Does anybody drink raw milk?
- Thread starter Nicolas Mestre
- Start date
Jeff Grossman
Jeff Grossman
Mankind has been drinking milk since approx. 5000 BC while pasteurization appeared in the 1860s.
Thus, for milennia there was no "milk supply". So, if the modern world cured an ill that it created for itself... bravo.
And that is merely one disease, which is not the same as widespread disease. I suppose clean water, and the germ theory (e.g., Semmelweis), did more to lessen disease than did pasteurized milk.
TB wasn't just any disease: it was probably the leading cause of death in Western Europe and the east coast of the U.S. in the late 19th C, having come in waves periodically since it first spread from animals to humans sometime between eight and ten thousand years ago. In the early 18th C, TB caused about 1/3 of deaths in Europe and 1/5 in what would become the U.S. Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard conducted tests in the 1860s, but the Pasteurization of milk only became common in the 1890s in France and later in the States. Non-pulmonary infections have always been relatively rare, and Pasteurization was hardly a cure -- nor, for that matter, were vaccines, despite considerable efforts -- but it did help, along with rising living standards, isolating the sick, and, after WWII, antibiotics.
Jonathan Loesberg
Jonathan Loesberg
Indeed I think our current indifference to pasteurization would disappear if TB were still a rampant killer it was until a century ago or so. We are riding on the strength of all the other things that have contributed to its near eradication. Since it hasn't in fact been eradicated, though, and may yet evolve again into a disease that ravages, while the free ride isn't very dangerous now, it could easily become so.
Sure, in order to get prices down, you need economies of scale. Society has to feed it's people first.
Now that we're well fed we need to start thinking of ways to decentralize and make things more sustainable. People will have to be willing to pay the true cost of what they consume. I hope this can happen, but I'm not optimistic.
It is only very recently that scientists developed a serious understanding of the mechanisms of disease. Doctors even more recently. A doctor who prescribed raw milk was doing so for no other reason than anecdotal evidence and his own personal feelings. To think that medical care was somehow better even 30 years ago represents a serious misunderstanding of epidemiology and science in general.
If a doctor prescribed raw milk today, s/he is an imbecile. That's not their job, be they in league with big-Pharma or not.
Again, to think that the average health of a citizen is somehow worse than it was 150 years ago does not agree with the facts.
Are you making some sort of eugenics argument? Because, you know, maybe the genetic stock was better because all the inferior types died in the first 3 years of life.
I understand how people feel uneasy with our Frankenstein pharma world, but don't confuse that with some idea of a previous era that really wasn't so great for 99.99% of humanity.
Draconian measures have, historically, created unhelpful backlash. If you leave open the possibility of opting out, but make it difficult, by, say, sending a team of Prussian bureaucrats to people's houses and questioning them endlessly, you can still achieve coverage rates that are plenty high.
Jonathan Loesberg
Jonathan Loesberg
Even if cows got TB from us, which is probably why they don't have it now, they did pass it on, did they not?
The free rider problem is different with milk precisely because we aren't taking a free ride off of the general drinking practices of the community, which is unjust, but taking a free ride off of the near eradication of TB from cow's milk, which may be due to the larger near eradication of the disease rather than the immunization pasteurization offers. I am insufficiently scientifically versed to know this for sure. But I expect most people feel differently toward people how drink raw milk (how dangerous of you, really!) than they do toward non-vaccinators (this is seriously socially irresponsible and, minimally, you should be subject to constant buking and scorning) and that difference corresponds to the difference in the free rider situations, I would claim.
The free rider problem is different with milk precisely because we aren't taking a free ride off of the general drinking practices of the community, which is unjust, but taking a free ride off of the near eradication of TB from cow's milk, which may be due to the larger near eradication of the disease rather than the immunization pasteurization offers. I am insufficiently scientifically versed to know this for sure. But I expect most people feel differently toward people how drink raw milk (how dangerous of you, really!) than they do toward non-vaccinators (this is seriously socially irresponsible and, minimally, you should be subject to constant buking and scorning) and that difference corresponds to the difference in the free rider situations, I would claim.
