow.
But the reality is that dairy overall is one of the safest product categories around, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, with milk and milk products accounting for fewer than 1 percent of total outbreaks [PDF]. Yes, raw dairy is riskier than pasteurized dairy for carrying pathogens (and many of us who favor the availability of raw milk readily acknowledge this), but the reality is that neither food is especially dangerous. Raw dairy causes between 50 and 150 reported illnesses each year -- this out of a total of between 20,000 and 25,000 illnesses reported by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control each year (there were 21,244 reported in 2007, the last year for which data is available). (And pasteurized milk does cause illnesses as well -- as recently as 2007 it killed three people in Massachusetts.)
Then the editorial states that "raw milk could cause a massive E. coli outbreak within a single state." We have had large-scale E. coli outbreaks in this country, involving ground beef and raw spinach, for example, but never involving raw milk. I suppose anything is possible, but to propose banning a food because of some far-fetched possibility? I don't know how to characterize the idea, except as hysterical.
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