Posted on 06/23/2013 8:03:38 AM PDT by rickmichaels
I grew up on a chicken ranch in an area full of dairy farms, cattle ranches, sheep farms, etc., etc. As an exchange student in France, I lived with a family who owned a small farm--13 cows, 3 pigs, rabbits, chickens, plus a kitchen garden. I do *not* have this idyllic image of cows grazing in pristine pastures completely free of disease-ridden wild animals, parasites, mosquitoes, biting flies, etc. Animals are naturally dirty, there is just no other way to put it. I guess if you're from the city and have never lived on or visited a farm, those Disney fairy tales might seem like reality to you.
Also, FYI, I've never seen a "conglomerate" dairy farm; I've only seen the local ones. They're all over. And they're dirty and stinky, too.
My brother drives a semi. He picked up a load of pickles and got to tour the "factory". What he saw would make you puke. Government doesn't "protect" us. It controls.
I have no idea what you're talking about. What did your brother supposedly see that would make me puke? Unsanitary conditions in violation of local, state, and federal food safety regulations? If he saw such unsanitary conditions, why didn't he report them to the local health department? Are you being contradictory here, trying to blame what I assume are filthy conditions (because you didn't actually say) on the very government that makes it a crime to process foods in those same filthy conditions?
I have no idea what you're talking about. What did your brother supposedly see that would make me puke? Unsanitary conditions in violation of local, state, and federal food safety regulations?
Sorry but you're a naive idiot. You have no idea what your buddies in government allow in your food while still calling it "clean". Stop reading liberal, pro-government crap and get some truth. YOU live in Disneyland and think that government gives a crap what you eat.
In compliance with law, the major pickle plant had dead squirrels, birds and other detritus floating in the vats. They skim off the dead animals and bottle them. Dan will not touch pickles anymore. Grow up.
Excuse me, where did I even once mention equipment? All dairies have to sanitize their equipment--as I have already pointed out, food safety laws and regulations cover every aspect of food production--meaning that they regulate the milking equipment, as well.
Properly sanitized equipment isn't the issue. The cows are the issue. It would not matter if the equipment were taken apart and sterilized between every cow--that still would not make the milk of a cow infected with hoof and mouth, brucellosis, rabies, tuberculosis, E. coli O157:H7, etc., safe to drink. That's because the pathogens come from the cow, not the equipment. The cow doesn't even have to be sick to pass those pathogens into the milk. Furthermore, as I have already pointed out, animals are dirty. I have yet to see a cow that will refuse to drink or wade in water contaminated by urine and feces, or refuse to graze in a field equally contaminated. Nor have I seen a cow apply DEET to itself to keep disease-causing mosquitoes and flies from biting.
Sorry but you're a naive idiot. You have no idea what your buddies in government allow in your food while still calling it "clean". Stop reading liberal, pro-government crap and get some truth. YOU live in Disneyland and think that government gives a crap what you eat.
Wow. Isn't it obvious by now that I'm actually familiar with the laws and regulations I keep referring to? And that I have studied microbiology and food safety practices? I read scientific literature all the time, and monitor the CDC (and the FDA, to a lesser extent). Your dismissal of actual scientific evidence tells me a lot about the kind of websites you frequent and your lack of critical thinking skills. In the matter of food safety, the government doesn't just invent rules and impose them--scientists (like myself) using the most up-to-date research-based information tell the government what the rules should be. And we scientists are *not* a bunch of ranting liberals--we're far too intelligent and logical for that. In fact, you act more like a liberal than I do, with your illogic and invented stories.
In compliance with law, the major pickle plant had dead squirrels, birds and other detritus floating in the vats. They skim off the dead animals and bottle them. Dan will not touch pickles anymore. Grow up.
Really? If you're going to make the ridiculous claim that food safety regulations allow dead animals to be in the pickle vats, you'd better come up with a reference for that. Hint: food safety laws are available on the internet. I'll take the reference in the form of the citation of a specific local, state, or federal regulation, with full section number, or a direct link to the regulation. Another hint: if you want to make an outrageous claim on the internet, it is *extremely* easy to fact-check. Here is a link to a pickle factory website, with video. Note that the workers all wear hair nets, gloves, and white t-shirts. Notice how all of the equipment and the factory building are made of hard surfaces that are amenable to sterilization between batch runs. I'll bet that every process in the factory is temperature-monitored, that hard-copy temperature records are maintained, and that they randomly sample the product to make sure their processes are adequately killing bacteria.
Don't bother answering unless you fact-check yourself first. Because if you don't fact-check, I will. And I will post verifiable facts to counter your ridiculous stories.
PASTEURIZED milk has been the source of many widespread outbreaks. A total for some of the documented outbreaks due to PASTEURIZED milk over the past few decades is 239,884 cases and 620 deaths.
