Advocates Explain Why Food Rights Struggle Must Be Built on Community; Behind Zinniker Dairy's Demise

So I'm curious. I was too busy dealing with cheese making this week to get to the Biodynamics conference. Did anyone bother to try to figure out what caused the 2009 campy outbreak, and what food safety lessons can be learned from it?

That outbreak was spread over 4 counties.

This isn't Anatevka anymore, folks, and Mark Zinniker is not Tevye. We need more than just community to have raw milk in the 21st century.

In all of my years of producing RawMilk.....the state has always said that they wanted to help me produce the safest raw milk possible. Never in those 13 years did the state or any agency ever investigated the real origins of any challenges. Investigations and inspections always made irrelevant recommendations. They rarely if ever spent one minute of time investigating udder cleaning protocols or CIP procedures or temperatures in my milk barn. They never checked my milking equipment or hoses etc...they never watched us milk a cow.

For all the talk of caring about safety the inspections never focussed on things that directly impacted safety in my book. We reduced our coliform counts not by following the states recommendations...we did it through our RAMP program.

With that said....I wonder what the DATCP experts found at Zinnikers....

When CDFA or DPS mandates more concrete outside or 6 inches more distance from a wall to a piece of equipment or hard pipe instead of Grade A milk hoses....those things really do not improve safety. Those things make the agencies feel essential, powerful and important....if agencies really cared about raw milk safety, they would approach raw milk production with a systematic risk analysis from grass to glass. They would watch us milk our cows!!

They do not...

Bill, why the hostility? I heard you left the farm during the outbreak and never looked back. So much for your dedication to research and food safety lessons. You fancy yourself a socialist but you sure like to capitalize on others misfortune. By the way, thank you for not attending the conference.

Right on Mark and Bill. Hay, I just read an old post about milking systems, this adds one more item to my list of raw milk consumer concerns that inspectors couldn't care less about.

I may have to change my name to outbreak denialist because the more I hear people talk about outbreaks the more obvious it becomes that these so called outbreaks have never had anything to do with raw milk.

According to a CSPI report, approximately 5,000 people are killed every year by foodborne illness. From 2009 − 2011, three high profile outbreaks involving peanuts, eggs and cantaloupe alone accounted for 2,729 illnesses and 39 deaths. Yet there have only been a handful of deaths from pasteurized dairy products in the last decade, and there hasn’t been a single death attributed to raw fluid milk since the mid-1980s, in spite of the fact that well over 10 million people are now consuming it regularly.
The takeaway is that thousands of people are killed each year by foodborne illness, but they’re dying from eating fruits, nuts, eggs, meat, poultry, fish and shellfish – not from drinking unpasteurized milk.

CDC reports can’t be taken at face value

There are about 24,000 foodborne illnesses reported each year. Yet by the CDC’s own admission, this represents only a tiny fraction of the true number of foodborne illnesses that occur. In 1999, CDC scientists used an estimate of the overall prevalence of diarrhea and vomiting to calculate the “true” incidence of foodborne illness as 76 million cases per year! Put another way, 99.97% of foodborne illnesses go unreported.
A food vehicle was identified in only 43% of the reported outbreaks and only half of these were linked to a single food ingredient. What this means is that the true prevalence of foodborne illness that can be attributed to a particular food is much higher than what is reported. It also means that the data linking specific outbreaks with specific foods is such a tiny sample of the total that even small errors or biases in the reporting of outbreaks would seriously skew the results. http://chriskresser.com/raw-milk-reality-is-raw-milk-dangerous

Sylvia,
When health departments speak of matches of bacteria fingerprints they are being deceptive. What "matches" are PFGE patterns. These patterns may match even when the two isolates are NOT genetically related. PFGE patterns only can be used to distinguish between isolates that both originated from the same colony of bacteria. Health departments have to assume that they are looking at isolates that were once clones of one original bacteria. Of course if you start with this assumption it isn't surprising that the conclusion is that the two isolates "match". The assumption cannot be proven and is not possible outside of a laboratory.
When the epidemiological investigation looks at common denominators ,they ignore the very things that are most likely to be the real cause of the disturbance in the digestive system. These are factors that we all admit can upset the balance in a system that is already walking a tight rope because of malnourishment. Malnourishment ,especially lack of minerals in food ,can be the reason that people's systems are so easily destabilized. The real factors that are ignored are the biocides in the food, air and water and stress. All of these things contain a steadily increasing amount of toxic residues because of the war on bacteria that is our present food production,preservation and distribution system.
miguel
who: user2756 | when: Thu, 11/08/2012 - 13:24 |

