modern dairy practices are also a huge crock of BS, but that's a whole different story.
raw milk only causes disease when it goes bad, or is contaminated by some hormonal crap force fed to the cows.
as you can see below, pasteurization only had to be used because of disgusting urban dairys.
garbage in, garbage out.
History
The process of heating wine for preservation purposes has been known in China since 1117,[2] and was documented in Japan in 1568 in the diary Tamonin-nikki.
However, the modern version of pasteurization involving immediate cooling is much more recent. It was developed by the renowned French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur after whom it was named. The first pasteurization test was completed by Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard in April 1862. They "tested a process of thermal treatment to prevent decomposition of urine and blood."[3] The process was originally conceived as a way of preventing wine and beer from souring.[4] It would be many years before milk was pasteurized. In the United States in the 1870s, it was common for milk to contain contaminants to mask spoilage before milk was regulated.[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasteurization
***
Considering raw milk's role throughout history, it's simple to see that it's not a deadly food. If it were, all those dairy-loving primitive cultures would have died out long ago, leaving their vegetarian cousins to mind the store. At the very least, people would have dropped it from their diets entirely. And we haven't even gotten to germ theory yet...
Closer to home, our early American ancestors lived in a farm-based economy. As the Industrial Revolution reached our shores, the cities swelled with job seekers lured from their farms by the factories and mills. By 1810, there were dozens of water-powered operations lining the rivers of southern New England, all staffed by thirsty workers.
With raw milk and whiskey being the main beverages of choice (hopefully not mixed!), demand for both grew along with the cities. When the War of 1812 broke out, the supply of distilled spirits from Europe essentially dried up. Although the conflict only lasted about two years, it's impact on our country was substantial, and strangely enough for milk, particularly nasty.
To meet the soaring demand for spirits, distilleries soon sprang up in most major cities. In one of the most bizarre twists of entrepreneurial insight, some brilliant soul thought it would be fun (and profitable) to confine cows adjacent to the distillery and feed them with the hot, reeking swill left over from the spirit-making process (3).
As you might guess, the effects of distillery dairy milk were abominable, and for many of those drinking it, amounted to a virtual death sentence. Confined to filthy, manure-filled pens, the unfortunate cows gave a pale, bluish milk so poor in quality, it couldn't even be used for making butter or cheese. Add sick workers with dirty hands, diseased animals and any number of contaminants in unsanitary milk pails and you had a recipe for disaster.
http://www.raw-milk-facts.com/milk_history.html
***
At the end of World War II, 3.7 million of America's 5.4 million farms had milk cows. Most still sold raw milk directly to neighbors and through local distribution channels, a situation that would change drastically under relentless official pressure for compulsory pasteurization of all milk. A series of articles in popular magazines in 1944, 1945 and 1946 served to frighten the public into support of these efforts. A side effect of this movement was the demise of America's small farms.
Ladies' Home Journal began the campaign with the article "Undulant Fever," claiming - without any accurate documentation - that tens of thousands of people in the US were suffered from fever and illness because of exposure to raw milk.7 The next year, Coronet magazine followed up with Raw Milk Can Kill You, by Robert Harris, MD.8 The outright lies in this article were then repeated in similar articles that appeared in The Progressive9 and The Reader's Digest10 the following year.
The author of the Coronet article represented as fact a town and an epidemic that was entirely fictitious: "Crossroads, U.S.A., is in one of those states in the Midwest area called the bread basket and milk bowl of America�.What happened to Crossroads might happen to your town - to your city - might happen almost anywhere in America." The author then gives a lurid account of a frightful epidemic of undulant fever allegedly caused by raw milk, an epidemic that "spread rapidly�it struck one out of every four persons in Crossroads. Despite the efforts of the two doctors and the State health department, one out of every four patients died.
But there was no Crossroads, and no epidemic! Author Harris admitted this in a subsequent interview with J. Howard Brown of Johns Hopkins University.11 The outbreak was fictitious and represented no actual occurrence. Harris' own public statements both before and after the Coronet article show that not only was the article a complete fiction, but that he knew that such a thing could not possibly happen.
http://greenlivingjournal.com/page.php?p=1025
= new reply since forum marked as read
