The problem with raw milk isn’t salmonella, it’s tuberculosis.
During WWII my family kept a couple of cows. I remember, as a child, screening the bits of dirt and cowshit from the milk through a cloth funnel; but we drank the unpasteurized milk with no problem. It was probably better for us than the pasturized milk bought from a store.
However, one tubercular cow can infect the mixed milk from a dairy herd of a hundred or more cows. This milk could infect thousands, and did. City children during the winter, low in vitamin D with impaired immune systems, were particularly affected. Tuberculosis (“the great white plague”) was one of the leading causes of death in the United States in the early twentieth century. Pasteurization, more that the antibiotics which came later, reversed this. Only now, with TB largely controlled, there is this movement against Pasteurization because people aren’t losing friends, relatives and loved-ones to this disease. Both my grandfather and father died from TB, as did one of my first girl friends during the early 1950s.
By the way, tuberculosis is coming back in a more antibiotic-resistant and virulent form.
” Tuberculosis (“the great white plague”) was one of the leading causes of death in the United States in the early twentieth century. “
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My father died of TB in 1938. We were 5 and 2. I still have a positive reaction with the tine test even though my exposure was 75 years ago.
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My grand parents had a small dairy operation. They did their milking by hand, and we drank that milk. Their cows were tested regularly.
There was never any junk or poop in the milk to be strained either. What they didn’t use for themselves was sold to the local dairy operation.
The milk tasted like onions in the spring. It tasted great the rest of the time. We used to make homemade butter out of the cream, and it tasted great too.