Raw Milk Safety: A Summary

March 16, 2021 | Source: A Campaign for Real Milk | by Sally Fallon Morell

Ever since the proponents for pasteurization began their campaign against raw milk—and this dates back to the 1940s—their main argument has been the safety argument. Raw milk is “inherently dangerous,” they claim. Or as the early articles proclaimed: “Raw milk can kill.” The latest example of this rhetoric comes from a 2014 study out of Johns Hopkins, which concluded that “the relative risk of individual illness is almost 150 times greater per unit of nonpasteurized dairy product, compared to pasteurized.”

THE 2014 JOHNS HOPKINS STUDY

As reported in the Fall, 2016 issue of Wise Traditions, WAPF published a critique of this conclusion in 2015.1 The claim is derived from an analysis published by Langer and colleagues in 2012, which actually found no statistical difference in the rate of illness (as opposed to the number of “outbreaks”) attributed to raw milk or products produced from raw milk compared to those produced from pasteurized milk. In addition, the Langer analysis limited its time frame to the years between 1993 and 2006. By selecting such a narrow time period, the data excluded the nation’s largest outbreak of salmonella: in 1985, a multi-state outbreak of salmonella that was traced to pasteurized milk from a Chicago milk plant. This resulted in over 16,000 confirmed cases, and the investigators estimated that between 150,000 and 200,000 people were sickened.

Our own analysis of illnesses attributable to raw and pasteurized milk over the years 1980 to 2005 indicates almost 11 times more illnesses attributed to pasteurized milk than to raw milk. Using the estimate that one percent of the milk is consumed raw, we can calculate that on a per-serving basis, raw milk is less than twice as dangerous as pasteurized milk. Recent data suggest that as many as three or four percent of Americans consume raw milk; using these data instead of the one percent figure would make pasteurized milk appear up to twice as dangerous as raw milk on a per-serving basis.