A STORY FROM NEW HAMPSHIRE

We conclude our section on brucellosis with an old story recounted by the same Mr. Vonderplanitz. The story originates with a New Hampshire man who gave up dairy farming in the mid-1950s.

“It took being driven out of farming to have enough time to recognize what had been done to us,” the man told Vonderplanitz. “You put the final pieces of the puzzle together when you published a short reference about brucellosis being a deficiency disease. If it is, then the programs to control it are nothing more than a political football.

“When I was a boy my father and I went to see an old man who sold me his single shot 22. On the way home my father told me the story behind the man; I was young enough to not understand the implications, but old enough to remember.

“The gentleman had been a long time New England sales rep for many ag equipment manufacturers. Knew the territory and politics inside out. In retirement he had a small farm almost within the ‘city limits’ of a nearby town. Had eight milkers and sold his milk retail personally. Lo and behold, the State of New Hampshire pioneered a brucellosis eradication program in the early thirties. This gentleman’s herd had three reactors and four sus-pects, which meant he couldn’t sell the milk unless they were removed from the herd via a slaughter program. He kept selling milk.

“Pretty soon the State gave him a cease-and-desist order. He continued to sell milk, and was taken to court, where he asked the judge in an offhanded manner if he was allowed to have anyone testify on his behalf. The judge asked how much time was involved. ‘Probably have them here tomorrow,’ the farmer said. Permission granted.

“Four veterinarians, from Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts and Canada, showed up the next day. All testified that they had drawn blood on the herd recently and all were negative. Case closed, and the old gent sold milk until he died without further molestation.

“What the old gentleman probably knew, but was discreet enough to not speak out loud, was the fact that the Hood Dairy Company was trying to expand its control of fluid milk to include the ‘Boston Milk Shed,’ which included most of New England north of Boston. With thousands upon thou-sands of little farmers with four to ten cows supplying the local milk de-mands, Hood couldn’t muscle into control. But if the little fellow was ‘le-gally’ forced to replace part of his herd overnight, he would have to close up business. That is exactly what happened. These little farmers couldn’t afford to replace the brucellosis reactors and suspects that the state identi-fied, on a short notice. This was the first step to ‘big farming’ in New England. Supposedly the cattle slaughtered were sent to a state-approved slaughterhouse where the carcasses were carefully examined and suspected portions were removed from human consumption.

“Many a moon later, when in the Navy on the other side of the world, I talked with a sailor from New Hampshire. . . . I discovered that he had worked in the only state-approved slaughterhouse for brucellosis-contami-nated cattle. How were the supposedly contaminated parts eliminated? No different than in any other slaughterhouse he worked in—everything went into human consumption. So much for the protection of the consumer and the rape of the farmer.

“Long after my Navy days, I heard on the radio in the 1980s that whole herds were to be shot and buried in central Vermont because of an outbreak of brucellosis. I could hardly believe my ears. So, I called the local radio station and asked to talk with the news announcer. He was a good PR person and easy to talk to. I gave him a brief run-down on what I’ve told you. He assured me that it was a serious threat because he had been there and saw the cattle shot and buried. I explained the politics of the ‘show.’ He was surprised, and said he would look into it further.

“I went to the station a week later to talk personally with him. I was informed that he no longer worked for the station. Hmm. Strange that he got a sampling of the truth, and within a week is no longer employed. When-ever brucellosis rears its ugly head, hunt for who’s to benefit. The milk wholesale buyer? The beef processor? The farmers affected are classified ‘outlaws.’ Is somebody peddling the truth and needs to be silenced? Or a dozen variants.”⁴⁷

CURRENT PUBLIC HEALTH CONCERNS AND E. COLI O157:H7

A brief discussion of the full scope of food-borne illness in the United States today provides a useful prelude to consideration of incidents involv-ing both raw and pasteurized milk. Nearly all incidents involving raw milk have involved mild symptoms in at most a few dozen people. If all of the reports are accurate, and raw milk were indeed the immediate cause of all of the incidents to which it stands accused, then over the past 25 years or so, a few hundred people have become ill for a few days. A few dozen may have been seriously ill, and a few with serious underlying medical problems may have died.

In contrast, some 200,000 people are sickened each day in the United States due to food-borne illness; about 900 are hospitalized, and about 14 die. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) states that over a quarter of all Americans come down with food poisoning each year. Only a fraction of these cases are ever reported. Studies have shown that many food-borne pathogens can trigger serious chronic diseases, including autoimmune disorders, heart disease, neurological problems, kidney damage and inflammatory bowel disease.⁴⁸

Small social gatherings used to be the source of most cases of food poisoning. Such outbreaks still do occur, but new kinds of outbreaks are more typical now, outbreaks caused by changes in the way food is pro-duced. According to Dr. Robert V. Tauxe, head of the Foodborne and Diar-rheal Diseases Branch at the CDC, America’s centralized, industrialized sys-tem of food processing has created outbreaks that have the potential to sicken millions of people.⁴⁹

Food-borne illness from milk products usually involves gastrointesti-nal illness precipitated by the bacteria Salmonella and Campylobacter. Inci-dents involving these two organisms have accounted for most dairy-related illnesses reported since the early 1980s. Recently, the new virulent form of

E. coli (E. coli O157:H7) has caused dairy-related outbreaks of illness, which have received considerable attention because of the particularly se-vere or fatal complications sometimes produced by the organisms. In Ap-plied Dairy Microbiology, Ryser reports, “at least 60 cases of raw milk-associated illness” due to E. coli O157:H7. In the same paragraph, he docu-ments more than 500 hamburger-related cases of E. coli O157:H7 illness that caused the deaths of four children in 1993. At least 15 additional out-breaks linked to the consumption of undercooked ground beef occurred in the 1980s. In Canada, 1600 cases were reported in 1992, and 1400 were reported in the United States in 1994.⁵⁰

In the cases “associated” with the consumption of raw milk, E. coli O157:H7 has been found in the feces of a few of the cattle in the involved herds, but not in the milk. On the other hand, a recent paper reported that E. coli O157:H7 is in 10 percent of raw milk bulk tank samples collected from 69 different Wisconsin farms.⁵¹ Apparently this pathogen can find its way into raw milk by fecal contamination, and clearly it can lead to serious illness. A reasonable assumption is that it is not found in healthy animals fed on green grass or hay.

