Maybe I just need to stop looking at statistics about food contamination. Something isn’t clicking when I review the various compilations and studies.
My disconnect comes from trying to resolve the relatively small numbers of milk-related illness cited in the statistics from the Centers from Disease Control (CDC) released to Pete Kennedy of the Weston A. Price Foundation, along with the similarly small number of cases identified in a study from the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) cited by Mary McGonigle-Martin following my post of two days ago.
The CDC data Kennedy obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request indicates about 21,000 illnesses from raw and pasteurized milk over 32 years, and the CSPI data points to 3,385 dairy-related illnesses over 12 years. Some sense of consistency here. There are many more illnesses in the CSPI data from meat, produce, eggs, and seafood, but even with these, the total is on the order of 90,000 illnesses over 12 years.
I know these numbers aren’t necessarily small, especially if you’re one of the people who became ill, but they appear pretty minor compared with the 2005 study from CDC, which estimates 76 million food-borne illnesses each year. Now, the CDC allows that there are some huge knowledge gaps when it states, “Some proportion of foodborne illness is caused by pathogens or agents that have not yet been identified and thus cannot be diagnosed. The importance of this final factor cannot be overstated.” If you’re looking for reassurance that the medical community knows what the hell it’s doing in diagnosing and tracking such illnesses, you’re not going to find it in statements like these.
I thought of this statement as I read Dan Corrigan’s account of his long-term struggle with likely food-borne pathogens (following my Tuesday posting). There were some weird things going on for him, and he finally had to find his own way, via a long journey of discovery, toward healing. I wonder if most of the 76 million cases are similar to those experienced by Dan–kind of mysterious and seemingly chronic in nature.
I think it’s pretty obvious by this point that there is much more the medical wizards don’t know than they do know about this arena. I wouldn’t mind such admissions of ignorance, if they didn’t act as if they do know what’s going on. They and the regulators continue to use producers of raw milk as a convenient whipping boy for the problem of food-borne illness.
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Supporters of Whole Foods have always wanted to believe that its founder really cared about the movement toward organic and locally grown food. He usually said the right things in public to support that notion.
But in the revelations about his extra-curricular promotional efforts on behalf of Whole Foods stock on a Yahoo discussion board, it’s become ever clearer that support of a movement was one of the furthest things from his mind. It was all about competitiveness and ego.
Today’s Wall Street Journal has another major article about his postings. Judge for yourself.
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