A business expert I worked with some years ago while writing a book about business planning used to remark, If you don’t know where you are going, any path will take you there.
I feel a little like Im descending further into that Alice-in-Wonderland kind of place with this food-borne illness data situation. I described in my previous post how disturbing the quality and accessibility of the food-borne illness data are. I referred in that post to my frustration in being able to locate data used by a new study published in the Journal of Food Protection to suggest that pasteurized milk becomes extremely dangerous for listeria when pasteurized at higher than standard temperatures. That study indicated that 18 people die each year from regularly pasteurized listeria-contaminated milk, and that the number could go up by a factor of 40 if higher temperatures were used in pasteurization.
How did the authors determine, as their starting point, that 18 people die each year from listeria in milk, when the data compiled by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control show nine people died from pasteurized milk in total since 1998 (and only three of those nine died from listeriosis in fluid milk; the other six died from tainted cheese), and no deaths from listeria in raw milk? The authors’ source wasnt clear in the actual paper (I have a copy of the full study but am not able to publish it here because it is copyright protected.)
So I inquired with the lead author, Matthew Stasiewicz, who is a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University in food science. I finally heard back from him yesterday, and he said the data came from a 2003 study compiled by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, with the sexy title, Listeria monocytogenes Risk Assessment.
Typical of FDA risk assessments, this study is highly technical with lots of complex mathematical modeling exploring what if scenarios. Another way to describe it: murky.
My immediate question was about the origin of the statement that 18 people die from listeriosis in milk each year. And I have to say, I still dont know. Here is how the FDA study, which is about ready-to-eat foods in 23 categories, summarizes its data sources:
The published scientific literature, government food intake surveys, health statistics, epidemiological information, unpublished food product surveys acquired from state and federal public health officials and trade associations, and surveys specifically designed to augment the data available for the risk assessment are the primary sources of data used in this document. Expert advice on scientific assumptions was actively sought from leading scientists from academia, industry, and government. This included two formal reviews of the underlying model structure and assumptions by the United States National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods. In addition, the risk assessment was initially published in draft form and public comments sought for six months.
And there, deep in the bowels of this lengthy report, in Appendix 10, Table 4, you will see the 18 deaths estimated from listeria in pasteurized milk; unpasteurized milk, according to the table, is responsible for less than one death per year–0.6 deaths, which I presume means that roughly one person has died every two years from raw milk. Perfectly obviousIm surprised everyone wasnt aware of this data.
(As an aside, I have yet to find a single documented illness, let alone a death, from listeria monocytogenes in fluid raw milk in the last ten years. I know listeria m has been found in raw milk, and dairies have been shut down as a result, but no one has become sick from it, that I am aware of. )
Now that they have their baseline of 18 deaths a year, the authors of this study speculate that ever more use of ultra-high-temperature pasteurization may already be leading to increases in listeriosis. Evidence of the ill effects of this processing change may be hidden in the epidemiologic record, the authors say in their discussion. Although the public health data are certainly not conclusive, further investigation is needed to determine whether changing the pasteurization of fluid milk has affected the epidemiology of listeriosis in the United States and the EU.
Ah, yes, more funding needed for a problem no one even knew existed, and now is “documented” based on hocus-pocus estimates.
Maybe these authors should explore whether there is an inverse relationship between heat and listeriosis; the fact that raw milk is never heated may help explain why no one gets listeriosis from it. Nothing doing–the authors discovered in that same 2003 risk assessment data indicating raw milk is more risky for listeriosis than normally pasteurized milk. According to Staciewicz, it shows that “the per annum risk cases of listeriosis due to all fluid milk consumption in the U.S. is 91 cases per year, a risk of 1 case per billion servings. Please note the relatively greater risk per serving of unpasteurized fluid milk, 7 cases per billion servings.” Where that 2003 study came up with the number of servings of raw milk will have to be a research project for me for another time, I’m afraid.
In the end, we dont know how close to reality the data about illnesses and deaths from listeria in pasteurized milk (or unpasteurized milk) really are. Even if they bear a relationship to reality, they are already eleven years old. And Im not convinced they bear much relationship to reality since, as we saw in the last post, the real data on food-borne illness is likely incomplete, and the huge numbers of estimated data are likely highly exaggerated for political purposes.
I am no apologist for pasteurized milkI suspect many of the serious nutritional benefits are wrung out via pasteurization and homogenization. That being said, I have no more desire to unjustly demonize pasteurized milk as a frequent carrier of serious pathogens than I do raw milk. I have as much trouble accepting, based on the quality of data used here, the notion that higher temperature heated milk is 40 times more dangerous than standard pasteurized milk as I do accepting that raw milk is 150 times more dangerous than pasteurized or that soft raw milk cheeses are 60-150 times more dangerous than pasteurized ones, or that 20,000-plus Minnesota raw milk drinkers get sick from tainted milk each year. It makes for good headlines, but in the end, dangerous headlines because they are such misleading headlines. Indeed, I would go so far as to suggest that such “risk analysis” is fundamentally fraudulent.