Ryser also documents a number of E. coli O157:H7 outbreaks that involved pasteurized milk, citing faulty pasteurization or post-pasteurization contamination. As usual, Ryser cites these outbreaks as additional reason for compulsory pasteurization. Writing of one outbreak involving 18 severe cases in Montana in 1994, however, he actually provides us with fair warn-ing that one should avoid all pasteurized dairy products (though this was certainly not his intent):

“This outbreak does raise serious new public health concerns regard-ing the possible presence of toxic strains of E. coli in factory environments and their entry into finished products as post-processing contaminants.”⁵² It appears that what’s in the milk is the same thing Eric Schlosser told us is in the meat.

E.COLI IN OTHER FOODS

While E. coli 0157:H7 may pose a threat to individuals who consume raw milk from conventionally managed herds, it poses no threat to consum-ers of raw milk from healthy, grass-fed. But virulent E. coli in other foods, such as undercooked meat, is a prime candidate to cause the type of epi-demics that Dr. Tauxe of the CDC is most concerned about—those that sicken millions of people.

The organism was first identified in 1982. This pathogen has become widely dispersed in the food supply with the rise of huge feedlots, slaugh-terhouses and hamburger grinders. Meat production in America is ever more centralized: most of the beef consumed in the United States is now slaugh-tered in thirteen large packinghouses. Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, provides the following description:

“The meat-packing system that arose to supply the nation’s fast food chains—an industry molded to serve their needs, to provide massive amounts of uniform ground beef so that all of McDonald’s hamburgers would taste the same—has proved to be an extremely efficient system for spreading disease.

“The large meatpacking companies have managed to avoid the sort of liability routinely imposed on the manufacturers of most consumer prod-ucts. Today the government can demand the nationwide recall of defective sneakers, but it cannot order a meatpacking company to remove contami-nated, potentially lethal ground beef from fast food kitchens and supermar-ket shelves.”

Schlosser is blunt in his attribution of blame. “The unusual power of the large meatpacking firms has been sustained by their close ties and siz-able donations to Republican members of Congress. It has also been made possible by a widespread lack of awareness about how many Americans suffer from food poisoning every year and how these illnesses actually spread.⁵³ Not just in the US, but throughout Western Europe, people are beginning to question the massive, homogenizing systems that produce, distribute and market their food.⁵⁴ It is a sad but undeniable fact that for the past two decades the right wing of the Republican Party has worked closely with the fast food industry and the meatpacking industry to oppose food safety laws, worker safety laws and increases in the minimum wage.”⁵⁵

Furthermore, the public health establishment is unwilling or unable to take meaningful steps to enforce decent standards for the products of in-dustrialized agriculture. Instead, public officials spend considerable time, energy and public money campaigning for nationwide compulsory pasteur-ization of virtually every drop of milk in the United States. We turn now to the story of just how far these officials were willing to go in pursuit of their agenda in the state of California.

SALMONELLA AND ALTA DENA DAIRY

Infection with Salmonella species accounts for a substantial portion of food-borne illness in this country, with an estimated million and a half cases and 500 deaths annually.⁵⁶ An infective dose of Salmonella requires at least a million organisms. Ground beef is a common and persistent source; USDA regulations allow for up to ten percent of the samples taken at a given plant to contain Salmonella, but these limits are often exceeded. High levels of Salmonella in ground beef indicate high levels of fecal contamination. Meanwhile, known sources of Salmonella are fed to cattle. Quoting again from Fast Food Nation:

“A study published a few years ago in Preventive Medicine notes that in Arkansas alone, about 3 million pounds of chicken manure were fed to cattle in 1994. According to Dr. Neal D. Barnard, who heads the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, chicken manure may contain danger-ous bacteria such as Salmonella and Campylobacter, parasites such as tape-worms and Giardia lamblia, antibiotic residues, arsenic and heavy met-als.”⁵⁷

An example of the difficulty USDA officials have in enforcing regula-tions against the meatpacking industry is provided by the 1999 case of a ground beef plant in Dallas, owned by Supreme Beef Processors, which failed a series of USDA tests for Salmonella. Up to 47 percent of the company’s ground beef contained Salmonella—nearly five times higher than that which USDA regulations allow. Yet the USDA continued to purchase large quantities of meat from Supreme Beef for use in schools. Indeed, Supreme Beef Processors was one of the nation’s largest suppliers to the school meals program, annually providing nearly half of its ground beef. On November 30, 1999, the USDA finally removed inspectors from the company’s plant, shutting it down.

The next day, Supreme Beef sued the USDA in federal court, claiming that Salmonella was a natural organism, not an adulterant, and contending that the USDA should not have removed inspectors from the plant. Federal Judge A. Joe Fish ordered inspectors back into the plant, pending resolution of the lawsuit. The plant shutdown lasted less than one day. Six months later the judge issued a decision, “. . . ruling that the presence of high levels of Salmonella in the plant’s ground beef was not proof that conditions there were ‘unsanitary.’ Fish endorsed one of Supreme Beef’s central arguments: a ground beef processor should not be held responsible for the bacterial levels of meat that could easily have been tainted with Salmonella at a slaugh-terhouse. The ruling cast doubt on the USDA’s ability to withdraw inspec-tors from a plant [and thus shut the plant down] where tests revealed exces-sive levels of fecal contamination. Although Supreme Beef portrayed itself as an innocent victim of forces beyond its control, much of the beef used at the plant had come from its own slaughterhouse in Ladonia, Texas. That slaughterhouse had repeatedly failed USDA tests for Salmonella.”⁵⁸

In contrast, consider the story of raw milk and Salmonella in Califor-nia. The California State Health Department and several county health de-partments, most notably those of Los Angeles and San Diego counties, conspired for some 30 years to harass the Alta Dena Dairy, and nearly every other raw milk dairy in the state, and put them out of business.