I think you put in place the system that has the best evidence of high compliance. This is an issue with a factual, or at least a data driven answer. Talking about it theoretically doesn't make sense to me.
It's sort of like the 401(k) thing. If people have to opt out instead of opting in, they tend to just stay in and benefit themselves by saving for retirement.
People are not particularly rational or far-sighted. And they almost never know what is best for themselves, even though they always think they do.
The total genome sequences of enough of the mycobacteria have been done to construct a pretty good phylogeny. M. bovis is a late divergence and has much less diversity than M. tuberculosis.
I don't have the issue of Nature anymore, but I think that's where it was published within the last year or two.
Steven Spielmann
Steven Spielmann
I'm sure I don't know what's best for myself.
I will however help VLM forcibly vaccinate people in exchange for occasional sips of back-vintage Baudry.
I will however help VLM forcibly vaccinate people in exchange for occasional sips of back-vintage Baudry.
Scott Kraft
Scott Kraft
I grew up drinking only raw milk between the ages of 8 and 18. Judge the ill effects for yourself.
scottreiner
scott reiner
I think big pharma is a major contributor to PBS, and it showed. They did a better job than most similar segments on the ethical issues involved, and the presentation of the parents was quite effective. Surely the very success of vaccine programs, the absence of mumps, measles, and polio over the past generation gives young parents a different perspective from their parents and grandparents. But as most similar presentations do, this one exaggerated the role vaccines have played in reducing the incidence of disease. Nor did it show what is making parents hysterical. It did not pay any attention to the increase in autism diagnoses. Is the increase simply a statistical artifice, the result of better and earlier diagnosis? I don't think anyone knows. The show failed to look carefully at the epidemiological studies they cited. I haven't followed the debate closely since the IOM report on autism came out in 2004: the handful of studies it relied on were all obviously flawed. Getting reliable data sets and doing this kind of work on vaccines is extremely difficult. It's not that I think the parents are right or that there is a link between vaccines and autism. I'm with VLM that these parents have no idea what's best for themselves or their children. I am glad I do not live in the part of Oregon the show presents, where whole communities are opting out of vaccine programs. If nothing else, the neighbors would drive me crazy. But I do think parents have provoked the medical establishment behave badly in order to protect the vaccine program. I notice the show didn't breath a word of the Simpsonwood transcripts, the most troubling evidence I've come across. In June 2000, the CDC National Immunization Program called together a team of consultants, state and federal public health officials, and pharma reps to deal with preliminary findings from the CDC's own lead statistician, who said he couldn't make an association between thimerisol (a mercury-based preservative) and autism go away. One of the doctors there got a call in the middle of the proceedings from his daughter-in-law. She had just delivered the first son in the next generation. He said he was so troubled by what he saw that he told her not to let his new grandson have any vaccines with thimerisol until scientists could figure out what was going on. At the end of the session, when the group rated the probability of a relationship between thimerisol and neurological problems, most of them dismissed the connection. The one lone holdout (a different doctor!) got berated in front of all of them for jeopardizing the vaccine program. Science has no doubt improved at an impressive pace recently, but to suggest that scientists and statisticians are immune from political bias, that politics plays no role in science, that Paul Offit is a disinterested expert, would be naive. I have no idea where the science is at this point. By all appearances, the CDC flooded the data set that produced the initial results, and I really haven't followed it further. Autism certainly hasn't gone away. I also thought the show could have done a better job presenting arguments that the vaccine schedule itself might pose risks. They mention the claim but then immediately drop it. The number of vaccines given to very young children has increased dramatically in the past generation, a perverse, last gasp response, I think, to the collapse of Great Society social programs. As social programs go, vaccination is both affordable to the public and yet handsomely profitable to big pharma at the same time. We vaccinate one-day-old infants against sexually transmitted diseases not because they are likely to contract those diseases but because so many of them will never see a doctor again. Vaccines can be tested individually, with difficulty, but how do we evaluate the consequences of giving so many in rapid succession at such a young age? Are there no trade-offs in increasing coverage rates by compressing the schedule as we do? I have heard credentialed doctors and scientists argue over the question, but they were absent here.