Post by Joann on Feb 6, 2005 17:22:28 GMT -5
The following remarks were written in answer to a concern about Campylobactor jejuni but apply to many fears about raw milk.
The short answer is that you cannot get any disease from a cow unless she has that disease. The classic cow diseases (TB and brucellosis) are under such excellent control that no one in the Eastern US will be exposed to an infected cow. The entire US is essentially free of these diseases.
Campylobactor jejuni is a bacterium that is world wide and can from time to time be found in the feces of virtually all warm blooded creatures from birds to man. Because of its easy transmissibility in feces it is often found in water. If found in milk it is a result of fecal contamination. According to my copy of Merk’s Veterinary Manual 10th edition, it is not shed in milk.
Laboratory tests to positively identify C. jejuni are not difficult. What is difficult is determining from whence it came. It can be spread from one person to another by such things as the handles of grocery shopping carts. The majority of people and animals who happen to shed C. jejuni in their feces never become ill. When an ill person mentions having drunk raw milk, health practitioners invariably pounce on this as the source. When they go to the farm to investigate they may indeed find C. jejuni in the environment. They would also find it at the animal shelter and in virtually any hospital but it is the cow that will result in a news story. Even in cases where C. jejuni is isolated from raw milk, usually a bulk tank at a large dairy, of 100 people who drank raw milk, only one may show symptoms. Clearly, as with so many other bacterial and viral threats, what we are really looking at is immune system vigor.
How do we control our environment so that a disease organism never challenges even the weakest among us? This is where 150 years of modern medicine and the Germ Theory hits a stone wall. Despite impressive progress in controlling disease with medications and suppressing environmental bacteria, medical practice is becoming increasingly bankrupt in this area. A new paradigm called the Hygiene Hypothesis is rapidly gaining credence. This hypothesis suggests that people are born equipped with an immune system evolved to respond to all the common environmental threats. Excessive efforts to banish the germs it is pre programmed to expect get it so confused that it attacks our own bodies, resulting in autoimmune disease. There is a mounting body of research evidence to support the Hygiene Hypothesis. Whatever else it does or does not prove, one fact emerges. Our best defense against disease is to be well fed healthy people as best we know how. Few foods support health as well as raw milk and none better.
A not-to-be-overlooked fact about raw milk is that it contains within it the power to destroy pathogens (harmful bacteria and viruses). It is extremely difficult to isolate living pathogens from raw milk; they are all dead. Pasteurized milk has no such property. If Campylobactor jejuni or any other pathogen enters pasteurized milk it does not die, it grows. The Merck Manual notes that the most common food source of C. jejuni is not milk but undercooked chicken. Instead of assuming illness is derived from raw milk, an infrequent carrier, attention should first and foremost be directed at the most common source of this and many other intestinal diseases including salmonella and dangerous strains of E. coli: commercial chicken.