from The Orangeville Banner:
Defends farmers' right to supply raw milk
Dear Editor,
I am writing this letter, not because I am a supporter or drinker of raw milk, but to defend our individual rights as Canadians living in a "free" country to decide for ourselves what we should be ingesting.
Once again government agencies are using scare tactics to influence consumers without providing a single statistic or fact regarding real life cases of illness due to this "poisonous" milk.
A brief search of the Internet revealed the following statistics related to illness from raw milk. Although there are certainly reported cases of illness where raw milk is the suspected cause, the numbers are very small compared to those attributed to other foods, including pasteurized milk. This past year, for example, I read about the E. coli outbreak attributed to spinach from California, and E. coli illnesses in attendees of functions who ate contaminated pasta salads, and recently about two very sick individuals who drank pasteurized carrot juice from a national grocery chain. Nothing about raw milk.
In 2002 the FDA reported that there were 200 cases of illness attributed to raw milk in the U.S. The total U.S. population is approximately 298 million. If you look at the CDC FoodNet report for 2002 they state that there were 16,389 reported cases of food-related illness in the population that FoodNet monitors, which is about 14 per cent of the U.S. population. That extrapolates to about 116,000 cases in the total U.S. Which means that the per cent of reported food-related illnesses due to raw milk out of the total is 0.17 per cent.
Of course you could quite correctly point out that because there are so few people who drink raw milk, of course there will be proportionately fewer people getting sick from it. A better statistic would be the illness rate due to milk among raw milk drinkers. That's harder to come up with since those specific statistics are not reported.
The data I have seen for the general U.S. population shows that salads are the worst, then fruits, then chicken, with milk having the lowest incidence (beef was curiously not reported). Another thing that the FDA report leaves out is where the raw milk that caused the 200 illness came from. Did it come from certified and regulated producers or others?
If you look at the performance of conscientious individual raw milk producers, you will see some stellar results. Michael Schmidt of Durham, for instance, has been providing raw milk for over 20 years and has not had one case of illness attributed to his milk.
In California, the sale of raw milk is legal although it must be clearly labelled. A major raw milk dairy in California, Altena Dairies, has been selling raw milk for 40 years with zero cases of illness reported. California has a highly regulated raw milk industry and the highest sales of raw milk of any U.S. state. There have been a number of years in California when there were zero cases of illness attributed to raw milk. In the same years there were numerous cases attributed to pasteurized milk in California.
Statistics and illness aside, do you think that Schmidt would have such a large number of families to whom he regularly supplies raw milk if even one of those families became sick from it?
I'm positive that his customers have weighed the risks and benefits of ingesting unpasteurized milk and have clearly decided that the benefits outweigh the risks.
So, even though I personally don't drink raw milk I feel obligated to defend his and his consumers right to choose what they feel is best for themselves and their families. As Canadians who want to continue living in a truly free country, we must all be proactive and support Schmidt and his freedom to produce and distribute a demonstrated safe level of raw milk to those consumers who do want it.
Peggy Bond, Orangeville
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