Edit: SciAm says a qualified "mostly safe": https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-raw-milk-chees...
In France we eat cheese made from raw milk all the time, it's almost never a problem, it's so rare that when it does it makes the news and products are recalled.
Louis Pasteur won all kinds of awards for doing things like figuring out how to treat milk. Some of the bugs you can get from raw milk are not fun.
I'll bet that the process of becoming cheese treats the bugs.
From what I hear, consuming raw milk is what's dangerous.
Certainly the safety of raw milk is important for the 2% of the population that drinks it, and we should add H5N1 to the existing pile of pathogens they should worry about like E. coli, salmonella, listeria and campylobacter.
The far more significant fact that we're not discussing for some reason is that H5N1 has not only jumped from birds to mammals, but it's spreading rapidly between different species of mammals. And not just cattle from coast to coast in the US, but also bears, foxes, skunks, minks, raccoons, otters, seals, sea lions, domestic cats and even at least one dolphin. And for many of these mammals, not only does it spread fast, it also has a very high fatality rate.
If the virus has mutated to spread rapidly from mammal to mammal, and it also spreads to many different species of mammal, that's a very new thing that's never been seen before with this virus.
I don't know what the probability is for this to turn in to a high-mortality human pandemic, but that probability is certainly orders of magnitude greater now than before the virus achieved mammal-to-mammal transmission.
Disclaimer: I drink pasteurized milk like everyone else because raw milk is expensive and hard to source. When I was a child I drank raw milk in glass bottles sourced from a local dairy since I grew up in a dairy town. I suffered no ill effects.
So what?
> changes the quality and nutrition of the milk
Does it? In what way, and with what evidence? People say things like this without ever getting specific.
> Baby cows don't drink pasteurized milk, and neither do human babies
No, but (a) there's a much shorter supply chain there in nature, which is the big problem, (b) cows consume all sorts of things that are inedible by humans, and (c) it's not actually "natural" for humans to drink cow's milk at all, that's a relatively recent genetic adaptation (lactose tolerance) that not everybody has.
For that matter, humans drinking the milk of another mammal after they’ve been weaned off their own mamas is ridiculously unnatural.
But you know what is extremely natural? H5N1, ecoli, etc.
The idea that “unnatural” vs “natural” provides any sort of basis for decision making in human life today is laughably stupid.
Completely agree. You should also eat raw potatoes!
I hear ricin is completely natural too.
I do wonder every now and then if there is a way to stop this trend. I do believe that most people know that they'd have all the information available to prove themselves wrong. But that's just uncomfortable. Being the one who "knows better" feels better. We need to embrace uncomfortable truths more.
The French can access raw milk and cheeses made from raw milk. As I understand it, one or two people a year in France die from this.
How big the risk actually is or how great it is I can't say. But it's not that dissimilar to regular people eating unhealthy junk food all the time.
I say this as someone who shares this mindset. It is as shocking to me that you would queue up for a dangerous vaccine, support mass 3rd world immigration, consume slop full of soy and seed oils, etc as it no doubt is to you that I would be an openly racist anti-vaxer who gets his steaks and eggs straight from the farm (and would my milk too, if it wasn't illegal here).
It doesn't help at all that the champion of pasteurization was one Lord Rothschild, whose only two addresses to UK parliament were for Zionism and the prohibition of raw milk. If one is considered a program of genocidal supremacist hatred of my people, it's a very tough sell that the other is supposed to help keep me safe and healthy.
Do your own research isn’t viable either given that I can’t be an expert in everything. Especially with the rise of misinformation. At some point you’ve got to trust something
Steak and eggs from the farm seems quite reasonable to me. ;)
“Do your own research” is absolutely ridiculous when what it means is diving deeper into the rabbit holes presented by the YouTube or TikTok algorithms.
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
Where are all the mass deaths and murders since then?
Even overall death rates and mortality rates have fallen across the world after jumping up during COVID itself.
Even an extremely tiny risk of say 0.1% should have seen aroun 4 million dead. Where are all the overflowing morgues and need for new hospitals we saw when COVID, which has a low mortality rate, and had definitely not infected even close to 70% of people in Italy, or China, was spreading in the early months?
Murders?!?! WTH?
COVID was Corporal Trips.
