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CDC Raw Milk Information Website
Have you ever run into some dirty raw-milk drinking hippie who talks about how "processed" food is evil? Do you know a reasonable person who thinks that raw milk might not be a bad idea? Are you sick of me going on and on about raw milk and you shouldn't fucking drink it?
The CDC now has a convenient webpage all about raw milk.
Also, in case you didn't know, there is a (relatively) new government site all about food safety. You should check it out.
The CDC now has a convenient webpage all about raw milk.
Also, in case you didn't know, there is a (relatively) new government site all about food safety. You should check it out.
Comments
Relevant because I saw this tweet by Kevin Rose, the Digg guy.
But if you are adequately informed and, more importantly, educated about the risks of consumption of raw milk, and elect to do so anyhow, that's fine.
Feeding it to your kids? No. Telling people that it's "better" for you when 1) that is not supported by evidence and 2) downplaying the risks? No.
But if you know all that and you're still really jonesing for some dysentery, be my guest.
Though I am quite certain that the Digg guy has no idea what invasive listeriosis is, or how likely he is to get it from consuming raw milk. That might change his mind.
So go ahead Digg guy, keep drinking raw milk. Just note that you might wind up getting....buried.
EDIT: Corrected my mortality rate and hospitalization figure based on the 2011 CDC foodborne illness estimates.
It's all well and good to know that you might die, but without a decent estimate of the likelihood it doesn't mean much.
I'm not interested in consuming raw milk, but I'd like to see the data.
However, data on "this food is this likely to give you this illness" is several orders of magnitude harder to collect than either of those other sets for a variety of reasons.
1. Linking a case (or cluster or outbreak) of listeriosis to raw milk specifically is intensely difficult and/or next to impossible. There is a general problem of lying - and yes, there have studies on this - when doing epi investigations involving raw milk. The people who drink raw milk and get sick have an apparent tendency to give what appears to be false accountings of what actually happened. Couple this with the generalized difficulties of epi investigations - can you recall everything you ate over a 72 hour period 3 weeks ago? - and the long incubation time of L. mono and you have a statistical nightmare.
2. Raw milk has a ridiculously short shelf life, on the order of a few days. It takes a few days just to even start to exhibit the symptoms of listeriosis, much less have it diagnosed in culture. By the time there's a patient isolate - two weeks from the time of ingestion is often considered miraculous in clinical labs - the milk is totally gone.
3. Most foodborne contamination events are unevenly distributed within a production batch, arise sporadically, and often occur randomly. Additionally, unless the cluster is quite large, your data are subject to massive uncertainty.
So, the event that contaminated that bulk tank of raw milk may have only happened once, and it may have made a bunch of people sick and maybe even killed some people. The milk is gone in a matter of days, but let's say it takes 2 weeks for epidemiologists to figure out there's a cluster. They go back and try to collect samples and find nothing, because now the farmer has gone through no less than 12 different tank fills and scrubs, and now the flora in the tank is totally different than it was two weeks ago. Hey, maybe he even cleaned thoroughly every time.
So, you get nothing out of the milk samples. You go and interview the patients and come up with nothing because there are maybe 10 of them and one was a pregnant woman who isn't interested in talking about her recent miscarriage. So you have no samples and no patient information. You maybe associate it with the farm but can't come up with anything definitive. Case closed, the cluster is unresolved.
4. Independent of even finding people who have made ill by raw milk, it's impossible to extrapolate from that the odds that any person will get sick from raw milk contaminated with L. mono. You have to enumerate the organism in the milk to figure out what levels were present - and this is assuming that you can get your hands on a "hot" sample. We only have sporadic enumeration data for some products from the history of outbreaks.
5. The nature of microbial infection risk modeling is subject to countless variables, the largest of which is that the infectious dose of L. mono varies from person to person depending on their exact immune status right when they drank the milk. It can take 100 cells for this guy and 10^9 cells for the guy next to him.
You could come up with a risk model by feeding subjects varying levels of L. mono until you figure out how much it takes to get an infection, but you'd still have to standardize for the immune status somehow. And let's not even get into the ethics.
So we extrapolate, because that's all we can do. Every now and again, we get lucky, and we isolate a bug from raw milk that we subtype and match to patients who had that same bug and subtype. Do some epi, things line up, and BAM! You have a solved cluster related to raw milk. As I said, it's doing that consistently that is almost completely impossible.
I didn't even get into the lineages of L. mono, the major serotypes and their association with illness, point mutations that reduce pathogenicity, and so on. The picture is incredibly complicated.
The take-home message is that drinking milk that has L. mono may elevate your risk of contracting invasive listeriosis. More than that depends on hundreds of variables. Once a person understands all the variables that go into the equation and why science can't say more than that, they'd see just how risky it is. Which is to say, very fucking risky.
Farm A produced raw milk. That raw milk was found to be contaminated with a particular subtype of L. mono. We'll call the milk "milk A" and the bug "LM A."
Farm A sold milk A directly to consumers, and to Farm B.
Farm B did not have cows, but they made cheese. They made raw milk cheese from milk supplied to them by Farm A. We'll call this "cheese A."
We found out that Farm A did in fact sell milk A to Farm B. Farm A did not know about the problem before the sale.
Farm B went ahead and made cheese A from milk A, as I said before. We investigated cheese A and guess what? We found LM A.
We didn't find that subtype in any of Farm B's other products; we only found it in cheese A, which as I said was made from milk A.
So, this particular subtype of L. mono contaminated raw milk which was turned into cheese and aged for 60+ days. The bug survived.
And then we found human cases with that same subtype of LM who reported eating the cheese. That specific brand. That specific production batch.
Fuck you, microbes.
O157 in Costco raw milk cheese
O157 in Whole Foods raw milk cheese
1) It reduces the available moisture in the cheese, which inhibits the continued growth of organisms.
2) As cheese ages, the culture continues to ferment lactose, reducing the amount of available sugar.
3) As more lactose is fermented, more lactic acid is produced, further inhibiting and often killing most bacteria.
So, basically, aging the cheese for 60 days starves almost all populations of bacteria of many vital nutrients, and eventually, they die.
And this works for a lot of things. However, in recent years, we've seen evidence that many pathogens survive this process. Sometimes, they survive in numbers sufficient to cause illness.
There is a black market for raw milk soft cheeses. We've investigated and busted up cheese smuggling rings. People smuggling cheese from Mexico in suitcases to sell on the streets of New York.
I am not making this up.
Seriously guys, you can't make this shit up.
Yes, people should have the right to take calculated risks, and even to harm themselves if mentally competent to make that decision. I'm confident, for example, that most of the people consuming marijuana have a reasonable understanding of the risks involved. Smokers are fully aware of the cancer risk. BASE jumpers are fully aware of the very high death rates in their sport.
However...
I don't believe that the vast majority of people who choose to consume raw milk products are actually aware of the fullness of the risks they are assuming in doing so. I don't believe they quite grasp the severity of the possible adverse outcomes, and likely assume that the worst that could happen to them is too much pooping.
I live dangerously. Sometimes I put sugar in my coffee too.
Now, Casu Marzu, that's a cheese to avoid.
Evolution is a huge bitch sometimes.
Just don't bitch to me when your raw roquefort kills you. Oh wait, you won't, because you'll be dead.
I feel like I've said this to you before in a different context. Oysters and V. vulnificus.