The Steuve brothers—Ed, Harold, and Elmer—founded Alta Dena in Monrovia in 1945 with 61 milk cows and two bulls. Dr. Pottenger was a regular customer. In 1950 the family purchased a much larger operation in Chino. The dairy became certified for raw milk production in 1953 and grew rapidly. By the 1980s, the dairy milked over 8,000 cows daily and owned 18,000 animals. With 800 employees, Alta Dena was the largest producer-distributor in the nation, selling over 20,000 gallons of certified raw milk daily. Alta Dena products, including raw milk and raw butter, buttermilk, ice cream, kefir and yogurt were sold in health food stores in every state. For over 40 years, Alta Dena proved that safe and healthy raw dairy products could be produced and distributed on a large scale with literally no proven cases caused by their products. This did not deter the various county health officials and the California State Health Department from their campaign to destroy Alta Dena. Eventually, the Department’s chosen weapon would be Salmonella, a weapon they used only after failing with the alleged threat of a number of other diseases to generate fear of raw milk in the public and a costly ongoing legal morass for Alta Dena.

The first assault occurred in 1965, when a San Diego County health officer named Askew summarily issued an order banning all raw milk in the county, claiming to have found Staphylococcus aureus in Alta Dena milk. While these bacteria can be involved in everything from skin infections to pneumonia, they are ubiquitous in the environment and are carried by about half of the human population. Many pasteurized dairy products contain low levels of S. aureus, the residues of higher levels present before pasteuriza-tion.⁵⁹ Staph poisoning is usually traced to processed foods such as ham and cream-filled pastries. Although Staph can cause mastitis in cows and staphylococcal poisoning has on occasion been attributed to a wide variety of dairy products in the past, the only four major outbreaks reported in the United States since 1970 have involved either processed butter products or pasteurized 2% chocolate milk.⁶⁰

Illness caused by Staph is brief and intense, with nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and cramps. Acute symptoms last only a few hours, with the pa-tient fully recovered within a day or two.⁶¹ No one had become ill when Alta Dena milk was banned in San Diego County. “The health officer stated publicly that he was going to do away with raw milk in the state of Califor-nia,” writes Douglass in The Milk Book, “if it was the last thing he ever did.”⁶²

According to Douglass, health officer Askew was asked, at a hearing of the County Board of Supervisors, whether to his knowledge anyone had ever become sick from drinking certified raw milk in San Diego County. He answered, “No, but it could happen.” The Board urged that he lift the ban, yet he refused to do so. The country’s largest producer-distributor dairy could not sell its raw milk in San Diego County, and the ban remained in effect for three years.

Finally, after a three-year battle, the 4th District Court of Appeals ruled that the health officer had exceeded his authority. Meanwhile, in 1967, the California Medical Society had passed a resolution calling for the pas-teurization of all milk in California. Three other counties summarily banned raw milk, but vociferous public opposition succeeded in removal of the bans.

It was in January of 1969 that the Los Angeles County Health Depart-ment attacked Alta Dena. The Los Angeles Times announced, with banner headlines based on information supplied by the Health Department, that Alta Dena raw milk was banned with the presumption of contamination by the organisms that cause Q fever. This obscure viral-like disease is caused by the parasite Coxiella burnetti, which is carried in ticks and sometimes in the ruminant animals that ticks infect. The parasite causes no symptoms in the animals; most cases of Q fever occur in farmers and meat factory employ-ees who work in close contact with animals, and the disease appears to be transmitted by inhalation of the parasite. The symptoms are fever, pain and intense headache, and most patients recover fully with two to four weeks of antibiotic treatment.⁶³

C. burnetti has been found in milk from cows carrying the parasite, and regular consumers of raw milk sometimes have antibodies to the para-site without showing any evidence of disease. This implies that exposure stimulates the immune system to develop resistance. Two reports in the medical literature have linked raw milk consumption with a few dozen cases of Q fever (one article was published in 1968, a few months before the Los Angeles County charges), but the association remains totally unproven. In fact, Ryser states that “. . . in one study in which contaminated raw milk was ingested by human volunteers illness did not occur.” Other studies showed that the parasite survived the temperatures normally used for pas-teurization for most of the twentieth century.⁶⁴ On balance, it appears unlikely that Q fever has ever been transmitted by the consumption of raw milk.

No one in Los Angeles County had reported any symptoms of Q fever. Alta Dena defied the LA County Health Board ban, continuing to sell raw milk in the county, and was taken to court. Meanwhile the dairy labeled its raw milk as “pet food, not for human consumption.” Harold Steuve, president of the dairy and the mayor of Monrovia at the time, was arrested for contempt of court. Only when Alta Dena expert witnesses testified that Q fever was caused by inhalation of the parasite and not by consumption of raw milk did prosecutors drop the charges.

A 1966 Los Angeles County Health Department report on Q fever proves the health department’s bias. The report describes seven cases, six of which lived “in or around dairies.” None of the seven drank raw milk. Contact with animals and subsequent airborne spread, the report admitted, was the vector for infection, but claimed that “the most practical solution now available” was the universal pasteurization of all milk.

The California State Health Department led the next attack in 1974 with a statewide ban of Alta Dena’s raw milk, citing the threat of brucello-sis. All Alta Dena cows had of course been vaccinated against the disease and were routinely tested as an extra precaution. The ban forced the dairy to go to court once again and to retest the entire herd. No brucellosis was found, and Alta Dena resumed sales of raw milk. But, once again, the Stueves lost thousands of dollars in lawyers’ fees and testing expenses and an untold amount of lost sales due to adverse publicity.

Having failed to show that Alta Dena raw milk had ever caused any of the classic milk-borne illnesses, the state zeroed in on Salmonella. In the mid-1970s the state made numerous claims that Salmonella contaminated raw milk produced by Alta Dena and other California raw milk dairies. In 1978, the Steuve brothers led California raw milk producers in seeking a California state Senate bill requiring the State Health Department to oversee raw dairy foods in a manner similar to that of other food products. On June 4th, a week before the Senate bill was to come up for debate, a state labora-tory claimed to have found Salmonella in Alta Dena milk.

The State Health Department delayed five days in releasing the infor-mation, while the public bought and consumed the milk—milk the state would subsequently declare was a public health hazard. Then on June 9th, two days before the Senate debate was to begin, the Department notified the press of the alleged contamination, claiming that an epidemic of Salmonella poisoning was imminent.

