Serious illness or the death of a child is a tragedy that touches all of our hearts. Over this past week four seriously ill children have been hospitalized in Oregon after drinking unpasteurized milk contaminated with E. coli O157, and although the milk in question is no longer being distributed, additional cases may yet occur. The lives of these children currently hang in the balance.
These tragedies are made even more distressing when one considers that those who gave this milk to these children undoubtedly believed they were doing what was best for them. As a parent, my heart goes out to those adults.
Unpasteurized, or "raw," milk, like many unprocessed food products, may sound healthier, but it is not. Hundreds of years of experience have demonstrated that raw milk can carry many kinds of harmful bacteria that can make you very sick or kill you, and that's why pasteurization was invented in the 19th century. While it is possible to get food-borne illnesses from many different foods, raw milk is one of the riskiest of all, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Pasteurization is a simple but very effective process. It involves heating up milk for a brief period. No chemicals are added, and pasteurization can be done on organic or regular milk. This simple heat treatment is enough to kill a host of bad germs that can get into the milk from the cow's skin, udder or feces, such as salmonella, listeria, yersinia, campylobacter, mycobacterium tuberculosis and staphylococcus aureus, in addition to E. coli. While there are occasional outbreaks from pasteurized dairy products, the rate of outbreaks from unpasteurized products, per unit consumed, is about 150 times greater than from pasteurized products. So pasteurization works.
While there is great value in eating locally sourced foods and strengthening the connections between consumers and farmers, those strategies are not enough to prevent contamination of milk with dangerous bacteria. Nor is it a matter of preventing lax procedures used by farmers; it would be impossible for even the most conscientious farmer to prevent contamination, and that is why pasteurization is required for commercially distributed milk. The milk implicated in this outbreak came from a "herd-share," and so was legally distributed to 48 members, even though it was not pasteurized.
In the wake of this outbreak, I had occasion to review some clippings from 1922 in The Oregonian documenting 13 deaths and many illnesses from an outbreak caused by a different type of bacteria transmitted by unpasteurized milk from the Pleasant View Dairy. But we don't have to go back to the 1920s to find these outbreaks. In the past two decades we have had at least six outbreaks linked to raw milk in Oregon alone, and many others nationwide.
Milk is good for most people. It is packed with vitamins, calcium and protein. But history has taught us over and over again that milk needs to pasteurized to be safe. These latest events have taught us that painful lesson yet again.
Mel Kohn is director of the Oregon Public Health Division of the Oregon Health Authority.