For those who oppose real food, it is enough that we all keep the discussion focused on bacteria. We can talk about how to encourage "good" bacteria and discourage "bad" bacteria.This all reinforces the idea that the problem of illness can be caused by bacteria. From a soil scientist's point of view,all bacteria have a role to play in the recycling of materials.They take apart dead or damaged cells ,sometimes repairing them and sometimes, if not repairable, disassembling them and turning them into a form that can be used to build new cells. Healthy soil is where everything that dies and rots becomes purified and healthy soil is the source of the nutrients that build healthy new cells. The view that bacteria cause disease is an upside down way of seeing the natural world.Bacteria clean and maintain and build and repair our bodies. When an abundance of one type of bacteria are present at some place in our bodies ,they are there because they are part of the healing process.We want to recognize this and assist in the healing. Balance can best be restored quickly by understanding that the opportunistic bacteria flourish in order to quickly clean up a disaster.By supporting their important work,we will speed up the succession to a more diverse and stable community of bacteria and so bring everything back into balance more quickly. The real cause of disease is the conditions that destroy the diverse,stable community of bacteria that keeps our world functioning smoothly. Our cells die when they are deprived of the nutrients needed to maintain their integrity .They die when they are exposed to poisons. Healthy cells are not attacked for no reason by predatory micro organisms.
miguel
who: user2756 | when: Thu, 11/08/2012 - 14:58

Here's something else that has come to mind over the last couple days.

Has anyone noticed that most of what we call food born illness seems to have very little to do with the particular food that we may have been eating at the time the illness occurred. Last year when norovirus made it's annual sweep across the country the media made very little of it, so the average person, not seeing the pattern, just assumed it was what ever they had last ate.

When it comes to raw milk, I know from my own experience over the last six years that it actually prevents the very illness it is said to cause, not to mention its dramatic effect on hay fever, food allergy, cat allergy, dust and chemical sensitivity, psoriasis, and general intestinal health. So even if you could prove raw milk caused one case of illness this would be irrelevant since it had already prevented twelve.

How do we know Mary's son got diarrhea from raw milk? Not only is there no way of proving it. There is no reason to even think such a thing. Diarrhea is a symptom of malnutrition and the most common illness in industrialized nations like the U.S. All of us have had it and will have it again whether our milk is pasteurized or not.

If a raw milk dairy with one thousand customers has less than ten a day with diarrhea it proves that raw milk is preventing illness not causing it.

Even if you believe that the offending bacteria could give someone diarrhea and that there was enough in the milk and at the farm, you wouldn't know how it got there and if it was that which caused the persons diarrhea.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/24/more-on-milk/?em&exprod=...

" (It would not surprise me a bit if it were eventually discovered that industrial production methods, which include giving dairy cows feed that they have trouble digesting, produce an inferior and somehow damaging form of dairy.)"

Ya think!

"The stories here expose problems both with agriculture and with medicine. Once American agriculture became fixated on producing the most crops possible, regardless of the cost to land, water, air, animals and people,"

These stories have been on-going for many many years. TPTB have done nothing to correct the problems.

"As for medicine: for many doctors drugs are the answer to almost every condition, a situation that suits Big Pharma just fine. More than $13 billion worth of P.P.I.s were sold in 2010, "

It's not just the mass produced dairy or the consumption of pills that's causing health issues. It is also the "food" , it's highly processed and contaminated with man-made chemicals and GMOs, etc.

How very sad that the Zinnikers can no longer produce dairy. I hope the situation changes someday. That Judge Fiedler decision should strike fear in the hearts of liberty-lovers everywhere in the U.S.

Just to keep you all updated....Raw Milk has some very smart people in some very high places in research.

See this link http://cdrf.org/2012/11/12/meet-milk-sciences-leading-communicator-dr-da...

Dr. Lemay attended the WAP conference and spoke with Sally at lunch. She even visited the RAWMI booth and reviewed our mission and Common Standards. When you read the article attached...read it with your "UC Davis political PhD decoder mode" on full blast..... "Marvelous fluid known as mother’s milk" means raw milk. She told me that I had cracked her PhD code speak when I saw her at the conference. We both had a serious but good laugh.

You will notice that at the bottom of the article about her research it says funded by " CDRF Check off dollars". That means funded by GOT MILK? She has political minefield to cross as she stays true to her studies and research.

http://www.theresilientfamily.com/2012/11/the-oddball-farmer/