Organic Farmer Sickens 70 With Raw Milk
July 9, 2002
This article was co-authored by Senator Rudy Boschsitz
CHURCHVILLE, VA—A Wisconsin organic dairy farm has been forced to end a complex “cow-boarding” scheme that enabled 250 “shareholders” to get otherwise-illegal raw milk—but not before 70 people were sickened by campylobacter, a health-threatening bacterial disease.
Since the sale of unpasteurized milk is illegal in Wisconsin, farmer Tim Wightman of Hayward sold shares in his cows, so the milk “belonged” to the share owners. Unfortunately, they also got Campylobacter jejuni, which causes bloody diarrhea, severe abdominal cramps, nausea, fever and occasionally even leads to chronic health problems such as reactive arthritis.
Thousands of Americans still seek out raw milk as part of the “technology-is-bad, natural-is-good” movement. They forget that “benign” Mother Nature has fangs and claws. Farmer Wightman still claims unpasteurized milk is safe because he and his family have never gotten sick.
A foundation in Washington, D.C. is even conducting a nationwide campaign for raw milk, which it calls “Real Milk.” The web site of the Weston A. Price Foundation says, “Today’s milk is accused of causing everything from allergies to heart disease to cancer; but when Americans could buy Real Milk, these diseases were rare.”
Of course, we’ve added 30 years to America’s average lifespan in the century that we’ve been pasteurizing milk. Thus, we’re living long enough to die from “old-age” diseases such as heart ailments and cancer—instead of from the epidemic tuberculosis that used to be spread through unpasteurized milk.
The World Health Organization says more than 2 million people a year die from diarrheal diseases, and bacteria-contaminated food, milk, and water account for a high percentage of these deaths. Even in America, despite refrigeration, preservatives, pasteurization, and plastic wrapping to keep foods safe, about 76 million Americans still get ill from foodborne bacteria every year—and an estimated 5000 die.
The Price Foundation says “Both raw and pasteurized milk harbor bacteria, but the bacteria in raw milk is the healthy bacteria of lactic-acid fermentation while the bacteria in pasteurized milk is the bacteria of spoilage.” This, of course, is unadulterated claptrap. Putting raw milk out in the sun for a few hours will quickly prove that it, too, contains the “bacteria of spoilage.”
Nor does the Price Foundation seem to understand that several families of foodborne bacteria have evolved more dangerous cousins in the last half-century. The U.S. Public Health Service says four of these (Campylobacter jejuni, Salmonella typhimurium, Listeria monocytogenes and E. coli O157:H7) are the most serious foodborne pathogens
in America. These virulent bacteria can do far more than cause a stomachache. E. coli O157, for example, can kill even healthy people and cause permanent organ damage even in its survivors. It attacked five kids in Vancouver, Canada, last year; after they drank goat’s milk from a cooperative farm; two suffered permanent liver damage. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says O157 is endemic throughout the nation’s cattle herds, almost certainly including Farmer Wightman’s dairy cows.
An outbreak of Salmonella in ice cream sickened more than 200,000 Americans in 1994. More than 30 Californians got the more-virulent form of salmonella from unpasteurized cheese in 1997. Fifty people were sickened by Campylobacter jejuni in raw milk at a Minnesota church social in 1992.
In the 1990s, Massachusetts even reported two incidents of potential mass raw-milk exposures to rabies! Two different cows in different herds were diagnosed with rabies, and 80 people who drank their raw milk had to take the painful series of rabies shots.
There’s another risk from drinking raw milk: it’s not fortified with Vitamin D. Before World War II, mothers across the northern United States schemed and threatened to make their kids swallow oily, foul-tasting cod liver oil, to protect them from a bone-weakening disease called rickets. The only way to get Vitamin D naturally is from the sun, and kids in the northern part of the U.S. don’t get enough sunlight in the winter months to prevent rickets. Huge numbers of American children suffered from the disease until we finally added Vitamin D to most of our milk.
It’s no surprise that more than 20 states require milk to be pasteurized, and the others severely limit raw milk sales. (In Minnesota, farmers can sell it only on their own property and can’t advertise it.)
It certainly makes you wonder who Weston A Price was. We seriously doubt that he wanted all of us to expose ourselves to bloody diarrhea, liver damage, rickets and rabies.
RUDY BOSCHWITZ is a former Republican Senator from Minnesota, and chairs the advisory board for the Center for Global Food Issues. Readers may write him at the Center for Global Food Issues, Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421
DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for Hudson Institute in Indianapolis and the Director of the Center for Global Food Issues. He was formerly a senior policy analyst for the U.S. Department of State. Readers may write him at Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421
This article was published by Knight Ridder Tribune
Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis.
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