As I said at the start of this post, if you dont know where you are going, any path will take you there. It seems increasingly apparent that if you want to demonize particular foods, there is data somewhere in the vast federal trove that will help you make your case. Just get me out of the sink hole.
Indeed, that’s hitting the nail on the head. It is difficult to have faith in any entity that makes obtaining information difficult. Also when you do start digging and find that the numbers are skewed, it makes the red flags furiously wave. You can only ask yourself, “What else are they hiding?”
This is the first time I have seen evidence and studies from with in the establishment that went against the establishment. PHDs that say and publish these types of studies tend to lose jobs and suddenly find their grant sources dry up. The published idea that “more of a good thing creates a very bad and dangerous thing”shocks me. According to the FDA, NCIMS and all the “sterile is better fanatics” higher heat should be better all around. It makes for safer, longer shelf life and less liability with no effect on nutrition or anything else. These ideas come straight from the mouth and official powerpoints of John Sheehan and others at FDA.
All of this is not so. We learn now that higher heat is down-right super-dangerous!!!
If the entire picture of raw milk is appreciated as a continuum from clean fresh raw milk…up through HTST at 165 F degrees and then into the blistering heat of UHT or UP pasteurization at 282 F degrees, the whole picture can be seen. The authors only looked at HTST as it was increased about 20 degrees F. A very small snap shot of the whole. This study is just another piece in the forbidden research puzzle. I find it fascinating that we even got to see this piece. It basically acts against interests and takes a very very serious shot at the establishment. The PHDs that performed this study either report to a higher god, have major guts, or are very secure in their jobs with endowments that can not be pulled. The dairy and raw milk Phd researchers that I know in CA based universities tell me…”a hungry mouth can not freely speak!!!” An exact quote in an email to prove it! If they published this kind of work, they would be fired.
Let me say this….of all of the establishment based studies I have seen, this one completely places into question all of the virtuous food safety qualities that are espoused by the FDA when it comes to “Guarantees of safety by pasteurization”. In fact this study says “pasteurization is unsafe at any heat and the higher the less unsafe”. At low heat guaranteed safe pasteurized milk kills 18 per year…and with just 20 degrees higher heat, “conservative” calculations place the death count at 670 per year!!
This is one of the greatest tools that we can use to effectively educate about raw milk safety and the true and very real dangers of pasteurization. Those are not my conclusions….PhDs said this !!
One PHD I know suggested that perhaps “competitive exclusion” was missing at higher temps allowing listeria to rage. That admission alone says…”biodiversity matters” so drink raw milk with its biodiversity present and all well. I say…drink RAMP system produced raw milk and thrive.
We are seeing the end of fluid pasteurized milk as we speak. The scientists are now brave enough to speak and publish up…they see the writing on the wall. Market dollar voting data says this best.
What we now see are the tragic long term effects of pasteurization, when the 18th century filth crisis was short term. When industry applies short term solutions to a long term food resource, the people lose their long term health giving foods. The long term solutions are “conditions based and RAMP”, not just turn up the heat!
Mark,
You are correct, we don’t see much in the way of soul searching on weaknesses in the pasteurization model. But a few things to keep in mind about this research:
1. It was in response to concerns about bio-terror growing out of the 9-11 attacks. The authors are merely expressing caution about increasing pasteurization temperatures: “Therefore, increasing fluid milk pasteurization temperature to reduce a bioterror risk could have the unintended consequence of increasing the incidence and public health burden of listeriosis.”
2. The lead author made sure to tell me that the same “risk data” his team used for the study showed raw milk was riskier than pasteurized milk for listeriosis, despite the fact that no one seems to have found any actual illnesses from listeriosis in raw milk, and despite the fact that the risk level for raw and pasteurized milk was extremely low.
3. As for who funded the study, there is an acknowledgment near the end of the study that states: “This work was supported by the New York State Milk Promotion Advisory Board (through the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets), New York State dairy farmers committed to production of high-quality dairy products, and U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture Special Research grant 2010-34459-20756 (to M. Wiedmann).” Given USDA’s low profile in the raw milk wars, it could well be that USDA is less ideological than FDA and CDC. Same with NY State. From their vantage point, it doesn’t matter whether pasteurization is standard or high-temp, just so it happens.
As I said, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some kind of an increase in risk for listeria as pasteurization temps increase; I would just feel better about the conclusions if the base data seemed more reliable.
In other words, hocus-pocus. I think the authors of this study picked the “Magic” textbook off the shelf when they actually wanted to learn “Math” instead. 🙁 Unless they fully disclose ALL this “data” that they list, their entire data-set, including emails containing that “expert advice” and all those “comments,” why should we trust it? Again, they’re using a “black box” model – deciding that we do not deserve to know, that we are insignificant idiots who cannot think for ourselves, and must therefore completely “trust them.” When someone tells me “Trust us,” I get suspicious.
