After I wrote my postings last weekend about my raw-milk dilemma with a neighbor, I had an opportunity to chat at some length with Mary McGonigle-Martin, the California mother of seven-year-old Chris, who nearly died last fall after consuming raw milk. His bacteria was never identified for certain in tests, but Mary feels certain it was raw milk from the Organic Pastures dairy that made him and several other California children ill.
I held off writing about the conversation because I wanted to let it, and the entire discussion here, settle a bit. I think I was bothered some by the fact that I felt so strongly about treating raw milk differently from other foods in serving it to others, kind of giving it a big red warning sign.
Listening to Mary recount what happened to her son reinforced my strong feelings…to a point. She recalls how she took a month late last summer to finally decide to purchase raw milk for Chris. “I thought, ‘What if…’ I went on the Organic Pastures site and read all the dairy stuff. I thought, ‘He (Mark McAfee) really runs a good dairy. He tests every bottle.’ But I went against my instinct and let my guard down.”
For three weeks after serving Chris raw milk, everything seemed to be going okay. The big benefit was that his symptoms of attention deficit disorder disappeared.
But then he became very ill, and Mary and her husband spent two months in the hospital watching him nearly die and, finally, recover fully. Mary wonders not only about the raw milk, but about the antibiotics doctors used to treat Chris, which may well have exacerbated his illness. The doctors, not surprisingly, won’t entertain that notion.
“There is no accountability,” she says.
More significant for her now, “I have to live with the fact that I gave my child raw milk that nearly killed him.”
Yet what occurs to me now in re-examining Mary’s story is that such drama plays itself out in many cases of food-borne illness. Whether individuals become ill from spinach, Taco Bell, seafood, or raw milk, the illnesses can take patients to the edge of death, or sometimes all the way there.
Because we don’t learn about each of these individual illnesses, we don’t get caught up in the drama of most of the situations. Then, when we hear the details of one or the other, it hits us hard, especially when it involves a young child. It moved me to a super-cautious position.
What I found refreshing about speaking with Mary was that she has retained her open-mindedness. While she feels she can’t in good conscience serve her son raw milk again, she backs the right of others to make that decision for themselves.
And she doesn’t try to create a climate of fear. “We live in a toxic world,” she says.
She’s still speaking with the medical people involved in treating Chris, trying to get them to examine their treatment methods so they won’t repeat possible mistakes again. “We’re not suing, but we want to get them to understand what may have gone wrong.”
As for the raw milk debate, she says, “We have two extremes. The raw milk people say you can’t get sick. The public health officials say that’s why we have pasteurization. I think there is a middle road.”
If that middle road is one that encourages us to explore the best food choices and sources possible, and recognizes the fact that even after making our best efforts, there is a slight bit of risk associated with all foods, then I’m okay with that. And just as there are no guarantees the most nutritious and carefully produced food won’t make us sick, there are no guarantees it will keep us healthy, either. I say this because of Michael Richard’s comment at the end of my original posting, where he laments “my first health setback since starting to drink real milk last summer.” I’ve heard health-food adherents express surprise, and disappointment, when they contract one or another illness, and I try to tell them not to blame themselves or their diet. Illness is just another inevitable risk of life.
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