The only epidemic was an outbreak of inflammatory news reports. From San Rafael to Sacramento, from Ventura to Vallejo, raw milk produc-ers stood accused: “Raw Milk Warning,” “Some Raw Milk Found to be Contaminated,” “Contaminated Raw Milk Ordered Off Shelves.” Radio an-nouncements warned the public not to drink raw milk from Alta Dena dairy. No one got sick, but in the hysteria the Senate bill failed.

A few days later, after reviewing relevant documents, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner accused California State Health Department officials of falsifying bacterial reports in order to defeat the Senate bill. Two indepen-dent laboratories—one that did testing for the Los Angeles County Medical Milk Commission, and the other that did considerable testing for the state— returned negative results for Salmonella. The Health Department laboratory had either falsified its results, or the testing methods had been so sloppy that the milk samples were contaminated during the testing procedures. The Herald Examiner article hinted at a conspiracy among members of the State Health Department to eliminate raw dairy products.

Other State Health Department tactics bolstered the conspiracy charge. In several instances, products for which there was no evidence of contami-nation at all—falsified, inaccurate, or otherwise—were destroyed. Officials forced a food store manager to pour 90 gallons of certified raw milk down a toilet. Health officers punched holes in Alta Dena raw cheese, and poured Chlorox over it. The Department leaked a “staff report” to New Age, a widely read California magazine, which published excerpts in August 1978. “Evidence points to a continuing health hazard to the public consuming Alta Dena’s raw certified milk,” reported New Age, and quoted a medical epide-miologist who claimed that Alta Dena raw milk was killing cancer patients.

The epidemiologist and two of his colleagues, both of whom worked with the California State Health Department, published a report in the British Medical Journal stating that 22 patients, mostly with leukemias and lym-phomas, had died between 1971 and 1975, sometime after being “exposed” to Alta Dena raw milk. Publication in a foreign journal made the authors relatively immune to lawsuits. Since then, the article has been widely quoted as scientific fact in American journals.

The governor’s office in California received over 17,000 letters, telegrams and phone calls in defense of Alta Dena within two months of the Herald Examiner report. The furor died down, but the number of letters alone grew to over 50,000. The State Health Department was undeterred, repeating unconfirmed allegations of Salmonella contamination later in 1978 and again in 1979. Both times, newspapers generated the usual scare head-lines: “Poisoned Milk Recalled,” “State Issues Warning About Alta Dena Milk,” “Tainted Milk Ordered Off Market Shelves.” Again the allegations were false, no one got sick and Alta Dena carried on. But one by one, other raw milk producers in the state went out of business.

In 1983, Nevada state inspectors seized Alta Dena raw milk from a health food store and claimed it contained Salmonella. The milk was 21 days old, past its expiration date. Four different labs, including the Califor-nia State Health Department lab and one county lab, subsequently analyzed the milk and found no Salmonella. The FDA spent three days investigating the Alta Dena Dairy and found nothing of importance. The California State Health Department nevertheless issued warnings to the people of California not to drink Alta Dena raw milk, or even give it to their pets.

Also in 1983, the report describing five serious Salmonella cases at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in San Diego was published. Three of the five patients were regular consumers of Alta Dena raw milk, and one, a patient with advanced cancer who had been receiving extensive chemotherapy, died with an acute Salmonella infection. It is certainly pos-sible that Alta Dena raw milk was the carrier of the Salmonella that infected this woman. The dairy did its best to produce a large volume of raw milk for the people of California, but it was not a pasture-based dairy. Mistakes were undoubtedly occasionally made, and milk may have occasionally been con-taminated with Salmonella or other pathogens. Since the State Health De-partment reports cannot be trusted, it is impossible to know how often that may have occurred. But to expect or demand perfection from any dairy would be ludicrous, and any raw food may on occasion carry pathogenic organisms that may precipitate illness in susceptible individuals. The point is that people need and have a right to choose carefully produced raw dairy products despite the fact that contamination may occasionally occur. The proper role of the public health authorities is to help producers make the best possible products and ensure that any contamination is minimal, and then to take proper steps to protect the public when and if contamination occurs. For proponents of raw milk to claim that problems never occur is to avoid reality and play into the hands of bureaucrats who would seize upon rare and isolated problems as an excuse to condemn all raw milk.

For that is exactly what the California State Health Department did. Ignoring all the evidence on the benefits of raw milk and the desire of many people to consume it, the Department used the possibility of occasional Salmonella contamination as an excuse to wage a vendetta against Alta Dena and California’s other raw milk producers.

In 1984, an article in Vogue headlined “A Raw Milk Warning: A New and Dangerous Health Fad” featured statistics published in the newsletter of an organization called California Council Against Health Frauds. The report claimed that raw milk drinkers were at increased risk of Salmonella infec-tion, “which can result in high fevers and bloody diarrhea.” This is ex-tremely rare for most Salmonella infections. People who drink raw milk are 118 times more at risk, said the article. This exaggeration was obtained by manipulating figures originally published in 1944.

In 1991, Consumers Union of the United States joined with California’s conventional dairy producers to file suit against Alta Dena Dairy for adver-tising, allegedly falsely, that raw milk was healthful and pasteurized was not. The State Health Department concurrently claimed raw milk products were a public health hazard and prohibited Alta Dena from distributing and selling its raw milk pending settlement of the Consumers Union suit. In 1992, the court ruled that Alta Dena’s health claims were illegal and ordered all raw milk sold in California to carry a government warning. The Steuves then sold Alta Dena Dairy, but continued to produce and distribute raw dairy products under the Steuve’s Natural label.

In 1997, John Leedom, MD, one of the six members of the Los Ange-les County Medical Milk Commission, publicly stated that not only licensed grade A raw milk but also certified raw milk should be banned in Los Ange-les County. Alta Dena produced licensed grade A raw milk that was also certified by the Commission; California’s other licensed grade A raw milk producers were not certified. Three other commissioners sided with Leedom. According to James Privitera, MD, one of the two commissioners who favored keeping raw milk available, the majority implemented regulations so restrictive and prejudicial that it became impossible for raw milk producers to stay in business. Alta Dena’s new owners at that point stopped selling raw milk, and Steuve’s Natural raw milk has not been available since May 1999. We’ll pick up the story of what’s happened with raw milk in California subsequently in Chapters 16 and 17.

