The discussion following my previous post about the role of pre-pasteurized milk isnt just a theoretical debate.
That is because the data that are accumulated about raw milk illnesses are used as part of an ongoing propaganda campaign to discredit the idea that real raw milk can be and is produced safely for hundreds of thousands of people each day. In order to justify the argument that all raw milk is the same, and is inherently life threatening, opponents at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control see illnesses like those at Durant, WI, high school, as valuable, because they can be used to simultaneously blame raw milk as dangerous and portray advocates as uncaring. That is what is going on in this article from a Wisconsin paper about the Durant illnessesa girl who was sickened is quoted as saying that if she knew the milk was unpasteurized, she never would have consumed it. Of course, the articles writer didnt see the need to explain that no one outside the farm family that produced the milk should have been drinking that milk because it wasnt intended to be served unpasteurized.
Adding insult to injury, the 38 illnesses in Durant will now be added as raw milk illnesses to the database kept by the CDC, to be pulled out whenever major media inquire about the dangers of raw milk. Indeed, that Wisconsin paper used that data: From 1998 to 2011, 148 outbreaks due to consumption of raw milk or raw milk products were reported to the CDC and resulted in 2,384 illnesses, 284 hospitalizations and two deaths.
Its the same data that in a Fox News report earlier this year that put it this way: According to the CDC, there were 2,384 illnesses, 284 hospitalizations and two deaths attributed to raw milk or raw milk products from 1998 through 2011.
Sometimes the data gets sloshed and stirred around a little differently, like in this Washington Post article earlier this year, which presented the CDC data this way: The agency reported that 796 people in 24 states had become sick after consuming raw milk between 2006 and 2011, the latest years for which complete data are available.
How big a factor are the pre-pasteurized illnesses in this data? Interestingly, food safety lawyer Bill Marler suggested a few years ago that the number could be significant, when this same subject came up in connection with another episode of Wisconsin illnesses from pre-pasteurized milk. He wrote in a comment on this blog: David, I think it does make sense to talk about two raw milks. I tend to agree that in general, if you know the product is going to be heat treated, much less care is taken in the production hamburger is a great example. I have asked the folks at Food Safety News and Real Raw Milk Facts to be sensitive about that going forward.
On his own blog, he made a quick computation indicating how seriously the pre-pasteurized cases could be affecting the CDC data: Over the last few years I have been keeping track of outbreaks and recalls linked to raw and pasteurized milk and cheeses over at Real Raw Milk Facts (of which I have been a financial supporter). We went through the list and more clearly defined the Type/size of dairy to try and differentiate between outbreaks and recalls linked to raw milk that had been intended for pasteurization and raw milk that was not. I hope this makes it clearer where the outbreaks are coming from. By my count, outbreaks or recalls due to raw milk intended to be consumed raw account for 23. There were 15 outbreak or recalls related to raw milk intended to be pasteurized, inadequately pasteurized or contaminated post-pasteurization. (He was looking at data for a couple years.)
So Marler was suggesting that one-third or more of the reported illnesses could be from pre-pasteurized milk. When I looked closely at the numbers reported by Real Raw Milk Facts covering 13 years, some 349 out of 2,468 reported raw milk illnesses, or about 13%, were from queso fresco cheese alone. (Queso fresco cheese appears to generally be made from pre-pasteurized milk.) Then there are 57 illnesses from multiple raw dairy productsmilk, cheese, colostrum. And according to the data, we dont even know, for 1,263 of the illnesses, whether the milk involved was from cows, goats, sheep, or what.
Clearly, we’re dealing with a can of worms here that indicates a substantial number of the reported illnesses attributed to raw milk are in fact from commercial dairies. This is a can of worms Big Dairy very much wants to keep closed.
First, past practice as precedent, administrative law will be used to maintain the economic viability of, A. the pasteurizing equipment industry, and, B. those that occupy the economic cat-bird seat of the dairy processors in the PMO fluid milk world. Wont the PMO milk be given to captive audiences? Schools, prisons, &c? You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink. Maybe theyll refuse it too. And doesnt the PMO milk world generate the greatest number of asthma patients? Based on income streams, do you think that the asthma treatment industry strongly supports PMO milk?
