A mother writes in the blog of the New Jersey Star-Ledger that,
"What began as a two-night getaway at a farm in Lancaster County, Pa., turned into a calamity of nightmarish proportions for me and my two kids when we drank raw milk.
My friend and I took our children to a working farm during spring break. They milked cows, fed bottles of milk to calves and ran free on acres of land – a rarity for these city kids.
They also drank the milk that was on the breakfast table, a milk I might add, that was the most silky and delicious any of us had ever tasted. We were told it was unpasteurized, but made to believe it was safe. (I assumed it was at least boiled).
A day after returning home, we knew we had made a terrible mistake. The first to fall ill was my five-year-old daughter, who had a high fever, then stomach flu symptoms, then my four-year-old son, then me.
My friend and her family had become violently ill as well. We spent seven days worried that our kids could dehydrate and forced them to drink gallons of Gatorade. My friend did get dehydrated and needed intravenous fluids in order to return to her job as a nurse.
After a week of this torture, medical tests showed we had contracted campylobacter, a bacterial food poisoning that can be found in unpasteurized milk. The six of us were prescribed antibiotics.
Thankfully, we’re all going to be OK.
To be fair, campylobacter can also be spread by contact with raw or undercooked poultry, as the farm owners later told us, but the likely culprit according to my doctor was the raw milk."