Perhaps the most important lessons from this little escapade are these:
1. Phd funny math does not equate to real numbers, which exposes how inaccurate funny PhD math truly is.
2. CDC and FDA and others twist data all the time and official data can not be trusted or relied upon.
3. Real raw milk progress will come from the grass roots!!
4. RAWMI data with EU based PhDs will publish USA RAWMI Listed producer data…because USA researchers do not have the stones, the will or funds to do it.
5. Ethics has died in the US research community.
The very idea that raw milk was said to have a higher listeria risk profile than pasteurized milk is very telling of the ethics of the authors if this study. In fact that idea conflicts with their own findings. If that was true then why didn’t they show a curve and the sweet spot for how perfect pasteurization is when the optimal heat is used. They did no such thing.Why???? Because there is no sweet spot on the curve of optimal killing heat. Instead….it is all “down hill to high risk” as the heat increases and passes the first microbiol death at 120 degrees or so. The living truth is so inconvenient. The CDC has zero ilness or death related to listeria and raw milk??? How could there be any risk? This is the pent ultimate PhD idiocity. This is abscence of ethics, ignorance and politics all rolled into one.
I do applaud the effort to look at assumptions and expose an inconvenient truth. A truth that has been buried and conveniently overlooked by the FDA and industry. I guess Al Queda had another win with this one. As we react in our paranoid ways like spending $2 trillion dollars on two insanely stupid and unnecessary wars…it leaves me with one impression, we are our own worst bioterrorism enemies. We could have spent $2 billion on America and laid in wait and captured Binladen at our leisure with 30 special forces operators. But…we are not that smart, we instead feed the military industrial machine and create all sorts of enemies in the world. Some microbiol and some political….but both pathogenic. Drones are not the answer…probiotic good will and investment is the answer with most of those dollars spent right here at home.
God….we are a stupid people that elect even more stupid leadership on either side of the isle.
In 2014 there are two raw milks in America….one is marched off to be killed by the 1893 technology, is cheaper than water and it is dying in the market place and the other is clean,healing, alive and thriving at ten times the value.
History is a matter of perspective. Oh how things change!
History is indeed a matter of perspective.
The 1906 book, The Jungle written by American journalist Upton Sinclair (18781968), portrays the lives of immigrants in Chicago and similar industrialized cities in the United States.
More appropriately the book should have been entitled The Zoo.
The book depicts how working class poverty, deep-rooted corruption and discrimination nurtured crowded and dirty living conditions. Food supplies were unreliable, impure, and limited to such a degree that nutrition was an ongoing problem. Now if people were living in such squalor its not hard to imagine the horrid conditions that livestock including milking cows were subjected to.
The problem of disease and illness at that time was complex and multifaceted and required a complex and multifaceted solution. Pasteurization on its own would have had marginal effect if any on the outcome of illness.
Fear of infectious diseases led to public health hysteria. This attitude, which resulted in a supposedly healthy carrier of typhoid – Mary Mallon (1869 – 1938) to spend the rest of her life in quarantine, is also the same attitude that resulted in the controversy between raw milk and pasteurized milk. Indeed it to exemplified the confrontation of public health, law, ethics, the media, and (rather then anti immigrant attitudes as in the Mary Mallon case), anti-raw milk attitudes.
Ken
Now the Progressive Dairyman Magazine carries the story about the newest Congressional legislation to open up the “Raw Milk Check Point Charlie” located at every state border and let the raw milk flow freely. No where does the story make a mention of how CA raw milk is flowing into nearly 700 stores and selling like crazy!!! Nowhere.
The article quotes the International Dairy Food Association saying that consumers have high confidence in pasteurized milk….what a crock. If the consumers loved pasteurized milk so much, then why is it being abandoned on the shelf and why are sales plummetting at 2-4% per year?
Talk talk talk….all the scary talk. When fear is the only tool used to combat raw milk you know they have lost their cause.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/05/10/utah-residents-become-next-to-confront-bureau-land-management-in-growing-debate/
And/or the adulterated seeds?
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/climate-change-making-food-crops-less-nutritious-17415
I just read this a little while ago. http://www.occupycorporatism.com/home/harvard-study-proves-dangerous-gmos-humans/
Not that it will matter who did the study, someone will refute it sooner rather than later, because, you know, the evidence must be here somewhere.
[quote from article]:
We urge the US Congress to reject GM crops as both hazardous and contrary to the interest of family farmers; and to support research and development of sustainable agricultural methods that can truly benefit family farmers all over the world. We, the undersigned scientists, call for the immediate suspension of all environmental releases of GM crops and products, both commercially and in open field trials, for at least 5 years; for patents on living processes, organisms, seeds, cell lines and genes to be revoked and banned; and for a comprehensive public enquiry into the future of agriculture and food security for all.
[end quote]
The problem with putting too much stock in university studies is that their definintion of sustainable is different than what most people believe. A huge subject, however.