"Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world. Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence."
Louis PasteurFrench biologist & bacteriologist (1822 - 1895)
I am about to start writing a series that may become boring to some of you, but is vitally important to me. In my blog caption, I said I would write about "everything that matters." Well, today my local Independent newspaper published a cover story on the raw milk movement, and there is a bill before the N.C. General Assembly to allow cow shares and human consumption of raw milk within certain limits.
In the story, pasteurization and homogenization are attacked in no uncertain terms as production steps that are alleged to destroy all that is good and true in milk, and raw milk is heralded as a panacea cure for everything from milk allergies to cancer. As an epidemiologist, thinking like that which produced this story leaves me feeling sad, concerned, and alarmed. Add to it a recent lawsuit against North Carolina alleging vaccines causing autism, along with the general degradation of science during the Bush administration and it is hard to remain optimistic about the future.
In the series I am about to write, I will focus only on the science of public health. There are too many things that I could write about. I will be trying to build the case that anti-science thinking and a basic failure to comprehend the history of disease control efforts in the United States are coalescing to support a radical fringe movement that threatens to undermine public health improvements that have taken 60 years to achieve. This case will take time to build, and I want to proceed in a way that illuminates the topic. If this is not your cup of tea, I can only beg your patience.
For the record, to tie this new series in with the one I did on food and food safety earlier, a few disclaimers. My grandparents had milking cows, and every morning and every evening my grandfather milked the cows. He brought fresh raw milk to the house and poured it through cheesecloth into milk cans, which he sold to a local dairy. But he also kept two gallons at the house each week, usually, one of fresh whole milk and one of fresh buttermilk. As a child I helped churn butter and I ate that butter. I was fed raw milk on my cereal. My grandmother cooked with raw milk. And I didn't die. None of that means it was safe. One of the points the author of the piece I read today made was basically built on interviews with people who drink raw milk, and say things like "And I'm fine. It's never made me sick."
The best analogy I can think of to respond to those points is that as a child in the 1960s I can remember my mom driving around Georgia at frightening speeds, with me, a small child sitting in the front seat, never wearing a seat belt. Meanwhile, everyone was driving 80 MPH (the then posted speed limit), no car had airbags, and most sign posts on the side of the road were solid bars that if hit could cut a car in half. And I didn't die. But that does not mean any of us were safe.
Louis Pasteur was a great man, a great scientist, and a true humanitarian. Pasteurization was one of the two or three major process inventions in the history of human kind. Along with vaccination, and a couple of food additive efforts, pasteurization has done more than almost anything else to add 30 years to the average life expectancy of most Americans. People who idolize a past before pasteurization and vaccination forget to mention that in that world, the average life expectancy in the U.S. was in the 50s, that thousands of children died from disease and want each year, and no one understood anything about the way diseases spread or how best to control them.
Judge me as you will, but let me make my case. For my part, I am grateful for the work Louis Pasteur and others have done before us.
9 comments:
Great post. I think the assault on science is the result of a failure to stress the fundamentals of science though out our education system from the early grades through college. People are not taught critical thinking and scientific principles.
Also, many times, science threatens people's belief systems and as a result they try to find ways to attack science.
I look forward to reading your future writings on this subject.
Thanks Ken
I'll try to keep it interesting. If people who understand scientific thinking cede the internet to people who don't, we'll all be worse off. I'll welcome any ideas you may have on how we can improve the situation.
Hi apexdbs,
I am one of the interviewees from the "Drink It Raw" article. I have come to accept your offer to discuss the raw milk issue. I hope that I can help you to feel less sad, concerned, and alarmed about my demand for the right to legally choose raw milk for myself and my family. Please see my posts on the article’s site -http://www.indyweek.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid:155882
The analogy of driving in the 1960's is a bit of apples and oranges here, but I'll try to work with it. The reason that there are all of the extra safety measures and practices in modern driving is because over the years, experience and reason worked together to determine the causes of injury and death due to these practices. Then procedures and devices were implemented in an attempt to save lives.
There is a logical thread between children riding in the front seat with no seat belt resulting in death and children riding in the back restrained and safe. This is centered mostly in the common sense fact that the very middle of a metal projectile is the safest place in the case of a crash.
Regarding raw milk from properly raised animals, though, there is no logical thread from experience to implementation. Please keep in mind that I am not talking about the slurry farms of the early 1900’s. I’m also not talking about the modern industrial dairy farms where the animals are raised in the unhealthiest conditions imaginable. Folks who choose to consume products raised this way most definitely need pasteurization, radiation, etc.
What I am speaking to here is raw milk produced from properly raised animals. “Properly” here means that these ruminants must be allowed to graze on grass grown from healthy soils.
There is absolutely no evidence that consuming raw milk from these animals is the slightest bit dangerous – no more than any other food, say spinach. Any food that is produced in unhealthy or unnatural conditions will make you sick. So why would spinach be legal and raw milk not? More people died last year from spinach than have ever been proven to have died from raw milk from properly raised animals.
