The raw milk debate continues and clearly the risks of drinking unpasteurized milk outweigh its’ benefits. I read earlier that the raw milk enthusiasts were crying and almost begging to legalize the sale of raw milk. Well, when you are looking at your own child in the hospital on a dialysis machine, you’ll really want to cry. Again, this brings me back to my laboratory days when I was analyzing raw milk that was implicated in a number of horrible illnesses. We were testing for a whole gamete of nasty pathogens and when I saw the agar plate the next day which was specific for Campylobacter jejuni, the numbers of colonies present were overwhelming, couldn’t even read the plate. The samples kept coming in with more and more positives and of course more and more people sick..jpg)
The Toronto Star writes:
Despite claims that drinking raw milk has well-defined health benefits, this has never been established. But even if true, the risks clearly outweigh any potential benefits. Before mandatory pasteurization of milk, the TB sanatoria in Ontario were inundated with tubercular patients, many of whom were infected by the bovine tubercle. This is not something we want to repeat, particularly in an era when TB is again on the rise and drug resistant strains have emerged.
Your editorial on the same date correctly pointed out that drinking untreated milk puts consumers at increased risk of exposure to deadly pathogens. It is one thing for milk producers to drink their own milk – they do so knowingly at their own risk. However to legally provide raw, potentially contaminated milk for consumption by the public is a matter of great concern.