Two comments on yesterday’s posting about the views of Ohio officials, from Cara and Miguel, raise a similar question: Are public officials open to possibly adjusting their view of the world of milk safety, or are they locked into a particular position, for economic or other reasons?
The comments remind me of an additional part of my research for my latest BusinessWeek.com column into Ohio’s tough enforcement of anti-raw-milk laws in Ohio.
One of the factors that triggered the Ohio Department of Agriculture’s (ODA) investigation of Carol Schmitmeyer, a dairy farmer mentioned in my column, was that two of her herd-share owners became ill last spring with campylobacter, a food-borne illness described by the U.S. Center for Disease Control as “one of the most common bacterial causes of diarrheal illness in the United States,” which means it can be carried by many foods aside from raw milk.
One victim was an elderly man and the other a young child. Of course, local public health and ODA officials immediately blamed Carol’s raw milk, even though tests of milk from the Schmitmeyer dairy showed no evidence of harmful bacteria.
The elderly man later wrote ODA to say that a newspaper report about the illness stated “I was in good health prior to contracting the bacteria…this was not the case.” He recounted his “history of edema in the ankles and legs” and how he was told during a recent visit to a hospital emergency room that “my oxygen level was very low.” He also recounts that his wife and other family members drank the same raw milk as he did and encountered no problems. What he was saying was that his immune system problems rendered him susceptible to bacterial infection.
The mother of the boy who contracted the illness wrote to ODA as well, saying that though “every member of our family drank the milk, including our one-year-old daughter and six-year-old,” the third child was the only one to become sick. She recalls that her son had eaten snow on the way out to the car two days before his illness, and it could well have been contaminated by the bird and squirrel droppings that were in ample supply around the house.
So what was the reaction of Lewis Jones, head of ODA’s dairy division, to these explanations? Denial is putting it mildly.
“That’s what is so dangerous…If people get sick, they’ll say it was something else” besides raw milk, he stated. So he’s saying that the victims are in denial…
I mentioned to him that a number of people who drink raw milk credit it with helping reduce the intensity of any number of conditions, including autism and asthma in children. That caught Lewis’ interest. “I have an autistic son, I would never give him raw milk.” Why not? “Because there’s a chance he could get sick.”
That told me there was no way this man would ever change his mind. If, after growing up drinking raw milk, he wouldn’t even try it as a means to perhaps relieve an otherwise uncurable condition in his own son, then he must be terribly locked into his own view of the world. Too bad for the people whose lives he affects.
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