“Raw Milk at the Crossroads, Again”
Few of us were born when the forces for milk pasteurization launched the first major attack on Nature’s perfect food. In 1945, a magazine called “Coronet” published an article, “Raw Milk Can Kill You,” blaming raw milk for an outbreak of brucellosis in a town called Crossroads, U.S.A., killing one-third of the inhabitants. The “Reader’s Digest” picked up the story and ran it a year later.
Just one problem with this piece of “reporting.” There was no town called Crossroads and no outbreak of brucellosis. The whole story was a fabrication — otherwise known as a lie. And lies about raw milk have continued ever since.
Unfortunately, the fictitious Crossroads story paved the way for laws against selling raw milk, starting with Michigan in 1948.
Here’s another example of lies against raw milk (which I referenced in an earlier post,1 but it is worth repeating). In 2007, John F. Sheehan, BSc (Dy), JD, US Food and Drug Administration, Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (USFDA/CFSAN), Division of Dairy and Egg Safety, prepared a Powerpoint maligning raw milk; it was presented to the 2005 National Conference on Interstate Milk Shipments (NCIMS) by Cindy Leonard, MS.2
As shown in the table below, all of the fifteen reports associating outbreaks of foodborne illness with raw milk that Sheehan cites are seriously flawed. For example, in two of the fifteen, the study authors presented no evidence that anyone consumed raw milk products and in one of them, the outbreak did not even exist. Not one of the studies showed that pasteurization would have prevented the outbreak.
|
No valid positive milk sample |
12/15 (80%) |
| No valid statistical association with raw milk | 10/15 (67%) |
| Findings misrepresented by FDA | 7/15 (47%) |
| Alternative explanations discovered but not pursued | 5/15 (33%) |
| No evidence anyone consumed raw milk products | 2/15 (13%) |
| Outbreak did not even exist | 1/15 (7%) |
| Did not show that pasteurization would have prevented outbreak | 15/15 (100%) |
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One of our country’s most important freedoms is that of free speech.
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