Second, whatever can be accomplished with persuasion (advertising). I already see fast food shops devoted to cheese (The Melt with close to 20 locations), I see pizza pie chains jamming cheese into the crust and crowing about it. And, ah, yogurtville, yogurhtland, yogurt town, yogurt valley,
Consider this speculation: The figures for mercury use in dentistry, for amalgam fillings, dropped off a cliff a few years back. Probably fueled the legal forcing out of incandescent lamps for the your-apartment-is-now-a-hazardous-waste-site-in-a-bulb compact fluorescent lights in order to have a market for the production of the mercury mines. No, wait, its because energy efficiency is our ticket to heaven now. Yeah, right.
Mr. J. Ingvar Odegaard
Or, they can just change the name/diagnoses criteria, polio, infantile paralysis, or the current NON-polio viruse that has swept the country and affected all those vaccinated kids and some adults.
How do we get the CDC to accept and classify two types of raw milk? One for the Pasteurizer and One for the People? Is it a lawsuit? A secret meeting with an insider? A call from some Phd types? Michele Obama? Dr Oz?
If we are ever going to be more than just a bunch of bloggers….we need to come up with some brilliant ideas and act on them.
WE NEED TO BE the CDC but how do we do that who are they and where do they come from, zombie world?
Buncher bloggers…
s my
$64,ooo
I just discovered I have this “disease”. One of the symptoms: “Friends who decline to dine. Imposing dietary restrictions on oneself, … or a distraction with food and its makeup are signs of the condition.”
http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2014/11/food-frenzies-healthy-eating-obsessions-are-the-newest-eating-disorder/
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“Those who have an unhealthy obsession with otherwise healthy eating may be suffering from orthorexia nervosa, a term which literally means fixation on righteous eating. Orthorexia starts out as an innocent attempt to eat more healthfully, but orthorexics become fixated on food quality and purity. ”
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I love that wording…an “unhealthy obsession”….on eating healthfully…from our best government schools..
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How does this relate to Raw Milk????
The desire to consume Healthy Raw Milk will be considered a disease….that the CDC will need to track….
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How do we get the CDC to accept and classify two types of raw milk?
….it will take a lot more than $64K….
“Wisconsin’s dairy industry contributes $26.5 billion a year to the state’s economy. This translates into an industry which fuels the state’s economy at more than $50,000 per minute.”
Dairy is the largest segment of Wisconsin’s $59 billion agriculture industry. It accounts for nearly 40% of all Wisconsin agriculture jobs, employing 146,200 people in the state.
http://www.wmmb.com/speak-up-for-dairy/key-messages
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So, here in WI…it ain’t gonna happen….too much $$ tied up the industrial status quo to change….
Why is it that only Republicans and Democrats get elected??? Why is there no real 3rd, 4th, etc party option
available? … because the system will not allow it…
The existing system will not allow Raw Milk to get a foot hold….
And now you have government subsidized researchers making up diseases??????
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Well, I need another swig from my raw goats milk kefir…infused with rose hips…..
Cheers!!
Last year my wife and I went to meet our local representative in Madison about an issue we had with DATCP and the first thing he said after greeting us was “do not expect anything to change”. Their world is different from ours. Just remember….they do not like change….unless it benefits THEM…..
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How will making RAW Milk available benefit THEM????
maybe this is the real question….
Good points, Mark. There are really two problems at work here. One is the anti-raw-milk mindse at CDC. Remember, Bill Marler agreed three years ago with the need for a dual classification system, and nothing happened. I think there are people at the CDC who monitor this blog, as well as him.