I hope that a clear and unbiased look at the current evidence will help you to feel less concerned about my choice. I look forward to discussing this further if you wish. The safety and health benefits of raw milk from grass-fed animals is no longer debatable and is scientifically verified daily in states where it is produced and consumed legally by thousands of healthy men, women, and children.
Respectfully,
msenkpiel
Thank you for coming to my site, and I do look forward to a good dialogue on the issues.
I will be building my case over a series of postings, but briefly I want to state a couple of concerns, and also invite you to read a series of postings I did in late May on food and food safety.
We free grazed the cattle on the farm I grew up in too. Their milk was what I drank as a child. But free range cattle still have opportunities to be exposed to geese, snakes, turtles, water sources that can become contaminated, and of course deer can roam freely (and do) through all our pastures. There was an outbreak associated with raw milk in 2003 in just such a herd. The owners of the herd felt certain that their husbandry processes would ensure their milk was safe. The message we took away from that was just because an outbreak hasn't occurred, doesn't mean one can't occur.
I have investigated many outbreaks and individual cases over the years that ultimately linked back to the consumption of raw animal proteins. As a professional in food safety, I just don't believe eating uncooked and unpasteurized animal proteins, whether fish, shellfish, meat, poultry, eggs or dairy products, is something I could recommend to anyone.
One of the questions that several people on the Indyweek site keep throwing out there goes along the lines, "Why don't you care about the outbreaks associated with commercially produced foods? There are more of those." Of course, the answer is that I do care about those outbreaks. I fight them all the time. But I do believe that if the rules on raw and unpasteurized dairy products are relaxed, and more producers come into that niche market, and more people started consuming that product, that we would see an increase in salmonella, campylobacter, listeria and E. coli cases. Maybe not immediately, but eventually, so from a professional food safety perspective, I have to say that concerns me.
One of the problems that supporters for the choice to drink raw milk consistently face is their opponent’s reference to alleged past contaminations due to raw milk. When pressed for documentation and details, which enables us to research the issue to its end, every case that we have looked into turned out to be just as likely – or even blatantly - something other than raw milk.
I'm not saying that the cases that you refer to are that, but without details, I can't verify the claim. As one might imagine, after several instances of "agencies" or "professionals" (either consciously or not) falsely blaming raw milk, we have a healthy suspicion toward these undocumented “contaminations”.
Regarding the contaminations from wild or loose animals in fields, this is apparently what happened in the case of spinach contamination (Spinach and E. coli Outbreak) where many got sick and some died, yet legally, I have the freedom to choose to consume spinach. And I wouldn’t doubt that the "professional" way to correct this is to now require radiation of spinach!
Rather than admit that the source of the problem is industrialized, feed lots where they force a ruminant to eat grain, they just keep trying to pound the square peg in the round hole by making the end product more and more dead for the consumer. This is where I demand to make my own choice. If some folks want to trust others (who may or may not have their health interest at heart) to make their decisions for them, that’s fine with me – I don’t deny them that freedom, but I demand the choice to do my own thinking to determine what is safe for me and my family. I know where my interests lie.
I don’t deny that there is a chance that I could get sick from my choices, but science and history have proven that there is also a chance that I get sick even when all of these extreme measures are in place and someone else makes the choice for me. The main difference is the type of sickness. Eating dead foods causes an inevitable slow sickness and a chance of contamination, whereas living foods result in great health and a chance of contamination. For me, that’s a no-brainer.
Briefly, with regards to our cry of, "Why don't you care about the outbreaks associated with commercially produced foods? There are more of those." There is an important word that is inaccurate – “care”. We don’t ask why you don’t care. We ask why is it legal to choose those products and illegal to choose raw milk.
I believe that the only way that more people will get sick if the laws are relaxed is if industry tries again to take over the safe and humane production of raw milk from properly raised animals and replace it with their methods which are motivated by profit before health - the health of the animal and thus the consumer.
Thanks,
msenkpiel
people could also get well drinking raw milk, eating raw spinach. The industrialists can have their industry as far as I'm concerned, just don't try to make every else's decisions for them and label them "consumer safety" when it is protecting market share.
I take great exception to scientific folk claiming that particular bacteria are present in all raw milk -- that is absolutely not true. It may be true of cows raised in a commercial setting, but is definitely NOT true of the pastured home dairy cow.
I recently had my cows, my goats, and their milk tested -- negative for ALL pathogens, negative for everything. And just as important, the manure was negative for E.Coli also (e.coli is a direct result of high grain diets)
My milk is so clean that it takes 4 days of sitting on the kitchen counter before it will even clabber, and it stays fresh for better than 3 weeks in a jar in the refrigerater.
Since buying a cow in 2000 and drinking my own "ultrafresh" milk, my health has taken a great turn for the better. I no longer suffer from GURD, IBS, and Diverticulosis (diagnosed in 1994)and I have more energy than I did 20 years ago.
