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.
That’s complicated. So much easier to let a bureaucrat in Washington to make an arbitrary rule and decide for us.
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.