MILK-ASSOCIATED ILLNESS TODAY

My familiarity with the work of Weston Price and my clinical experience have convinced me that most illness is the direct result of eating processed foods. Dairy foods—nearly 100 percent of which are highly processed —make up a significant portion of the diet of most Americans. So it is no exaggeration to state that pasteurized, homogenized milk and milk products are closely associated with most of the disease with which Americans suffer.

And suffer we do. Nearly 600,000 Americans die of heart disease every year, and almost as many die of cancer. One of every 15 adults is diabetic. Forty-three million of us have been diagnosed with arthritis. With just five percent of the world’s population, America has over 12 percent of the multiple sclerosis patients. Allergies afflict about 38 percent of all Ameri-cans, according to a recent survey. Untold millions of children suffer with ear infections and undergo subsequent surgical treatment. The incidence of all of these and most other diseases has risen drastically during the past 100 years. And during those years, processed pasteurized dairy foods have re-placed fresh raw milk products in the diet of nearly all Americans.

Most of us think of milk-associated illness as acute gastrointestinal distress caused by consuming a tainted particular portion of milk or a milk product. When we examine problems of this nature reportedly caused by both pasteurized and raw milk, we should keep in mind the full range of chronic illness in America today. The lack of good quality raw dairy foods and the generally poor quality of their modern processed counterparts have played a fundamental role in the deterioration of our national health.

A FAMOUS PEDIATRICIAN EXHORTS AMERICANS TO GIVE UP MILK

In 1983, Frank Oski, MD published what became a very influential book entitled Don’t Drink Your Milk. Oski was Chairman of the Department of Pediatrics at the State University of New York Upstate Medical Center; he subsequently became Director of the Department of Pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Physician-in-Chief at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. He has been characterized as America’s leading pediatrician.

“Milk has been linked to iron-deficiency anemia in infants and chil-dren,” Oski writes. “It has been named as the cause of cramps and diarrhea in much of the world’s population, and the cause of multiple forms of al-lergy as well; and it may play a central role in the origins of atherosclerosis and heart attacks.

“Among physicians, so much concern has been voiced about the potential hazards of cow milk that the Committee on Nutrition of the prestigious American Academy of Pediatrics, the institutional voice of practicing pediatricians, released a report entitled, ‘Should Milk Drinking by Children Be Discouraged?’”⁶⁵

About one-fifth of all infants under two in America suffer from iron-deficiency anemia, about half of which, according to Oski, is due to low-grade intestinal bleeding induced by sensitivity to milk. The amount of blood lost is too small to be detected visually, but is enough to lead to anemia.⁶⁶

Oski links a number of other symptoms to milk allergies including persistent or recurrent nasal congestion, asthma or chest infection, skin rashes, and otherwise unexplained vomiting or diarrhea. These are all prob-lems that I too have seen in many infants and children who consumed regular store-bought milk and milk-based formulas. Other investigators have linked kidney disease, eczema and rheumatoid arthritis to milk, and this too is consistent with my experience; I’ve long observed that regular milk is one of the worst and most obvious triggers for children with eczema or rheu-matoid arthritis.

Other investigators have published studies linking modern milk consumption to multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease), anti-social behavior in children and juvenile diabetes.^67,68 Of course, neither Oski nor any of these other investigators appear to have considered the possibilities of raw milk.

ALLERGIES AND ILLNESSES ASSOCIATED WITH PASTEURIZED MILK

For many individuals allergies are the clearest manifestation of acute illness caused or aggravated by milk and other dairy products. Many articles in medical journals describe allergies to milk in babies and young children. The authors never mention the fact that the allergies are always to pasteur-ized milk; the alternative of raw milk goes unrecognized and unmentioned. In one study, 59 of 787 babies studied were found to have the classic aller-gic symptoms of recurrent nasal congestion and bronchitis, eczema, diar-rhea or repeated vomiting in response to pasteurized milk or milk-based formula. In other studies the percentages of babies allergic to milk have been even higher. These children saw their doctors much more frequently and required hospitalization more often than children who were non-aller-gic. The earlier the babies were exposed to pasteurized milk, the more likely they were to show signs of intolerance.⁶⁹

A more serious complication was described by investigators who worked with ten- to thirteen-year old children with a kidney disease called nephrosis, which involves the loss of excess amounts of protein from a damaged kidney. Fluid accumulation with swollen hands and feet is com-monly the result, and the problem can lead to permanent renal disease and death. When pasteurized milk was removed from the diet, the children showed signs of marked improvement, and when the milk was reintroduced, the problems returned. The researchers concluded that sensitivity to milk and other foods played a prominent role in causing the disease. Unfortunately, in this as in other studies, the investigators made no attempt to give raw milk and note the results.⁷⁰

Other physicians have observed additional relationships between pasteurized milk and allergic disease in children. Eczema, musculoskeletal pain (“growing pains”), rheumatoid arthritis and strep infections are just a few of the problems pediatricians have alleviated by eliminating milk from the diet.⁷¹ In my own experience, there is not a single problem that occurs in infants and young children that cannot be helped by eliminating pasteurized milk and dairy products from the diet. Upper respiratory symptoms, fre-quent ear infections and asthma are often the most obvious symptoms, but virtually any complaint may be a manifestation of allergy to pasteurized milk, as well as to other processed foods. Of the hundreds of children I’ve treated, virtually every child whose parents have been willing to eliminate these foods from the child’s diet has had marked improvement in symp-toms, often with subsequent progress to vibrant good health. Just how far that progress can go is generally determined by the willingness of the par-ents to learn and implement the principles taught by Weston Price—no easy task but one that can be accomplished when people are willing and have a good teacher.

Physicians have also noted a number of interesting and disturbing relationships between the consumption of pasteurized milk and several seri-ous chronic diseases. Investigators at the Baylor College of Medicine found that the factors that characterized patients with Lou Gehrig’s disease in-cluded exposure to lead and mercury and high consumption of pasteurized milk.⁷² A number of pediatricians have noted milk allergy in juvenile rheu-matoid arthritis. In Don’t Drink Your Milk, Oski quotes pediatrician Dan Baggett:

“I have had several children with signs and symptoms of early rheumatoid arthritis. Without exception, during the past eight years, I have had the good fortune to relieve them and watch their certain return to good health by simply eliminating all traces of milk from their diet.”⁷³ Oski notes that many other pediatricians have had similar experiences. He also comments on the “many subtle and puzzling forms” milk allergy may take.

