The problem with this kind of thing is that the story looks different at the level of a government than at the individual level.
The FDA article mentioned 2,645 illnesses and 228 hospitalizations in a 20-year period, and that was a period during which raw milk was heavily regulated, so would be likely to be significantly higher otherwise.
Still, the odds of you as an individual getting sick from raw milk would be relatively low. Does that mean it shouldn't be regulated? It's not a purely scientific decision.
Perhaps another way to go would be warning labels on raw milk. Still, I bet that would produce much higher illness numbers than the ones quoted above.
In the end the question is whether the government should be trying to help people stay healthy or not. If the goal is actually "Make America Healthy Again," then requiring milk to be pasteurized is an obvious choice.
My understanding is that pasteurization denatures enzymes that would otherwise make the milk easier to digest. Which is true.
The problem is that the stringent production standards that would be required to make raw milk "safe" are incompatible with factory production and the profit motive. Unless you're personally vetting the sterilization of everything the milk comes into contact with and its immediate cooling to a temperature non-conducive to bacterial overgrowth, you probably shouldn't drink it.
It has nothing to do with science really. I don't think "pro-raw-milk people" question safety benefits of pasteurization or doubt germ theory. It's only about people's lack of nuance, totalitarian ambitions and safetism. Some people just can't help but make decisions for other people because they think they are smarter and know better. Ban, ban, unsafe, ban, I know better. The idea that consuming raw milk is somehow "unscientific" is plain stupid and/or propaganda. All I want is to enjoy the taste of raw milk from time to time, I know how germs work, I'm not forcing anyone to drink it, but I'll be fine, please worry about yourself.
I would even appreciate government making sure that companies selling raw milk to me are taking additional (but reasonable) precautions. But anyone just trying to ban raw milk for being unsafe and "unscientific" is just stupid.
Not only that link is a paywall, but I just don't trust propaganda outlets like this. Over and over I've seen these twisting and misinterpreting people's opinions. Quick googling suggests that he does have some unconventional (borderline quackery?) opinions there, though lots of it seems like a typical smearing tactics. Nevertheless, if I need to support even a complete quack to defend my rights, so be it. I wish both sides were more reasonable, so we could slap some warning signs on raw milk bottles, ensure higher safety standards on raw milk producers, so I could enjoy my glass of raw milk in peace, but I guess it is never going to happen.
The WSJ is, if anything, editorially right-wing, and bypassing the paywall is trivial; https://archive.is/n4JZL.
Excerpts:
> “The ubiquity of pasteurization and vaccinations are only two of the many indicators of the domineering ascendancy of germ theory as the cornerstone of contemporary public health policy,” he wrote in the book. “A $1 trillion pharmaceutical industry pushing patented pills, powders, pricks, potions and poisons and the powerful professions of virology and vaccinology … fortifies the century-old predominance of germ theory.”
> As his political profile grew, Kennedy made his war on germ theory part of his public platform. As a presidential candidate in 2023, he promised to tell the National Institutes of Health to “give infectious disease a break for about eight years,” NBC reported. On a 2023 episode of Joe Rogan’s popular podcast, Kennedy said “it’s hard for an infectious disease to kill a healthy person with a rugged immune system”—an assertion that runs counter to modern medical consensus. When Rogan said that wasn’t true of the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed more than 50 million people globally, Kennedy replied: “Well, the Spanish flu was not a virus.”
I'm not sure how to share a society with people who think it's OK for the HHS Secretary to be a quack.
How many human lives are worth the cost for you to enjoy the taste of raw milk that has been distributed across state lines from time to time? If possible please answer both in terms of acceptable deaths, but also in terms of hospitalization cases that did not result in death.
If banning the sale of raw milk saves a life is it still stupid and unscientific? What if it saves 10,000? A million?
People act like these things are a personal attack on them and their freedoms. Like they happened in a vacuum. Like a bunch of bros got together in the 40s - 70s and thought to themselves, "how can we deny future raw milk aficionado dpc_01234 his druthers decades from now". Pay no mind to the thousands of lives that could be saved from terrible diseases like tuberculosis.
This type of thinking and commentary (propaganda?) just constantly being thrust into the world is not only ignorant but it's dangerous. Good luck to you and yours man, I hope the worst that happens to you from this willful lack or regard for both science and history is the inevitable food poisoning you'll get from blindly ignoring food safety because "germ milk yummy".
These people do not understand the level of testing that we do; the statistics of efficacy or safety. Perhaps we need to explain it better, but it is really quite complex to explain. There's a trope that if you cannot explain something in a simple way, that thing must not be true. If so I would like someone to explain quantum mechanics and relativity to a 10 year old. Good luck.
That's a really good way to put it. I'll add that in my experience with raw milk, while I can still taste the taste I also think fondly about the relationship I had with the farmer and even (once or twice) the help I got to give at the farm.
It is if you don't understand the germ theory of disease, and how many bacteria can be present in raw milk. There is a reason that pasteurization was revolutionary, and it's because it caused fewer people to die.
If you don't understand the science behind pasteurization, you should absolutely "trust the experts", aka scientists, or if you prefer, trust the old wisdom of previous generations who knew the value of pasteurization and watched people die of preventable illnesses before it came along.
Really depends on the country and the access to clean processes between milking a cow and your glass tho.
Kind of related I was really shocked when I saw people eating raw pork mince in Germany when I lived there. My first reaction is that I would never do that based on my upbringing but if natural selection is a thing it's working fine for them I guess.
