Bottoms Up

Lawmakers sick after drinking raw milk to celebrate legalizing raw milk
Mar 2016, reddit

Sure this is more than a year old, but come on - does this story ever get old?

I don't think I need to explain much, because this headline says it all.

Just a couple notes on public health then. Louis Pasteur is the guy who came up with pasteurization, which is just heating your milk enough to kill the bacteria, especially the bacteria for Listeria, which can kill babies and old folks and people with compromised immune systems.

Homeopathic enthusiasts say that pasteurization kills the good bacteria with the bad, and although that may be true, most people would rather take the chance and just kill the listeria-stuff.

I went to a dairy farm in Pennsylvania this month, to take a tour. You know what's in that raw milk? Puss and blood and bacteria. You know what's even better? Every cow's milk gets poured into the same huge tanker truck to mix with each other.

If you're getting it directly from a cow that you know by name, go ahead and drink it raw. But if you're drinking it from a dairy farm like this one, you might wanna wait til it's been pasteurized.

Further, our host told us that organic dairy farming has a downside in that they aren't allowed to use antibiotics on their cows. Good right? Yes, until the cow gets sick; because cows get sick just like us. The farm I visited does use antibiotics, so if a cow gets sick, as soon as they notice it (using their hi-tech milking monitors they can tell if a cow is sick based on a drop in their milk production) they remove that cow from the group and stop milking it. If you can't use antibiotics, what do you do? You hedge your bets. You leave the cow in the group, to possibly infect other cows; and you keep milking that cow as long as you can, and risk infecting your milk. The other option is to get rid of that cow, like get it off the farm forever, which is a big loss, so why would you do that if you didn't have to.

Finally, our host also mentioned how those who own 50-cow farms all share a tanker delivery truck, but if one of them has a sick cow, and sick milk, he can ruin the whole batch. The batch gets tested and if it has the wrong number of bacteria etc., it gets denied and dumped, and everyone loses out because that one farmer tried to push milk from a cow that could have been removed from the herd while it was administered antibiotics, and then returned later.

Anyway, I don't mean to come down on organic-things, but it is good to know the whole story, especially being that 'organic' has become a selling point, which means you can expect the bad parts of the organic world to be left out of the conversation. And homeopathy, keep it coming, always really good stuff.