There is another problem at the CDC and that is the general sloppiness and pathetic lack of integrity in the entire food-borne illness data. If you look at that data, for all foods, you realize it is terribly antiquated as a searchable database and that little or no thought has been given to categorization of foods or illnesses. That is likely why most of the illnesses supposedly from raw milk aren’t even classified as to whether they are from cow, goat, sheep, or other milk.
Now, this latter problem doesn’t mean that the CDC can’t decree there are two types of raw milk. But that would mean the CDC powers that be would need to make the intellectual shift to acknowledge the dairy reality, but it would also need to begin tightening up its data system. Yawn. Who cares. Easier to just stay in our old rut. It’s only a problem if there’s a crisis, like the Ebola thing a few weeks back, and those things pass as well.
I know this isn’t a very good answer to the question you posed. My hope is that if we continue to raise their reporting issues, one day the few scientists there who have some pride will be embarrassed enough by the sad state of their reporting system they will want to tackle this issue and a host of other similar matters.
Attempting to alter the CDCs biased mindset would be akin to doing just that.
Continue to educate the consumer and let them challenge the current mindset via civil disobedience, exercising their right to decide what milk to drink or not to drink via the market place.
To paraphrase Albert Einstein, Problems cannot be solved with the same mindset used to create them.
Ken
A good use for protesting energy occurs tomorrow in Springfield, IL, at an all-day hearing on the public health proposal to limit availability of raw milk. More info on location and such in this article.
Another suggestion to lob into the mix: Farm-Fresh Unprocessed Milk from http://bcherdshare.org/information/farm-fresh-unprocessed-milk
Check out slide #19 through 25. These slides show more than 500 deaths from Listeria… This Cornell study digs at the origins of post pasteurization deaths and illness from listeria.
I guess that one of the foundational differences between the CDC and my own heart is that I care about death and illness and they do not. To them…deaths are just a number to be recorded or if not politically incorrect….then just avoided. Perhaps there is no way to change a sick organization. The best is to just let it change by attrition and replacement of old thinking leadership.
http://www.dairyaustralia.com.au/~/media/Documents/Education-and-careers/Dairy%20Manufacturing/Manufacturing%20webinars/Nicole%20MartinPreventingPostPasteurizationContamination%20of%20Fluid%20MilkOct%202nd2013.pdf
How about the milk that comes fresh from the cow for asthma prevention?
Over the last 30 years there has been a two-to-three fold increase in childhood allergies in developed countries. This is significant as compared to the 19th century when hay fever (allergic rhinitis) and asthma were rare.
The rise in allergies like asthma, rhinitis and eczema has not been seen in underdeveloped countries. This observation has resulted in the Hygiene Theory.
The theory attributes the rise of allergies to our sanitized lifestyle. In our super-clean world vaccinations, anti-bacterial soaps, antibiotics and airtight doors and windows we are keeping dirt and disease-causing germs at bay.
http://vactruth.com/2011/07/11/research-shows-vaccinations-are-causing-surge-of-asthma-in-children/
Holly got her first dose of Gardasil on a Thursday, and on Saturday had what she thought was an allergy attack. Sunday, she had problems breathing and took her asthma medication. The following Monday, she had severe chest pains and could not breathe. Her pallor was grey. Over nine days she repeatedly visited the emergency room, telling her mother that her chest hurt so badly it felt like someone was ripping her heart out. She had pericarditis, a swelling and inflammation that surrounds the heart with fluid. The doctor said it was directly caused by Gardasil, and wrote that in his report.
And here is the CDC asinine top of the list recommendation if one has asthma
If You Have Asthma, You Need to Take Steps to Fight the Flu.
Everyone with asthma who is six months and older should get a flu vaccine to protect against getting the flu.
Vaccination is the first and most important step in protecting against influenza. Even if you dont have a regular doctor or nurse, you can get a flu vaccine.