The nation’s largest recorded outbreak of Salmonella was due to PASTEURIZED milk contaminated with antibiotic-resistant Salmonella typhimurium. The outbreak, which occurred between June 1984 and April 1985 sickened over 200,000 and caused 18 deaths. Disturbingly, the CDC did not issue a specific Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report for this outbreak; information must be gleaned from other reports published in the FDA Consumer and the Journal of the American Medical Association.
A 2004 outbreak in Pennsylvania and New Jersey involved multidrug-resistant Salmonella typhimurium infection from milk contaminated after pasteurization.
Despite numerous outbreaks due to pasteurized milk, neither the FDA nor the CDC has ever issued a warning against consuming pasteurized milk. Pasteurization is not a guarantee; pasteurized milk is not sterile. The FDA permits the presence of up to 20,000 bacteria /ml and 10 E.coli/ml in milk after the pasteurization process has been completed.
Because pasteurization destroys probiotics (good bacteria), any harmful bacteria present in the milk after pasteurization can and will flourish. On the other hand, published research shows that good bacteria and many other components in raw milk actually destroy pathogens added to the milk.
You really are naive.
That’s complicated. So much easier to let a bureaucrat in Washington to make an arbitrary rule and decide for us.
I will not drink pasteurized milk. Haven’t now for 10 years. Real Milk is safe, and most attempts by the FDA/CDC Gestapo to discredit Real (Raw) Milk are based on falsified data, or intentionally falsified reporting.
A few years ago Real Milk saved my life. I had digestion problems and could not keep food down, except for Real Milk. I lived on it for several months, consuming 3 - 4 quarts per day over the course of 24 hours.
It is all about Big Dairy...their contaminated feedlots and milking operations make them poor candidates for supplying Real Milk. Therefore they stomp on small farmers runing clean operations with grass-fed cows who want to supply Real Milk.
I agree with you but the government has done a fine job of scaring people into believing that government is needed for SAFETY. It’s a shame that pro-government control can be found even on FR.
The purpose of government is to protect its citizens from all threats, foreign and domestic.
There are other protection mechanisms also: 1) your thinking cap, 2) threat of lawsuit, 3) Insurance, 4) Good business decisions to keep customers.
You remind me of my mayor as she is implementing draconian building codes that are putting many of us small landlords out of business. “I don’t care about you or your problems, this is all about safety.”
“It’s a shame that pro-government control can be found even on FR.”
Yes, and some of those left leaning Statists have been commenting on this thread.
Government has never been about protecting us from ourselves, but it has used that argument to tighten their jaws of control...Bloomberg, the sawed-off runt of an excuse of a man, is a glaring example of that. What an evil pussy...
Absolutely agree.
You also need to know how to analyze what the facts actually mean, how to properly make a comparison, and how to discern the actual cause of the outbreak.
Let's take your first example. The outbreak in 1985 only had less than 17,000 confirmed cases. The 200,000 figure is an estimate derived through statistical means--it should be taken with a grain of salt. The cause of the outbreak was not pasteurized milk. The cause was a contaminated pipe fitting, where the salmonella were lodged in pipe threads, in an area inaccessible to disinfectants. Any food piped through that pipe would have become contaminated. The milk was not the problem. As this account pointed out, the dairy in question pasteurized the milk early in processing, and performed several processing steps afterwards. Anyone who is familiar with sterile technique knows that the more you handle a sterile culture, the more likely you are to introduce contamination. Had the dairy waited until immediately prior to packaging to perform the pasteurization step, the salmonella would have been killed and no outbreak would have occurred.
There is no reason for the FDA or CDC to issue a warning against drinking pasteurized, because there is not a single case of food poisoning that has occurred as a result of the milk being pasteurized. In *all* food poisoning incidents in which pasteurized milk was involved, the contamination came from an outside source. (And, had raw milk been exposed in the same way, it, too, would have had the same contamination.) On the other hand, the most likely source of contamination in raw milk is the cow itself. If the cow has any kind of infection--whether it shows signs or not--those bacteria are most likely in the milk. The close proximity of the anus to the udder means that fecal bacteria will almost certainly be present in the milk--and E. coli O157:H7, although deadly to humans, causes no problems for cows. No amount of sterilization of the equipment or pipes is going to remove the bacteria that the cow put into the milk before it even emerged from her body. The only way to kill those pathogens is by pasteurization.
Because pasteurization destroys probiotics (good bacteria), any harmful bacteria present in the milk after pasteurization can and will flourish. On the other hand, published research shows that good bacteria and many other components in raw milk actually destroy pathogens added to the milk.
