Despite repeated warnings from U.S. health agencies, raw milk sales continue to increase, even amid the ongoing outbreak of bird flu among dairy cattle. Weekly raw milk sales increased between 21% and 65% compared with the same weeks last year, according to data shared with the Associated Press by NielsenIQ, a market research company.
The risk of bird flu to humans remains low, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, thanks in part to pasteurization, which inactivates the virus in commercial milk supplies. But non-infectious fragments of the virus have been detected even in pasteurized milk, raising concerns that untreated milk could pose a greater potential risk to those who drink it. And, experts say, you shouldn’t drink raw milk in the first place.
Here’s why.
What is raw milk?
The vast majority of milk sold in the US undergoes a form of sterilization called pasteurization. During this process, raw milk is briefly heated, killing or inactivating the vast majority of bacteria, viruses, fungi and other disease-causing microorganisms.
Raw milk, on the other hand, is not treated. Even milk from the healthiest cattle and cleanest farms likely contains a myriad of germs that can make you sick, Alex O’Brien, quality coordinator at the Center for Dairy Research, told Yahoo Life. “You can reduce the risk [via sanitary farm practices] whatever you want, but it will always be there,” he says. “It’s just the nature of the beast.”
Can raw milk make people sick?
Yes, say the experts. “We know that raw milk is a risky food,” he says Donald Shaffner, chair of the food science department at Rutgers University. “People who consume milk are subject to food poisoning, including vomiting and diarrhea. If these symptoms are especially severe, people may need to be hospitalized or may even die,” and, he adds, children are probably more susceptible because their immune systems are still developing.
Five people died from illnesses contracted from raw milk between 2007 and 2020, according to a data review from the USA and Canada. “If we consider the number of outbreaks associated with raw milk in light of the very small amount of milk that is consumed raw, the risk of outbreaks associated with raw milk is at least 150 times greater than the risk of outbreaks associated with pasteurized milk,” the CDC warns in its website.
Raw milk was once a major health problem in the US. In 1938, before pasteurization was widely introduced, milk was responsible for about 25 percent of all food and beverage-related disease outbreaks, according to the Food and Drug Administration’s 1990 guidance on milk safety. Raw milk is “kind of a wild card; there could be all kinds of bacteria,” says O’Brien. The most common pathogens found in milk are Campylobacter, Cryptosporidium, E. coli, Listeria, Brucella and Salmonella, according to the CDC.
Since the introduction of pasteurization, however, milk-related illnesses have become relatively rare. Between 2005 and 2016, only about 9% of foodborne illnesses were attributed to dairy products — and the majority of those came from raw milk, according to one study. 2018 study. These numbers have increased from previous years as illnesses have increased along with the popularity of raw milk.
Why are people drinking raw milk?
In recent years, raw milk has become more popular as wellness influencers and public figures like Gwenyth Paltrow and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. O’Brien suspect that its rise in popularity is, for many, a statement politics, a way of being “anti-establishment”. He adds that there may be a link to attitudes toward the COVID-19 pandemic, when many Americans became wary of scientists’ changing guidance.
Raw milk industry groups “have been propagating what I like to call ‘campfire science,’” or guidance based on anecdotal stories that claim that unpasteurized dairy helps treat lactose intolerance and dairy-related allergies. Some even say it has antiviral properties, none of which have been proven, says O’Brien. Nicole Martins, professor of dairy food microbiology at Cornell University, told Yahoo Life that “I often hear the argument that pasteurization destroys nutrients and ‘good’ bacteria in raw milk.” But, she explains, the process only reduces the levels of healthy vitamins in raw milk by a small percentage, and you would need to drink impossibly enormous amounts of raw milk to get any health benefits from the so-called good bacteria.
“There is simply no benefit to drinking raw milk that outweighs the risks,” says Martin. Instead, “it’s not a question of if you’re drinking raw milk you’ll get some kind of contamination, it’s a question of when,” and the more you consume, the greater your risk, O’Brien adds.
What about bird flu?
The FDA issued a Notice against the consumption of raw milk, as inactive pieces of the bird flu virus were found in around 20% of pasteurized milk samples. “The virus has been found in high levels in raw milk from cows infected with the virus, as it appears to have an affinity for the mammary gland,” says Martin. Without going through the pasteurization process, it is theoretically possible for raw milk to contain a live form of the virus that could infect people.
However, so far only one person has contracted bird flu from dairy cattle, and that person was a farm worker who was in close contact with the animals. They developed conjunctivitis but had no other symptoms, and there are no signs that the worker contracted the virus from drinking raw milk.
“There’s not enough data to say yes or no” about whether people can get bird flu from drinking raw milk, O’Brien says. “But you don’t want to give the virus any more time to figure out how to infect humans.”