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/asthma/
Ken
Joseph Heckman, if people use fresh milk from the cow for asthma protection, how do the doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies make money? What would the FDA bureaucrats do if they weren’t monitoring all the testing of drugs for asthma? Your solution may be good for many people, but it is terrible for the economy.
http://standardmedia.co.ke/evewoman/m/?articleID=2000140148&story_title=milk-drinking-promoted
But never give up, life will find a way to health.
http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2014/11/penn-state-receives-anonymous-1m-donation-dedicated-to-food-science/
Anyone with a $1M willing to donate to research and publish Raw Milk studies…or even build a Raw Milk Research Center?
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The medical-industrial-governmental complex spends more and more but has less and less to show for it
Over the last 30 years, spending on medical research and development soared more than five fold, but it didnt produce five times as many research geniuses whose insights brought us five times the life-saving discoveries, not by a long shot. Instead of the extra billions finding their way to a new generation of ever better funded, ever more empowered intellects, the money went mostly to medical mediocrities spawned by the expanding government bureaucracies that sucked up the monies, and that, too often, helped squelch rather than advance knowledge.
Before the rise of major health bureaucracies such as the Centres for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, science gave us the breathtaking breakthroughs that medicine still relies on today penicillin and antibiotics, vitamins and insulin, vaccines for typhus and polio, devices like x-rays, electrocardiographs, contact lenses, kidney dialysis machines, CT scanners, MRIs and pacemakers and procedures like blood transfusions, laser treatments, open-heart surgery and organ transplants.
Medical breakthroughs havent stopped under the bureaucratic weight but theyve slowed to a crawl. CNNs 10 medical advances of the last 10 years, published last year, mostly listed improvements on earlier discoveries such as refinements for laparoscopic surgery, invented a century ago. CNNs list includes items to make bureaucrats proud, such as expansions in smoke free laws.
Before the rise of major health bureaucracies such as the Centres for Disease Control, science gave us the breathtaking breakthroughs
While the amount spent developing new drugs has soared U.S. companies spent $49-billion in 2010 compared to $15-billion in 1995 the number of new drugs entering the market has plunged. Worse, most of them are deemed me-too drugs because they arent much different from existing drugs. According to the World Health Organization, a dollar invested in R&D between 2005 and 2010 was 70% less productive in terms of producing a profitable drug than a dollar spent in the previous decade.
What hasnt declined in the medical field is dogma, as best illustrated by the 2005 Nobel Prize for Medicine, awarded to Barry Marshall for an outside-the-box discovery more than two decades earlier. Marshall, a trainee in internal medicine in Australia, realized that ulcers then a very serious ailment were caused by an easily treated bacterial infection rather than by stress, as commonly believed. Marshall was ridiculed, called a quack, dismissed when he presented his findings to an annual meeting of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, dismissed by the pharmaceutical companies, dismissed by funding bodies that held the purse strings to research grants, dismissed by important medical journals. Although he soon successfully cured his own patients without subjecting them to conventional treatments like antidepressants to allay the patients presumed stress-induced gastric acids or surgical removal of their ulcerated stomachs the medical world treated him as a fraud, asserting his results couldnt be replicated and in any case couldnt be true. Even after Marshall, in desperation, decided to prove that infections caused ulcers by infecting himself, and then curing the resulting ulcer with an antibiotic, he remained a charlatan to most for another decade.
A breakthrough came when Marshalls story was published not in an august scientific journal but in Star, a supermarket tabloid that ran stories about Nancy Reagan adopting alien babies, and then in Readers Digest and National Enquirer. To the establishments chagrin, these periodicals readers increasingly demanded his cure for their ulcers, and physicians, after seeing the results, slowly were won over. Eventually, the scientific research establishment was forced by popular opinion to investigate the science and Marshalls nightmare and that of millions of needless sufferers was over.
Today, not only have ulcers disappeared as a major debilitating disease, stomach cancers have too the same bacterium had been responsible for them both. Why the dogma and the personal attacks on Marshall? How could so many for so long ignore the evidence that was so obvious and so easy to verify? An answer lies in the willful blindness of the vested interests that dominate the medical field.
