An agenda is develpoing: U.S. ‘making raw milk look dangerous’

CDC accused of skewing statistics

A new government study warns that “outbreaks” blamed on raw milk were “150 times greater” than outbreaks attributed to pasteurized milk, citing statistics from a 13-year period ending in 2006.
But a foundation that runs education programs on science, diet and health says the results were skewed because of the way federal report authors “cherry picked” data.
Sally Fallon Morell, president of the Weston A. Price Foundation, said the new government study listed an average of 315 illnesses a year “from all dairy products for which the pasteurization status was known.”
“Of those, there was an average of 112 illnesses each year attributed to all raw dairy products and 203 associated with pasteurized dairy products,” she said.
Citing the nearly 24,000 “foodborne illnesses reported each year on average,” she noted that “dairy products are simply not a high risk product.”
But she said the authors’ apparently arbitrary decision to choose to end their analysis at 2006 should have been explained.
“The CDC’s data shows that there were significant outbreaks of foodborne illness linked to pasteurized dairy products the very next year, in 2007: 135 people became ill from pasteurized cheese contaminated with e.coli, and three people died from pasteurized milk contaminated with listeria,” the Price Foundation report said.
And shortly before the time frame for the study, there were 16,000 confirmed cases of Salmonella traced to pasteurized milk from a single dairy, the foundation reported.
The federal report, published in the CDC journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, also noted that states where raw milk sales are legal had “more than twice the rate of outbreaks as states where it was illegal.”
The study noted 121 dairy-related disease outbreaks during the 1993-2006 period, which caused 4,413 illnesses, 239 hospitalizations and three deaths.
“In 60 percent of the outbreaks (73 outbreaks) state health officials determined raw milk products were the cause. Nearly all of the hospitalizations (200 of 239) were in those sickened in the raw milk outbreaks,” it said.
Robert Tauxe, deputy director of the CDC’s Division of Foodborne, Waterborn and Environmental Diseases, called for action.
“Restricting the sale of raw milk products is likely to reduce the number of outbreaks and can help keep people healthier. The states that allow sale of raw milk will probably continue to see outbreaks in the future,” he said.