Raw milk enthusiasts want you to drink a bacterial stew. Yum.

Sometimes it is astonishing how ignorant people can be. Now it's the turn of fans of "raw milk," a new fad that is sweeping the U.S.

I still remember reading milk cartons as a kid, and asking my parents what "pasteurized" meant. While I don't remember exactly what they said, I'm sure they told me that it made the milk safe by killing bacteria. Even as a kid, I understood that bacteria in my milk were probably a bad thing.

Louis Pasteur is one of the most famous scientists in history, and rightly so. In 1862, he invented the process of heating milk to kill the bacteria in it. Pasteurization, as we now call it, has saved millions of lives in the 150 years since. Pasteur also created the first vaccine for rabies. He was a true giant.

Fans of raw milk appear to be stunningly unaware of Pasteur's achievements, and equally ignorant of the dangers of bacterial infections. Many of the health and safety claims for raw milk can be found on sites such as RealMilk.com, a site that is chock full of

• Conspiracy theories: the Government is hiding the truth from you.
• Denialism: raw milk never hurt anyone, and even protects you against bacteria.
• Shifting the blame: infections are caused by other contaminated foods, not raw milk.

One of the more chilling facts about RealMilk.com is their emphasis on feeding raw milk to infants, who are at the greatest risk of dying from infections.  Their "Campaign for Real Milk" advocates

"universal access to clean raw whole milk from pasture-fed cows, especially access for pregnant and nursing mothers and for babies and growing children."

We have plenty of good science about raw milk. CDC review of infectious disease outbreaks across the U.S. from 1993-2006 found that

Langer et al., Emerging Infectious Diseases 18:3 (2012).

Among other findings, a

"The rate of outbreaks caused by unpasteurized milk (often called raw milk) and products made from it was 150 times greater than outbreaks linked to pasteurized milk."

Dr. Robert Tauxe, an infectious disease specialist at the CDC, debunks some of the myths about raw milk in an article freely available on Medscape. John Snyder and Mark Crislip have both written compellingly about the dangers of raw milk at sciencebasedmedicine.org.

If I were being cynical, I might say that the wild-eyed proponents of raw milk deserve whatever infections they get. But their children don't. 3-year-old Kylee Young, who the Washington Post wrote about this past Sunday, didn't deserve to suffer kidney failure and a stroke after her mother fed her raw milk that was infected with E. coli O157:H7. Kylee can no longer walk or talk and needs constant care. Her mother now says

"If I had known what I know now, I would never have fed [raw milk] to my daughter." 

Louis Pasteur and his wife had five children, three of whom died of childhood infections. These tragedies were Pasteur's motivation for studying infectious disease. Thanks to his work 150 years ago, no one today needs to die from drinking unpasteurized milk. The raw milk movement insists, despite the evidence, that they know better.

So go ahead, drink your raw milk and eat a paleo diet too, while you're at it. But don't ask our modern medical system to pay for your treatment when you get sick. And most of all, don't subject innocent children to the unnecessary risks of raw milk.

The perfect hamburger, spoiled

20 years ago, we cooked hamburgers the way we liked them.  If you wanted your burger medium rare, well, good for you.  A thick, juicy burger, seared on the outside and just a bit pink on the inside, was the centerpiece of any good summer cookout. That was a more innocent time.

In 1993, a deadly outbreak of E. coli infections hit the northwestern U.S., sickening hundreds of people and killing four children.  The outbreak was traced to undercooked ground beef from a hamburger chain called Jack in the Box.

Fortunately, we live in a highly educated, advanced society, where the citizenry understands that its health depends on having bacteria-free food.  The unsanitary conditions that allowed E. coli to enter the food supply, including assembly-line slaughterhouse practices, were quickly halted.  New government regulations assured that any factory that shipped contaminated beef would be shut down.  Inexpensive, accurate DNA testing now detects almost all bacteria at a neglible cost.  Food-borne outbreaks of bacterial infections have been rare ever since.

Ha ha ha ha ha!  Just kidding!  Of course we can't have government regulators getting in the way of efficient food manufacturing!  Consumers ought to know that it's their fault if they get sick.  We must cook our burgers until they're as sterile as a Martian landscape.  That's simply the trade-off we must make to have such cheap food these days.

It's not that we don't check for any bacteria at all.  In fact, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently announced that it would begin testing beef for six different deadly strains of E. coli.  Until now, it has only tested for the O157:H7 strain, which was behind the 1993 outbreak.  I guess this is progress.  However, the USDA will not be testing for salmonella bacteria or for any other nasty microbes.

The beef industry is opposed to any efforts by the government to test its products for bacteria.  For many years now, it has been remarkably successful, through lobbying efforts in Congress and through lawsuits, at rendering the USDA powerless.  As one example: twelve years ago the USDA tried to shut down a beef plant in Texas that failed its salmonella tests.  The beef industry challenged the USDA in court and won, and the USDA still doesn't have the power to shut down a plant for salmonella contamination.

We have the technology to detect all the bacteria that keep turning up in beef and chicken.  DNA testing technology has gotten much faster, cheaper, and more accurate in the 20 years since the Jack-in-the-Box outbreak, but we still don't use it on our food.  The meat industry won't say why it opposes DNA tests for contamination, but no one knows how consumers might react if they knew how much bacteria was really in their meat.

The USDA does test for E. coli O157:H7.  In the first half of this year, it tested 6,427 beef samples.  Out of those, 470 (7%) tested positive, which is pretty startling, considering that this is just one strain out of six known to be deadly to humans, and considering that we've known about this one since 1993.

(Chicken, by the way, has similar problems, with most raw chicken (organic or not) being contaminated by salmonella or campylobacter bacteria.  It helps that no one likes chicken cooked rare.)

Where does all this bacteria comes from, anyway? You may already know the answer: poo.  Beef and chicken production facilities aren't very good at keeping the (ahem) waste material separated from the meat.  Changing the way our beef is produced would cost more, undoubtedly. But is it unreasonable to ask a food producer to deliver safe food?

Luckily, if you cook meat long enough, it can't hurt you.  It might not taste as good, but hey, we all make compromises.  So broil those burgers through and through, and if they're a bit dry, well, that's what ketchup is for.