This is completely untrue, and demonstrates a lack of understanding both of how pasteurization works and of microbiology. Pasteurization does not sterilize milk; its purpose is to kill off the pathogens. That's why milk can go bad even if you never open the carton. Bacteria do not know or care about which ones are "probiotics" or which are pathogens--that "good" and "bad" terminology is meaningless to them. They will *all* grow as long as there is a food source. Lastly, if you're going to claim that some magical property of raw milk somehow inhibits bacterial growth, you'd better provide a reputable reference for it--preferably something published by a university or USDA laboratory in a peer-reviewed journal and indexed in PubMed. There is no known bacteriocidal or bacteriostatic chemical present in raw milk.
Finally, I'll point out a very relevant fact. Less than 1% of the population consumes raw milk. That means that, in order to compare how likely you are to get food poisoning from raw milk vs. pasteurized milk, you have to take the number of raw milk food poisoning cases and multiply it by 100. From 1998 through 2011, 148 outbreaks due to consumption of raw milk or raw milk products were reported to CDC. These resulted in 2,384 illnesses, 284 hospitalizations, and 2 deaths. A study released by CDC in February 2012 examined the number of dairy outbreaks in the United States during a 13‐year period. Between 1993 and 2006, 60% (73/121) of dairy-related outbreaks reported to CDC were linked to raw milk products. Three‐quarters of these outbreaks occurred in states where the sale of raw milk was legal at the time. Experts also found that those sickened in raw milk outbreaks were 13 times more likely to be hospitalized than those who got ill from pasteurized milk during an outbreak. And, finally, Raw milk is 150 times more dangerous than pasteurised, study reveals
If you are going to post misinformation taken from a raw milk salesman's website, I *will* counter it with factual information.
I have said before, and I will say again, I have no problem with fully informed people who are aware of the dangers and choose to drink raw milk anyway. My big problem is with those who lie to get people to buy raw milk, or who embrace and promote the lies to justify their choice.
Do you really mean that? Will you give them carte blanch on that?
Yes, I do. It is the reason that humans invented governments thousands of years ago, and it is the reason that governments continue to exist. Both times I entered government service (Navy, then Army), I had to swear an oath that I would perform this function. And I take that oath very seriously.
The fact that some politicians see in government a way to exercise personal power and control other people does not change the fundamental purpose of government, any more than using shovels as wheelbarrow handles changes their purpose.
There are other protection mechanisms also: 1) your thinking cap, 2) threat of lawsuit, 3) Insurance, 4) Good business decisions to keep customers.
That libertarian fantasy is unlikely to work in the real world. Unfortunately, the con man who mixes sawdust with flour so he can sell it at a large profit doesn't really care about lawsuits or customers--as soon as he pockets his money, he'll disappear and show up somewhere else to run another scam. (Bulking up flour with sawdust was a common way food was adulterated prior to the foundation of the FDA precursor.)
You remind me of my mayor as she is implementing draconian building codes that are putting many of us small landlords out of business. “I don’t care about you or your problems, this is all about safety.”
The issue here is balance. Without building codes at all, we'd be like a third world nation, with thousands of deaths every time a natural disaster hits. The strictest building code in the world cannot prevent every accident, yet some politicians want to try anyway.
I have yet to read anything factual in your posts. You post like one who is still ‘Dem’
Unlike you, I don't copy and paste from some conman's website. Everything I say is based in factual data, and can be easily verified with a minimum amount of effort. If I do not provide references, I will provide them if challenged. I try to provide references in the form of articles written for the general public, because they take the factual data contained in the actual medical literature and put it in a form that most people can read. I do, however, check that the facts presented in that manner are, in fact, scientifically correct. If needed, I can and will provide links back to the actual medical literature.
You, on the other hand, have not supported a single assertion with any kind of supporting reference from a reputable source. Or even questionable source, for that matter.
You should be careful when posting on the internet. People like me, who care more about facts than magical thinking, will always be ready to challenge you.
Indeed. I have that particular kind of naivety that can only come from growing up in a rural agricultural area--on a ranch, even--and from spending many years studying microbiology and public health and so forth.
Don't tell me, let me guess--you can't find anything to refute the facts that I have provided, and you can't find any references to support your assertions?
I don’t bother debating nanny-staters. It’s like trying to teach a pig to sing, it wastes my time and annoys the pig.
Your facts are powerless against their feelings.
I know that. I am also aware that many lurkers read FR, and I make the effort to put out accurate information for their sake. Some people fall for woo (a term I've seen used to describe pseudoscientific quackery) because they genuinely do not recognize woo. All too often, they or their children end up with serious life-threatening illness. I've seen heartbreaking videos made by mothers who thought they really were giving their children healthy food when they gave them raw milk--right up until their children ended up in the ICU. To try to educate the people who genuinely cannot recognize woo (and maybe save people from serious illness), I make the effort to factually counter woo every time I see it.
I do not expect to be able to reach the true believers such as those I have been debating here. They serve a function, though--they deliver the woo right to me so that I know exactly what I need to counter.
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