FDA claims all interstate......

[Dunkopf]

Meant to say urban vs rural. Oops.

 

[Bubblingbrooks]

Meant to say urban vs rural. Oops.

still confused though, unless you meant the numbers are false and you will be pasteurizing your own milk

 

[Wifezilla]

As for city dwellers, Abi is in the middle of Denver and she has a milk share and gets raw milk through the Denver Urban Homestead with no issue at all. So the number of raw milk drinkers is somewhere between 12 and 50 million people.....and they aren't dropping dead. So maybe the gooberment should focus on something else??? I am sure there is an issue or two that might be a much higher priority than stopping me from drinking raw milk?

 

[Dunkopf]

Meant to say urban vs rural. Oops.

still confused though, unless you meant the numbers are false and you will be pasteurizing your own milk

I meant that I think 50 million is way too high. 10 million is much more believable.

 

[Icu4dzs]

AFAIK commercial raw milk dairies DO test for TB as well as other things, often more frequently than normal pasteurized-milk dairies, and many private individuals just drinking their own cow's raw milk test for it too.

In the interest of sportsmanship and fair play AND at the risk of outright crucifixion here, we might do well to look at the resurgence of tuberculosis in this country. While most of our cows are NOT infected with this, milk is a common source of the spread of TB.

I would like to see a reference for that last bit please -- a contemporary reference saying that many PRESENT-DAY NORTH AMERICAN cases of TB are contracted from milk. As opposed to contracted person-to-person from people from other countries where the disease is common.

I am skeptical, not only b/c of what I recall of things I've read over the years (but am not sure of as I cannot point to anything particular) AND the fact that I just went adn read a bunch of the CDC webpages on TB and could find NO mention of warnings against getting it from milk, as opposed to about a bazillion references about risks from person-to-person contact and the resurgence of TB in north america due to infected immigrants and visitors.

So, no offense meant, but MODERN citation please?

Pat

None taken. HEALTHY skepticism is a good thing when tempered with fact and reason.

Tuberculosis (TB) is caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis. This bacterium is spread through the air when an infected person coughs or sneezes, and infection may occur if a healthy individual inhales the germ. Mycobacterium bovis causes TB in cattle. When transmitted through unpasteurized milk, it can cause TB in humans.

Source:
CDC: Tuberculosis

Medicine Net: Tuberculosis

NYC Health: Mycobacterium bovis (M. bovis) Fact Sheet

Tuberculosis
It is caused by the bacteria Mycobacteria tuberculosis and is spread through airborne droplets from ... Eliminate all suspected food allergens, including dairy (milk, cheese ...
www.umm.edu/altmed/articles/tuberculosis-000165.htm

Tuberculosis is caused by infection with bacteria from the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex, which includes: M. Tuberculosis, M. africanum, M. canettii (the later two responsible for a few cases in Africa), and M. bovis.

There are a lot more "modern sources" however I think the point is the same. If you want to claim that M. tuberculosis is the only organism that causes TB then you are eliminating M. bovis and a few others which does much the same thing...and as you can see, the truth is the truth.

As I said earlier, I am NOT dissing raw milk. Folks who do their due dilligence with taking care of their animals and keeping help properly tested have no real problem. I mentioned this not for the issue with raw milk so much as the drug resistance which is becoming alarming in scope. Active TB has a 50% mortality rate. If that continues to grow, we will have a real problem.

Mycobacterium of any variety is a serious health issue. Pasteurization is at least a way of eliminating other diseases spread through milk including plague.


Hope this helps clarify the situation a bit.
YMMV
Trim sends

 

[patandchickens]

Look. Your post utterly misses the point.

You are apparently claiming that a significant fraction of PRESENT-DAY NORTH AMERICAN tuberculosis cases come from milk.

I am obviously not disputing that it *can* come from milk, gee whiz, or that it *used* to be commonly contracted from milk. Of COURSE that is the case.

What I am not seeing evidence of is that any meaningful number of cases "here and now" ARE BEING CONTRACTED FROM COWS. (edited to clarify very, very clearly -- I mean, from drinking raw dairy products from American cattle. So don't be haring off after stories on Mexican raw cheeses, or the rate of TB in India, or American Tb cases from farm workers who get sneezed on by skin-test-positive cows )

Please document that if you wish us to believe it.

Pardon my aggravated tone but this keeps happening when I ask you a question about something you have gaily asserted.... please read the actual question I am asking, rather than posting some very basic info about a related topic that does not actually address the question??

Thank you for your consideration,

Pat

 

[Wifezilla]

Exactly Pat. We know TB CAN come from raw milk, but is that where the current outbreaks of tb are coming from? I say no based on the information that it is coming from immigrant populations.

As for the raw milk abi and I get, Windsor Dairy in Colorado tests weekly and posts all test results. You can also tour the farm every Friday & Saturday if you want.

Now to get back to the burning question, WHY is the FDA and other government agencies so anti raw milk? If the government makes available information that there ARE risk and people choose to make them anyway, that is their choice. People have the right to choose to smoke, drink, and eat Crispy Cream donuts until they come out their ears. But raw milk??? Call the swat team!

