Nobody called it an epidemic. The point of the thread is that there’s a small yet significant risk involved in drinking raw milk, which can be easily avoided.
Anyway, you can call me a dipshit if you like, but the fact remains you failed to find something in “an hour” that took me all of five seconds.
Ouch. :D.
Cut-rate skydiving: you really love shitty analogies, don’t you?
You might think that, but you’d be wrong: I know about the history, and I know about the current state of the industry. I personally think all this arm-waving reflects a ridiculous hysteria about safety and a fundamental misunderstanding of the risks of everyday life.
Daniel
Nah, I thought your reference to camping was extremely weak.
Comment for me then, if you will, about what other health and safety regulations you feel that we can toss aside, now that the current state of the industry has made things so safe, for items manufactured and processed here or abroad.
Other foods? Drugs? Supplements? Personal hygiene items? Pet care products? Cars? Appliances? Building construction?
Talk to us further about “the risks of everyday life”, about the protections we can dispense with now that industry has reached a permanent State of Enlightenment, and why only hysterics worry about things like infectious disease, which of course has been totally mastered and can be easily eliminated by a touch of antibiotics. :dubious:
*"The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture issued a consumer alert yesterday regarding the consumption of raw milk from a Pennsylvania dairy:
Consumers who have purchased raw milk from Misty Meadow Farm in Bernville, Berks County, any time after April 16 should discard it immediately due to the risk of Listeria contamination, Agriculture Secretary Dennis Wolff said today.
Raw milk is milk that has not been pasteurized or homogenized.
“During routine inspection of the dairy, a preliminary test showed the presence of Listeria bacteria in some raw milk samples,” said Wolff. “If consumers have raw milk from this farm, they should discard it immediately.”
Listeriosis is the disease caused by Listeria monocytogenes. It is acquired by the ingestion of contaminated foods. Certain groups of individuals are at great risk for listeriosis. These are pregnant women (and their unborn children) and immunocompromised persons (e.g., transplant recipients). Among infants, listeriosis occurs when the infection is transmitted from the mother, either through the placenta or during the birthing process. These host factors, along with the amount of bacteria ingested and the virulence of the strain, determine the risk of disease.
Listeria can invade the body through a normal and intact gastrointestinal tract. Once in the body Listeria bacteria can travel through the blood stream, but are often found inside cells (they are “intracellular” pathogens). Listeria can co-opt the cell’s machinery to its own advantage by manipulating the host cell genes, and then move directly from cell-to-cell, avoiding many of the host’s defense mechanisms5. The bacteria also produce toxins that damages cells.
For unknown reasons, in immune-deficient hosts Listeria invades and grows best in the central nervous system, causing meningitis and/or encephalitis (brain infection). In pregnant women, the fetus is most heavily infected, leading to spontaneous abortion, stillbirths, or sepsis in infancy.
Every year in the U.S. approximately 2,500 cases of Listeriosis are known to occur4. (It is likely that more cases go unrecognized). About 500 deaths per year are attributed to listeriosis. These statistics indicate true misfortunes, as listeriosis is a preventable condition."*
[url=“http://www.listeriablog.com/tags/milk-recall”*Obligatory cite.
I guess they didn’t realize that the “state of the industry today” made this warning unnecessary.
I’ll agree if you’ll stop with your shitty analogies.
South Carolina just re-legalized tattoos. That was a great move. If you’ve got others you want me to consider, I’ll do it.
Daniel
If they legalized commercial tattoo parlors using unsterilized needles, you’ve got another great analogy on your hands. 
Keep 'em coming.
I didn’t have time before to really check out your info, but I know when I googled “raw milk deaths” this is what I got when I googled That’s when I went to the CDC website and checked around there, if you do a search again using “raw milk deaths” you get zero, so I went to the stats and searched there, and still found zero. But whatever, this is again going into the stupid end of the pool, but I do hate it when I am made out to be a liar.
And as stated previously in this thread, pasteurized milk kills too. The Massachusetts Health Department.
Sure hope they don’t subsidize tobacco.
So don’t drink it. If you knew what a microbiologist knows about just the door handle of a public toilet, you’d probably wear Depends undergarments for the rest of your life (and probably pay someone else to change them for you). Bacteria are all around us. Raw vegetables are covered with E. Coli. You don’t even want to know what’s in the sponge you wash your dishes with.
As adults it should be our right to determine our own risk tolerance for what we choose to put in our bodies, whether it’s raw milk, raw oysters, or raw cannabis (preferably all three at the same time). If you want to call others idiots for choosing their own risk tolerance, that’s your right, but of course it’s our right to consider the source as a blathering nagging nanny-state dingdong.
Look, smartass, you asked a question, and I answered it. That’s not an analogy, it’s a straightforward answer to a question. If you didn’t ask it in good faith, more fool me for answering.
Daniel
ETA: doublepost
Ah.
In that case, just lose the quotes - raw milk deaths, not “raw milk deaths”.
Obviously nothing is 100% safe, and I don’t think anyone in the thread has suggested that pasteurization eliminates the risk of bacterial infection from milk entirely. Still, that’s like saying that you may as well shut off your airbags because they don’t protect the passengers in the back seats.