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Dear Mr. Zimmer,
I am a constituent in your riding and I would like to ask you to support MPP Bill Murdoch's resolution that will be presented to the legislature tomorrow to request that a task force be set up to investigate the sale of raw milk in Ontario.
I am sure you are aware of the raid by the OPP on farmer Michael Schmidts farm in Durham County on November 20. I along with many others in your consituency and throughout Ontario have been upset by the unjustifiably heavy-handed treatment of Mr. Schmidt by the police and Ontario Health officials. I was also offended by Dalton McGuinty's dismissive and obfuscating remarks to the media when he was questioned on the issue. I was on the other hand glad to see MPP Greg Sorbrara express his support for the regulated sale of raw milk in Ontario, and I hope you will join him in support of Mr. Murdoch's resolution.
The accepted wisdom amongst most of the public is that the pasteurization of milk is essential to protect consumers from a multitude of illnesses that it would otherwise carry. These apparent dangers are continually re-emphasized by health authorities and most people accept them without question. To listen to some of the comments I have heard recently, you would think raw milk was as dangerous to your health as arsenic!
When I was growing up I lived in rural areas much of the time. As a consequence, I drank a goodly amount of fresh unpasteurized milk and loved it. For about ten years my family purchased unpasteurized milk from a farmer we lived next to. We loved the rich taste and never gave a thought to any health risks, and never got sick. After I left home I used to boast to my friends about how great it was to get farm fresh milk whenever I went home to visit my family.
Now that the whole issue of raw milk safety has been brought to the fore by the recent events, I have been confused by the claims made by various health officials and decided to do some research of my own into the issue.
What I've come up with is interesting. The Department of Health claims that Raw milk is unsafe, however the data available on the web from places like the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) and other publications including the USFDA and the American Journal for Public Health (which are also consistently opposed to the sale of raw milk) indicate, contrary to their stance, that raw milk is just as safe as any other food product and in fact safer than many.
All the public statments that I have seen from our health officials, in the media and on the web, approach the issue by reciting various cases of illness that have been linked to the consumption of raw milk. The cases mentioned are always serious and are clearly chosen to engender fear in support of their case. What they invariably leave out is the "rest of the story" namely the relative incidence of illness attributed to other foods, including pasteurized milk. (Yes, there are lots of cases of people getting sick from pasteurized milk - and in most of those cases the pasteurization was verified to have been done properly! ).
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. For instance in 2002 the FDA reported that there were 200 cases of people getting sick in the US attributed to raw milk. This is in an article stating the raw milk is not safe (because 200 people got sick!). Well 200 doesn't seem like a huge number given the total population of the US. Conveniently, they don't say anything about the numbers of illnesses attributed to other foods, or due to pasteurized milk.
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% of the US population. That extrapolates to about 116,000 cases in the total US. Which means that the percent of reported food related illnesses due to raw milk out of the total is a miniscule 0.17% ! (Another section in the same reports quotes an estimate made by the CDC that in 1997 if unreporeted cases were included, there were probably 325,000 cases of hospitalization due to foodborne illness and 76 million probable cases of milder illness !! )
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, but you can get an rough approximation from the fact that about 1% percent of the milk sold in the US is raw. Dividing 0.17% by 1% gives you 17%. What that says is that among small number of raw milk drinkers who do get sick, 17% of the illness are due to the milk, and 83% are due to other foods. So although raw milk may cause some illness, it is certainly not the worst cause. The data I have seen for the general US population shows that salads are the worst, then fruits, then chicken, with milk having the lowest incidence. (I wasn't able to get data on beef)
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 concientious individual raw milk producers, you will see some stellar results. Michael Schmidt 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 labeled. A major raw milk dairy in California, Altena Dairies has been selling raw milk for 40 years with 0 cases of illness reported. California has a highly regulated raw milk industry and the highest sales of raw milk of any US state. There have been a number of years in California when there were 0 cases of illness atributed to raw milk. In the same years there were numerous cases attributed to pasteurized milk in California.
The thing that struck me though as I went through this is that there appears to be a strong bias amongst health authorities against raw milk, even though their own statistics suggest that the bias is unfounded. What concerns me is that the health officials and government are not comparing apples to apples, and are presenting incomplete information to bolster their case.
Given the small numbers of illness due to raw milk, relative to the scale of other food (and water!!!) issues that are out there, it seems a total waste of government resources to be going after people like Michael Schmidt when there are far more important health problems to tackle. I don't have hard data on this, but based on news reports I've heard over the last year or so on water quality issues, I'm willing to bet that despite Walkerton and its aftermath there are still far more illnesses in Ontario due to poorly treated water than there are due to raw milk.
There are risks involved in every aspect of life. Driving a car is far more risky than drinking raw milk, so is the consumption of alcohol. And what about tobacco? Smoking creates a huge strain on our health system, but it's still legal.
From what I can see, when a well regulated raw milk system is in place, the incidents of illness relative to the amount of raw milk consumed drops considerably. Which is why it would make a lot of sense for Ontario to establish such a system. I trust you will support me and the many others who are calling for this reasonable accomodation for those who chose to drink raw milk.
Thank you,
Paul Kirkley
North York, Ontario
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