 

[freemotion]

Look. Your post utterly misses the point.

Um.....isn't that spelled "udderly?"

 

[patandchickens]

LOL, Free, I thought the same thing when I was typing it I have been up twice nightly for the last week waiting for these expletive-deleted two sheep to lamb (one is now several days overdue and apparently planning on keeping them in there permanently) and may *possibly* need a bit more sleep <g>

One other thing about the whole raw milk business. If I may give you a piece of friendly advice, Icu4dzs, (other than to get facts straight first), it is that if you are just deep-in-your-gut opposed to people consuming raw milk, tuberculosis is not your best statistical argument. Bovine TB has only quite-low rates even in countries where nobody *ever* pasteurizes milk, and in the US (or european countries where raw milk sales are legal) it is almost vanishingly-rare. What is much more *common* is yer plain vanilla garden-variety "food poisoning" type bacteria -- illnesses due to Salmonella, Campylobacter, Listeria, E coli.

So if one wishes to focus on "harm being done" by raw milk, THAT is the by-far numerically-dominant problem, NOT the admittedly scarier-and-more-primitive-and-dirty-conditions-sounding tuberculosis.

At that point though, you will tend to run into people who resist lumping ALL raw milk sources (even in the US) together, and point out that it depends on what standard of testing and cleanliness and product handling/storage was used. There are plenty of raw milk sources who have never, NEVER, had any problems resulting from their milk, including some good sized commercial raw-milk dairies. Also many people who feel that the advisability of raw milk depends on your immune status -- some consumers would *not* feed it to infants or those with "issues" but have no problem drinking it themselves as long as they're healthy.

And finally, at the end of the day, if you are pointing to pasteurization as the cure for all milkborne problems, you run into the inconvenient fact that pasteurized ain't completely safe EITHER. Arguably because some organisms may be resistant now to pasteurization temperatures; but chiefly because cattle producing milk intended-to-be-pasteurized carry much higher bacterial loads to begin with, pasteurization is not always carried out to specs, and recontamination can happen afterwards (pasteurized milk being considerably more vulnerable to colonization by any ol' bacteria than raw milk is, that is why you can clabber raw milk to make cheese but pasteurized milk just gets scary)

It is too hard to do proper citation format in a forum post so I will add some suggestions for further reading relevant to the above points:

http://www.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/vetext/INF-DA/TB1202.pdf (discusses human and bovine tb in humans and bovines)

www.westonaprice.org/.../470-risk-of-bovine-tb-from-raw-milk-consumption.html
(a reasonable discussion of the TB risks, with journal references)

I would urge you to try to mentally separate the SAFETY issue from the alleged-health-benefits-of-raw-milk issue; and to consider this in the context of there being allllll sorts of OTHER not entirely guaranteed 100% safe things that we freely allow to be sold and consumed, like lettuce and hamburger for instance which sure actually account for a lot of illnesses and death

I'm not some rabid raw-milk-will-save-the-world person, btw. The large scale epidemiological, and small scale trial, type evidence for it really being actively therapeutic is pretty shaky IMHO. It is easy to have an "allergic reaction" so to speak to the degree of raw milk boosterism in some quarters. But on the other hand that does not mean they are actually wrong about everything either and I think it is incredibly silly to prohibit the consumption of raw milk (which, done sensibly, the worst you can say about it is that it carries maybe a leeetle small extra chance of food poisoning type illnesses) when the gov't is simultaneously giving two thumbs up to the sale of things like ground beef, which has a VASTLY higher rate of causing problems.

If we let people make their own choices about riskier things, like bagged spinach and cigarettes and tanning beds, unpasteurized milk seems very out of place as something to get all draconian and "gov't knows best for you!" about, IMO.

(edited to add -- actually I think it made perfectly good sense for pasteurization laws to be passed eighty or a hundred years ago. Back then, commercially-sold raw milk *was* a really significant public health hazard. But our abilities to test cows, sterilize equipment, and keep stuff refrigerated has improved hugely since then, and I think the raw milk argument should be evaluated on the basis of how things are NOW, not what once was)

Pat

 

[freemotion]

If we let people make their own choices about riskier things, like bagged spinach and cigarettes and tanning beds, unpasteurized milk seems very out of place as something to get all draconian and "gov't knows best for you!" about, IMO.

Preach it, sista!

(edited to add -- actually I think it made perfectly good sense for pasteurization laws to be passed eighty or a hundred years ago. Back then, commercially-sold raw milk *was* a really significant public health hazard. But our abilities to test cows, sterilize equipment, and keep stuff refrigerated has improved hugely since then, and I think the raw milk argument should be evaluated on the basis of how things are NOW, not what once was)

Pat

Don't forget modern closed milking systems....from teat to tank without any contact with the air, humans, the animals, manure, etc. And what a simple job it is to use the same system of vacuums and tubing to suck up some disinfectant to clean the system. Pretty foolproof.