Other investigators have found a relationship between heavy milk drinking and antisocial behavior. Young criminals were found to drink almost ten times the amount of milk that was drunk by the control group.⁷⁴

It is heartening to note that elements of the medical establishment are realizing that pasteurized milk and milk products play a key role in causing these various problems. But it is disheartening that physicians still lack un-derstanding of the beneficial role of raw milk. The position of the CDC, the FDA, the federal, state, and local public health services, the medical jour-nals, and every professional organization in the conventional medical, vet-erinary, and public health professions is one of overwhelming opposition to raw milk. This makes it difficult or impossible for the individual physician, pediatrician or otherwise, to suggest raw milk for his or her patients.

We turn next to the subject of bacteria in milk, and then examine reports about occasional outbreaks of gastrointestinal illnesses that have been associated with consumption of raw milk. We’ll also examine how these same problems can occur in pasteurized milk and milk products.

BACTERIAL ILLNESS ASSOCIATED WITH MILK

Freshly drawn milk always contains some bacteria. These come from the surface of the udder, the hands of the milker if a machine is not used, and from the udder itself. Fresh milk is rarely, if ever, germ-free, but the number and types of bacteria are different in different cows. Healthy milk glands secrete sterile milk, but the milk ducts in the teats of the cow afford a pathway for the invasion of the udder. The germicidal power of the milk itself prevents most but not all bacterial invasion of the udder via the milk ducts.

Even bacteria well adapted for growth in milk die off when introduced into perfectly fresh milk. “Investigators agree that milk, like serum, pos-sesses a genuine germicidal power,” wrote Edwin O. Jordan in his 1936 Textbook of General Bacteriology. “The action is different for different species of bacteria, and the milk from one animal may be more actively bactericidal than that from another.”⁷⁵ A 1976 article in The Lancet con-firmed that “. . .in cow’s milk an antiviral activity has been detected which does not seem to be related to antibodies or other known virus inhibitors . . .activity was lost after treatment at about 100 degrees C for 30 minutes . . .We think that the effect is likely to be due to an unknown substance or substances but much further work is required to characterize this.”⁷⁶

Bacteria from the udder form only a part of the total number of bacte-ria in milk; the skin of the cow and the vessels used for collection also contribute. Milking fully healthy animals under aseptic conditions results in a bacteria count as low as 200 to 400 per milliliter. Collected with somewhat less care, it may contain 2000 to 6000; with careless collection (or un-healthy animals) the counts in fresh milk may range from 30,000 per ml to 100,000 per ml or more, indicating a high degree of contamination.

Milk is a particularly favorable medium for bacterial growth; the rapidity of growth depends upon temperature. Even quite clean milk, with an initial count of 2,500 per ml and kept at 40 degrees Fahrenheit, develops a count of over 200,000 per ml four days later. Milk with an initial count of 38,000 per ml shows a count of over 4 million per ml four days later (the same milk kept at 68 degrees Fahrenheit shows a count of over 4 million in just 24 hours). Generally, these are beneficial bacteria, produced by normal lactic-acid fermentation.

However, when pathogenic bacteria are present, as was the case with distillery milk and other milk produced under unsanitary conditions for sale in the cities throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, rapid proliferation results in a dangerous product. Investigators at the turn of the last century reported that raw milk from shops in New York City and Boston averaged from 300,000 bacteria per ml in the coldest weather to 5,000,000 per ml in the hottest; in Chicago, counts ranged as high as 74,000,000.⁷⁷ When pathogens are present, the likelihood of infection oc-curring is determined in part by their concentration. Summer epidemics in the cities, with high death rates in young children, were common occur-rences in the nineteenth century, and sloppily produced and contaminated milk was definitely a contributing factor. The quick fix of pasteurization and continued cheap milk—as opposed to legislation and enforcement to insure a supply of clean but more expensive milk from healthy animals—appealed to politicians and public health authorities in those days as much as it does today.

Milk may be infected with pathogenic bacteria either directly from the cow, or by contamination with bacteria from people. In years past, before the introduction of the modern milking machine, cows were generally healthier than today (except in the distillery dairies), but contamination from milkers and handlers was common. Individuals milking cows or handling milk were sometimes suffering from sub-acute cases of typhoid fever, tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, scarlet fever or strep throat, all of which could easily contaminate the milk. Contamination of milk also resulted when improper raw sewage disposal made its way into water supplies used to rinse milk cans and utensils. Flies sometimes carried typhoid bacilli from infected feces to milk.

Mastitis—inflammation of one or more of a cow’s four quadrants of the udder—can be provoked by a variety of organisms that may cause diarrhea and also pass into the milk via the udder. “On more than one occasion the use of milk from udder-sick cows has been followed by illness,” Jordan wrote. “and the epidemiologic connection between sudden attacks of illness and the use of the milk of cows suffering from diarrhea is un-doubted.” Mastitis and diarrhea in cows often go hand in hand. Clinical and subclinical mastitis is all too common in the confinement operations that produce a majority of America’s milk today.

CAMPYLOBACTER

Salmonella and Campylobacter are generally recognized as the two leading bacterial causes of dairy-related illness in the United States and West-ern Europe today.⁷⁸ According to Dr. Ryser, between 1978 and 1986 some 700 reported cases of campylobacteriosis in this country were associated with ingestion of raw milk. Gastrointestinal illness caused by these organ-isms is “generally not serious,” according to an article in The Western Jour-nal of Medicine, but may be serious in people taking immunosuppressive drugs such as cancer chemotherapy agents or radiation therapy.⁷⁹ The total number of cases of illness associated with Campylobacter from all foods is vast and now rivals the number of cases associated with Salmonella. Each organism causes an estimated two million cases per year in the United States.