My husband became infected with West Nile virus in 2004. He is in his late 50's and suffered from a severe case of the polio-like form. Nothing was working, he was getting sicker and sicker, weaker and weaker, and was on the verge of being hospitalized when I finally convinced him to start drinking raw, or as I prefer to call it, "ultrafresh" milk. Upon starting to drink the ultrafresh milk, he immediately started to improve and within 3 weeks he had made a complete turnaround (to the puzzlement of specialists at the VA), and he recovered his muscle mass and muscle strength within an another few weeks. Today you would never know that he had been so sick with West Nile, he has NONE of the lasting effects he was told to expect by his doctors.
In the early 1900's, there was a lot of research into ultrafresh milk and it was curing a multitude of diseases. Very tellingly though, these very same doctors were MURDERED when they became vocal about the hazards of pasteurization.
"The Powers That Be" are not interested in protecting our health, they're interested in protecting the bottom lines of major corporations. Why else could there even be a discussion on Vitamin C being a DRUG?!?!?
The commercial dairy industy as it stands, cannot compete quality-wise against the small farmer who cares about his cows and the products that he/she produces. The commercial dairy industy KNOWS that the average consumer would never drink milk again if they actually knew what happens to commercial dairy products.
Milk at the grocery store is so adulterated it's amazing that it can even be called milk -- even so--called "whole" milk has been broken down and recombined with powdered milk to create a standardized product that bears little resemblance to what comes out of a cow.
And it's done with the blessing of "The Powers That Be", while Nature's perfect food, ultrafresh milk, is demonized and blamed for illness & death, when there is no proof whatsoever.
You are more likely to get sick eating at a fast food restaurant (employing unskilled workers who don't wash their hands) than drinking ultrafresh milk from a clean, pastured cow, kept by a farmer who cares.
Spend just one day at an industrial dairy farm watching 2,000+ cows in dark, miserable, filthy, fetid conditions, eating unidentifiable, semi-trucked-in glutenous clumped waste product "food". (I hope all those stories about all those euthanized dogs, pets and horses ending up at rendering plants selling farm feeds just isn't true!) Watch the $7 an hour attendants with goggles and respirators at work, dropping and dragging milking nozzles in ankle deep feces and then attaching them to dirty, muddy teats with total indifference. Watch the cows getting their injections of steroids, growth hormone and antibiotics to produce 10x more milk than it is natural for them to. Then the milk travels through a mile or more of chemically "cleaned" hose lines into holding tanks, then through another half-mile of hose to waiting trucks. Next, follow the trucks traveling up to 70 miles to a commercial facility where the milk is then piped through several more miles of chemically "cleaned" pipes to be "filtered" for solid matter, like bits of dirt and feces, then piped to be pasteurized and homogenized. (By the way, pathogens and everything else that is 'killed' by the pasteurizing process stays in the milk.) Note the nearby 55 gallon drums of chemical solvents and disinfectants. (Gee, I really hope that they aren't using any 'bad' chemicals to clean the same pipes and tanks the milk runs through!) From there, the milk is either piped into a nearby bottling facility or into holding tanks again to be trucked to another facility for bottling and labeling. Then the milk is transferred to distribution plants for major grocery store chains, where it gets to sit a little longer. (Hmmm, hopefully, the refrigeration systems in all of these different facilities and all these trucks were working properly the whole time). Hundreds of gallons of gas later, the milk is delivered to a grocery store where you can buy it. About $2.99 a gallon, and less than $1.00 goes to the commercial "farmer". The dozens of semi-skilled and unskilled hourly workers care more about their paycheck than this milk. It's all about production levels (Profit) on industrial farmed milk.
After I witnessed all of the above, I sought out a local organic certified family run farm with a couple of dozen cows out in beautiful grassy pastures, a bright, small, CLEAN bottling facility with a dozen or so hand-labeled bottles of milk in a walk-in refrigeration unit. About $6.00 a gallon - and it all goes to the farmer who produced it.
My RAW MILK only travels when the cows are walking back from the pasture to be milked, or when a member of this 3rd generation farming family hand carries it from the cow to the refrigerator. The farmer's family who produces the milk depends on it for their reputation and livelihood. They drink their own milk. Their customers are friends and neighbors, so the trust runs both ways. The animals are not pumped full of hormones and drugs, and any sick cow is removed from the milking line while being treated by the local vet.
So, commercially produced, COOKED MILK from industrial facilities manned by wage slaves and trucked in from ? miles away, or natural, raw milk from a small, clean family farm? It's a no-brainer.
My family and I have drunk raw milk exclusively for years without a single problem and all enjoy excellent health. We will never go back to cooked and drugged mystery milk. I am glad we live in a state that allows raw milk. I pity those in North Carolina. Can't even chose where your family's milk comes from. I wonder what freedom the government or some government shill will want to take away next under the guise of "protecting us"...
Just a thought on the constitution of the United States. If we can derive freedom of privacy from the constitution which is supposed to mean freedom to have and abortion, pasteurize a human if you will, why can't I CHOOSE raw milk an dwhy is it any of you business?
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