There’s quite a remarkable article just out from the Los Angeles Times magazine about Organic Pastures Dairy Co., and its trauma back in September and October, when five children who drank its milk became ill and the dairy was shut down by authorities for more than two weeks. (I wrote about the shutdown in BusinessWeek.com and had numerous blog postings about the situation.) For the first time I’m aware of, the subject of raw milk and sick children is seriously discussed and analyzed, without the usual ideological rhetoric pro and con. It’s a lengthy article, but well worth the time to review.
Five points stand out to me from the article, aside from the drama of a dying child and the threat to Mark McAfee’s farm from the regulatory crackdown:
1. There may be brief periods when e.Coli does inhabit raw milk, but then fades away.
2. Children who are new to raw milk may be especially susceptible to becoming ill from the e.Coli.
3. Those children shouldn’t be treated with antibiotics because, by killing huge amounts of bacteria, the antibiotics have the effect of releasing a toxin that can damage a child’s kidneys. Without antibiotics, the illness takes the course of an upset stomach for a few days, after which the children recover fully.
4. There’s an absence of fear mongering, since no agriculture officials or doctors are quoted directly.
5. McAfee shows admirable candor in discussing and assessing the five children who became sick after drinking his farm’s milk. When I was speaking with him regularly in October, he wasn’t willing to admit his raw milk might have made the children sick, speculating rather about the possibility of spinach being the culprit. Now he is, perhaps faced with what the regulators call the epidemiological evidence, or perhaps because he appreciates that candor is more disarming than denial.
As the article speculated about the possibility of a brief appearance of bacteria in raw milk, I realized that I have heard that possibility expressed previously–by Ohio agriculture officials. They mentioned this to me in describing their frustration with the phenomenon of kids becoming sick, and then the bacteria seemingly not being there when they test the milk.
The unfortunate difference between the two camps is that while McAfee sees this phenomenon as a risk to be managed (like taking care with raw meat or raw eggs), the Ohio officials take it as confirmation that raw milk is too risky for everyone and should be banned. One question that stands out: why don’t the dairy, regulator, and medical communities try to learn more about the phenomena described in this article?
In the end, parents may conclude that it’s too risky to feed their children raw milk (like the father of the seven-year-old boy who became most seriously ill). Or they may conclude they understand the risks well enough to control the situation. The point is people should have the freedom to make their own choice. Many people seem already to have made their choice, as McAfee reports his sales are better than ever. Other reactions to the article?
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