While it is not known precisely how most of these cases originate, “. . . the route for human infection is through the ingestion of adulterated food and drink,” according to a recent article in the Journal of Animal Science. “Some slaughter animals harbor this potential pathogen among the intestinal flora and, consequently, transfer of the organism to carcasses and to the resulting meat products does occur [i.e., feces contaminate the meat]. The most frequently implicated meat is poultry, with an incidence of recov-ery of Campylobacter from the store-bought poultry meat reported to be at least 50%. Red meat from slaughter animals has also yielded this bacterium . . . appropriate sanitary practices to prevent passage of the organism through meat products should be implemented.”⁸⁰ In other words, let’s get the feces out of the meat. Adding insult to injury is the fact that chicken manure is routinely fed to cattle (over three million pounds in Arkansas in 1994 alone, according to a study published in Preventive Medicine).

Instead of addressing problems occurring in modern foods, the federal and state public health agencies have concentrated on restricting the availability of raw milk. The production of any raw animal product has certain inherent risks that are a legitimate area of public concern. But instead of treating raw milk farmers fairly and reasonably enforcing regulations to protect the public when occasional problems occur, the authorities in most states have used minor violations as an excuse to harass farmers and gener-ate biased publicity. The double standard is obvious. If we prohibited the sale of any raw food that caused illness, we would not be able to buy raw oysters, raw eggs or raw meat.

In fact, public health policy increasingly ignores the threat of con-tamination in foods produced by big business. Consider the following pas-sage from Fast Food Nation:

“One of the Bush administration’s first food safety decisions was to stop testing the National School Lunch Program’s ground beef for Salmo-nella. The meatpacking industry’s lobbyists were delighted; they had worked hard to end the testing, which the industry considered expensive, inconve-nient and unnecessary. But consumer groups were outraged. In the ten months that the USDA had been testing ground beef intended for school-children, roughly five million pounds were rejected because of Salmonella contamination. The decision to halt the tests generated a fair amount of bad publicity. Three days after it was announced, Secretary of Agriculture Ann

M. Veneman said that she’d never authorized the new policy, reversed course, and promised that the school lunch programs Salmonella testing would continue.”⁸¹

America’s food contamination problems are not insurmountable. David

M. Theno, a food scientist, helped Foster Farms, a poultry processor in California, eliminate most of the Salmonella from its birds. He also helped Jack-in-the-Box clean up meat contamination problems. He is an advocate of Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) programs, a food safety philosophy also promoted by the National Academy of Sciences. Theno suggests that slaughterhouses be graded according to the cleanliness of the meat they produce. Microbial testing would determine the grades and grading would strongly influence marketplace pricing. Obviously, a similar system could be implemented in the production of milk.

Theno says, “If you put in a score-keeping system and profile these meatpacking companies you can fix this problem. You can actually fix this problem in six months. . . . This is a matter of will, not technology.” The cost of the food safety program Theno implemented at Jack-in-the-Box cost the company about one penny per pound of ground beef.⁸²

Although occasional outbreaks of Campylobacter have occurred in raw milk, the largest dairy-related outbreaks associated with Campylobacter have occurred in pasteurized milk. The British Medical Journal reported on a 1979 incident: “In an extensive outbreak affecting about 3500 individuals (mainly children under 8 years old) a statistical association was shown be-tween drinking free school milk and the development of symptoms. Pas-teurization of milk from the large dairy in question had failed in the week before the outbreak. There was no other linking factor.” Another incident involved 616 cases resulting from a pasteurization failure. Most of the ar-ticle, however, is devoted to 11 other incidents that involved some 300 cases associated with and possibly caused by the consumption of raw milk. Having demonstrated that 93 percent of the cases discussed in the article were associated with pasteurized milk, the authors then concluded “. . . only pasteurized milk should be sold to the public.”

They also wrote that “The great majority of human isolations of Campylobacter are from cases commonly described as ‘sporadic’ or ‘iso-lated’ . . . it is unlikely that a large proportion of sporadic cases of campylobacter enteritis infection are milk-associated.”⁸³ A year later, an American medical journal used this article as a reference for the statement: “In Great Britain unpasteurized (raw) milk has been described as the major vehicle of transmission in human outbreaks of enteritis caused by Campylobacter.”⁸⁴ While technically true, the statement is extremely mis-leading. The vast majority of cases are isolated and caused by foods other than raw milk. An “outbreak” is defined as a cluster of cases from a com-mon source, and a few “outbreaks” ascribed to raw milk lead to the charac-terization of raw milk as “a major vehicle of transmission,” even though raw milk causes only a tiny minority of the total number of cases. Such distor-tion serves the purpose of further biasing physicians, who are the primary readers of the journal, against raw milk. Actually, “. . . sporadic cases— which account for the lion’s share of the disease— are most often associ-ated with the consumption of poultry and poultry products,”⁸⁵ according to a 1994 editorial in the Western Journal of Medicine .

Bias against raw milk in medical journals stems from the modern view of disease. Conventional medicine is fully committed to the use of drugs rather than food in the treatment of illness. A significant percentage of the population at any given time is taking immunosuppressive drugs, including chemotherapy agents, corticosteroids and antibiotics. These people are at increased risk of bacterial infection from any source. The medical profes-sion has a far greater interest in protecting them from any possible raw milk-related illness than it does in maintenance of health in everyone else, or even in the improvement of health in the immunosuppressed through supe-rior foods.

The medical profession has little understanding of the relationship be-tween animal health and milk quality. In the Western Journal of Medicine article that castigates raw milk, we read the following: “. . . 60 percent of healthy cattle excrete Campylobacter in their feces . . .Present technology cannot prevent or eradicate Salmonella andCampylobacter infection in milking herds, nor can it prevent contamination of milk produced by such infected cattle. Because occasional fecal contamination occurs during the milking process despite the best efforts of dairies to prevent it, the result is human infection and disease unless milk is pasteurized.”⁸⁶ Actually, healthy cattle do not excrete Campylobacter (more on this in Chapter 15) but the cows that make up a majority of America’s milking herds are not healthy. With proper care, “occasional fecal contamination” becomes rare. Even when it does occur it need not cause illness.

There is no question that even small numbers of Campylobacter in milk can cause illness. An English physician reported becoming ill with mild diarrhea after deliberately ingesting just 500 organisms, and the same sero-type of Campylobacter that he ingested was found in his feces.⁸⁷ And a number of reports in both Great Britain and the United States have made it clear that Campylobacter has occasionally caused illness in raw milk drink-ers, including those using milk from licensed raw milk dairies.