Money provides one vested interest. Anti-ulcer medicines represented the largest therapeutic drug market worldwide, with sales in the 1990s growing to almost $20-billion. Big pharma had no interest in gutting this moneymaker and neither did individual practitioners. Every gastroenterologist was doing 20 or 30 patients a week who might have ulcers, and 25% of them would, Marshall later explained. Because it was a recurring disease that you could never cure, the patients kept coming back. Surgeons whose bread and butter was removing stomachs also werent interested in hearing their particular specialty wasnt needed; neither were the numerous scientists grinding out me-too papers by the hundreds on topics such as how to better manage ulcers by tweaking the dose of this or that antidepressant.
Money aside, personal egos and professional reputations were at stake. And cementing these powerful incentives together to form a near-impenetrable groupthink were government agencies that amplified the conventional wisdom and increasingly influenced what research should and shouldnt be done, what papers should and shouldnt be published, what drugs should and shouldnt be licensed. In this medical-industrial-governmental complex, there was and is little appetite for out-of-the-box thinkers who challenge the status quo; there was and is an insatiable need to squelch dissent.
Does more government money in the hands of this already bloated complex save lives, or destroy them? That will be the subject of a future column in this series.
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Consumer Policy Institute. LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com
Second in a series. For the first column, Were more vulnerable to disease, click here. For the next, Free the pharmaceutical market, click here.
October 16, 2014
I had their own documentation, proving that, in British Columbia there are no records of people getting poisoned from consuming raw milk. I made their own witness admit under Oath in a Court of law, that – arising from his 33 years as a Health Inspector in the Fraser Valley – he had no evidence of anyone getting sick from drinking raw milk. The judge realized the illogic of us * being prosecuted for breaching a law concocted specifically to catch us … yet he sentenced us to 3 months in gaol + awarded court costs ~ about $150,000, anyway
most of you on this forum, still do not have the measure of the enemy.
* Michael Schmidt and me
When I see things like that, my reaction is no different than when I hear this on a phone call, “For quality assurance, and training purposes, this call may be monitored or recorded”. All that tells me is, I WON’T be on my best behavior. Why? It’s a physic game, and probably 90% or more people fall for it. How many people want others to hear how much of a jerk they were to someone they talked to? I. DON’T. CARE. I will be nice, and polite, but if you cop an attitude with me, all bets are off. The CDC isn’t any different to me than any other alphabet gov’t. agency. There are some who would have probably enjoyed what I’ve said to dairy inspectors, and state survey officers. Just because I am not a raw milk drinking person, doesn’t mean I won’t go all out to defend your choice of drinking milk the way you want!
I also don’t appreciate bogus data to manipulate an outcome, and I don’t care where or who it comes from. I sure wish that everyone would mind their own business, and let people choose what they want to eat or drink, in whatever manner they want. My inspector once told me, “I don’t care if people want to drink raw milk, they shouldn’t give it to their kids”. Whatever. Sometimes, we have collateral damage, and it doesn’t make everyone happy.
Also, the CDC loves to use the specter of death as the justification for the removal of human rights to protect the public. Raw milk is such an easy target. The CDC tells a good fairy tale, but it’s all about control – because of their other agendas. And they have several, to be sure.
I think that is a bogus theory. (I do believe all the “germ killing” crap is not good to use on a daily bases)
I wonder just how many are living a real “sanitized” lifestyle? I’m not, neither are my kids, nor most of my friends. we have pets living in our houses with us, some even let their pets sleep with them. Kids play in the dirt. I even use one wood cutting board for meat and produce and I rinse my poultry in the sink too. I eat raw or partially cooked eggs (not from the grocery store).
I think the vaccines have contributed to most of the allergies we see today. I can recall only one person throughout my school years that had asthma, she also had other health issues (which may have been caused by all the medicines she was on- she took a hand full every morning before school) That was one person known from 12 years of school. I was an office assistant off an on for many years, so I did see who came and went into the nurses office.
From what I’ve read about those HPV, I cannot imagine giving it to my child. 9 days of returning to the ER…that really speaks volumes about crappy healthcare.