But it's not dependent on the country in this case, it's the US we're talking about. And I absolutely would not trust the US dairy industry to be able to properly produce and sell pathogen-free milk without pasteurization. And I would assume they don't want the liability of selling it anyway, most people and companies avoid selling things that can kill you if possible.
The biggest benefit of pasteurization is extending the shelf life, which is important in an industrialized economy. Dying due to consuming raw milk was not a problem, at least until milk had to be shipped long distances.
Not just distance, but time. If you try to keep milk around for any amount of time after milking the cow, you run risks like Bird Flus and TB and other disease contaminants.
Which is also why in the other direction cheese was invented for time stability of milk.
Believing that one should be able to consume raw milk is not anti-science. Yes pasteurization kills bacteria that can be present in milk which can cause serious harm and also it kills bacteria that can be positive and people should have the right to choose to consume it and sell it with proper disclosures.
I never understood the fear of raw milk.
The best cheese are made with raw milk. I don't understand how it can't be safe when both the cow and the milk are
tested for disease and bad germs.
Isn't cheese making just an old process of preserving milk for later consumption, which removes moisture and thus the environment for harmful bacteria?
I have no idea what the rules are, but I'm sure you can make whatever you want. If something is illegal, it's is probably illegal to _sell_ it, which i think is reasonable. I wouldn't trust just anyone to sell me raw milk cheese, and would want them to follow food safely regulations when doing so, which maybe are not compatible with the process of making raw milk cheese.
I know, but the topic at hand is about buying raw milk? From the article
> Powerful anti-vaccine advocates and people selling potentially harmful goods such as raw milk are profiting from the push to write anti-science policies into law across the U.S.
Plenty of things have serious health impacts and we don't mandate it. To go after something as niche as raw milk is weird in my view. Heart disease leads to quite a few deaths and we don't ban McDonalds.
If the fear is actually the drinking of raw milk then they should ban that, not the buying/selling of it.
> Plenty of things have serious health impacts and we don't mandate it.
There are very few things with serious health impacts that are completely unregulated. The closest we get is probably guns.
> To go after something as niche as raw milk is weird in my view.
It wasn't niche when we regulated it. It's niche now because we did.
> Heart disease leads to quite a few deaths and we don't ban McDonalds.
We take plenty of regulatory steps to reduce heart disease. McDonalds is required, for example, to provide nutrition facts. The burger meat gets USDA inspected. The restaurants get health inspections. (And we do try to do more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugary_drinks_portion_cap_rule)
> There are very few things with serious health impacts that are completely unregulated. The closest we get is probably guns.
Guns are more regulated than most everything else? Background checks, age verification, licensed dealers, rules on transporting and storing guns, etc.
> It wasn't niche when we regulated it. It's niche now because we did.
Just not true. It is niche in places where it is not regulated as well and some portion of those who buy raw milk pasteurize it themselves so we don't even know how many people drink raw milk.
> We take plenty of regulatory steps to reduce heart disease. McDonalds is required, for example, to provide nutrition facts.
Almost nobody reads that at a McDonalds...
> The burger meat gets USDA inspected. The restaurants get health inspections. (And we do try to do more.
And yet you can go to a McDonalds and die from a heart attack. Many places do not let you take that risk with raw milk.
Despite all these regulations you mentioned, McDonalds has more stores than ever before. With your reasoning that should be turning McDonalds into a niche place.
This is ridiculous. "Well there is something that people at home could do to make this safe so its no biggie to sell it even though we know that virtually nobody will do that thing."
Not the most anti-science, but clearly foolish. The safety of humans consuming raw-milk was solved long ago by Pasteur. Its all part of the dumbing-down section of the control the people handbook.
Pasteurization has been settled science since the 1860s. It's benefits are extremely well known and well studied. We understand the contamination issues it solved in trying to sell things across large distances and/or from grocery shelves that may take some amount of time to sell. We see those contamination issues in "Raw Milk" sales, exactly as predicted.
It seems pretty anti-science to me, going against such foundational food and health science.
It also seems directly related to anti-vax anti-science efforts because Louis Pasteur was also a critical early scientist involved in vaccines (through efforts against Cholera and beyond).
I think this will be difficult for LLM vendors to implement in the near term, as the cost of switching vendors is near zero. If vendor A implemented ads, preferential treatment to things, and it was very evident, switching to vendor B would take almost no time.
Rather than banning AI in technical interviews, better to see how the candidates use it and if they can comprehend what the LLM is saying, the quality of their prompts and own thinking.
I couldn't agree more. LLMs are legitimate tools and, ideally, I want to see how effective a candidate is in using their available tools to solve complex problems.
The service on offer here is different. It's providing a means to use LLMs to fake your way through a technical interview.
Showing that you can use LLMs to quickly and correctly solve problems is a good skill to have. Offering up a solution from an LLM as your own work without acknowledging how you got there is just misrepresentation... or to put it another way is just lying. Maybe fake your degrees and experience while you're at it, right?
At least in the long run, many that need these tools to get in will be found out once they start having to solve real problems on the job. Just a shame about other, more qualified people being turned away. Of course if the LLM was sufficient enough on its own, perhaps a real software developer was never required to begin with.
Perhaps it's of use to others, The possibilities for healing were not as diverse then as they are now. Besides the clinical dbt or cbt, there are many coaches and bodyworkers with diverse offerings on how to transform trauma. Somatic practices like Hakomi, breathwork like holotropic. Many many options, all of which can have a contribution to healing.
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