Nevertheless, charges against raw milk often lack real proof. Quoting Dr. Ryser on Campylobacter infections: “Despite the many aforementioned outbreaks, confirmation of raw milk as the source of infection has remained difficult. Only three reports have appeared in which the epidemic strain was recovered from a portion of the lot of milk that was consumed.”⁸⁸

An outbreak of Campylobacter associated gastrointestinal illness in 190 raw milk drinkers in Arizona is one of the more clear-cut cases.⁸⁹ An 82-year-old woman checked into a hospital in Tucson in May of 1981 with diarrhea, abdominal pain and fever. Campylobacter jejune bacteria were found in both blood and stool. Bacteria in the blood (bacteremia) is a sign of potentially severe illness. When her history revealed that she habitually drank five glasses of raw milk from a local dairy each day, the Health Department began an epidemiological investigation, contacting physicians, hospitals and laboratories in the Tucson area and requesting that people with recent gas-trointestinal illness call the health department. Thirty-nine cases were found in this way, a case being defined as a person with diarrhea and other symp-toms who drank raw milk from the dairy during the week before the illness began.

The dairy had been in operation for over 20 years and at the time was producing about ten thousand gallons of milk per week from 200 cows. Seven thousand gallons were pasteurized and three thousand were sold raw.

Raw milk drinkers included members of a natural foods coop, and patients of a chiropractic physician who recommended raw milk from the dairy to many of his patients and operated a number of health food stores that sold the milk. Investigators interviewed many of these people to deter-mine whether raw milk drinkers were experiencing more gastrointestinal illness than people who were not raw milk drinkers. A telephone survey resulted in contact with nearly 200 households that contained 241 people who drank raw milk from the dairy and 77 people who did not. Of the raw milk drinkers, 190 had experienced gastrointestinal illness, with no cases among the individuals not drinking raw milk.

Laboratory studies were also performed. Stool samples from 58 of the people who became ill were tested, and C. jejuni was found in 37 (64 percent). Samples of raw milk did not test positive for Campylobacter, but by the time testing was done, the outbreak had subsided. However, stool samples of nearly half of the cows tested positive for the organism. While there is no absolute proof that raw milk caused the outbreak, the statistical evidence strongly implies that it did. The outbreak was an important factor in the subsequent passage of a law in Arizona banning the retail sales of raw milk.

There are a number of lessons to be learned from this case. Those raw milk advocates who maintain that raw milk never causes illness should take a good look at the statistics and understand that just as other tainted raw foods can cause disease, so too may raw milk. As such, the public health authorities have a legitimate interest in assuring that raw milk sold to the public has minimal exposure to contamination. But the authorities should also consider the fact that the Arizona dairy sold thousands of gallons of raw milk weekly for some 20 years with a minimum of problems. Raw milk can be regulated in a reasonable way to assure safety and a minimum of problems. When a problem does occur, officials should take fair-minded steps to correct it without driving the producer out of business, while deal-ing sternly with repeat offenders and those who abuse the system, be they sellers of meat, milk, or pork and beans. Making all food sterile—free of all bacteria—is not a valid goal. Rather, the authorities should concern them-selves with quality as well as safety, while protecting the public’s freedom to choose.

IRRADIATION PASTEURIZATION: THE ULTIMATE IN “FOOD SAFETY”

A 1997 article in Emerging Infectious Diseases, titled “Irradiation Pas-teurization of Solid Foods: Taking Food Safety to the Next Level,” dis-cusses irradiation as the most effective way to sanitize the food supply.⁹⁰ “Irradiation pasteurization of solid foods with low doses of gamma rays, X-rays, and electrons will effectively control vegetative bacterial and parasitic foodborne pathogens,” claim the authors. “Recent outbreaks of foodborne illness associated with undercooked meat and uncooked fresh produce, and the emergence of previously unrecognized foodborne hazards . . . have stimulated interest in methods of pasteurizing solid food without altering its raw appearance . . .Irradiation pasteurization is a well-established process with clearly documented safety and efficacy that can be put into widespread use as quickly as facilities can be sited and built.”

The authors make no mention of the many studies that question the safety of irradiated foods. “Reports on public antipathy toward things radio-active” are attributed to “considerable consumer confusion and ignorance about food irradiation.” The fact that proper attention to sanitation in food production results in safe foods is dismissed with the statement that “the residual risk for infection that remains after state-of-practice sanitation during production, harvest, processing, distribution, and preparation yields an unacceptable level of illness and death.” Notice the words “state-of-practice” rather than “state-of-the-art.” In other words, the way food is produced today results in illness and death. Rather than cleaning up the process, the authors propose irradiation to sanitize the results.

The authors note that when milk pasteurization was introduced, promot-ers of the process had to overcome widespread public concerns that “the new thermal pasteurization technology would corrupt the dairy industry, destroy the nutritional value of milk and lead to serious public health prob-lems.” Those concerns, of course, have proven valid. Consumers and sci-entists have expressed similar concerns over the prospect of widespread irradiation of solid foods, including meats, poultry, seafood, vegetables and fruits.

Notice that the irradiation process is to be accomplished upon solid food “without altering its raw appearance.” Just as the producers of geneti-cally modified foods and milk tainted with bovine growth hormone have resisted attempts by consumer groups to require labeling of these products, the purveyors of food irradiation plan to sell products that appear normal and are not labeled as irradiated. Indeed, they may well follow the lead of distributors of milk produced with bovine growth hormone that lobbied for laws forbidding farmers who produce milk without the hormone from la-beling their products as bGH-free. The technology will meanwhile be por-trayed as harmless and indeed beneficent, one more way America’s indus-trial expertise is helping to feed a starving world. Do not be surprised if pictures of starving children are brought into the marketing effort, children to be saved by the bounty of bioengineered crops, bGH-produced milk and irradiated foods. The fact that widespread irradiation of foods would solve the nuclear industry’s toxic waste problems receives little attention in either the marketing campaign or a generally adoring press.

Ironically, the push to irradiate is aided each time another batch of meat is found to be contaminated with pathogenic bacteria. In November and December of 2002, 19 million pounds of raw hamburger were recalled for possible E. coli contamination, with subsequent calls for irradiation. Irradiated meat is now