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Comment by aunty_helen | Hacker News Reader

I’m just catching up on this, can someone explain to me what happens if you drink raw milk?

Edit: thanks for the answers everyone. My mum’s a dairy farmer and so was I during my high school weekends. My family’s been drinking raw milk for the past 20 or so years.

So it’s interesting to know what scary stuff is out there lurking and that a debate has formed around something I had grown to normalize. Tb is obviously a big one and my family being near a native forest increased that risk.

Honestly though, the only thing about drinking raw milk for me was you needed to shake it to mix the 2 inches of cream on top. So now I live somewhere I can’t even buy fresh milk, every time I get the milk out of the fridge it gets a habitual shake :s

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The wiki on Pasteurization is a real page turner!

> Prior to industrialization, dairy cows were kept in urban areas to limit the time between milk production and consumption, hence the risk of disease transmission via raw milk was reduced. As urban densities increased and supply chains lengthened to the distance from country to city, raw milk (often days old) became recognized as a source of disease. For example, between 1912 and 1937, some 65,000 people died of tuberculosis contracted from consuming milk in England and Wales alone. Because tuberculosis has a long incubation period in humans, it was difficult to link unpasteurized milk consumption with the disease.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasteurization#Milk

Interestingly, that seems to predate reliable cold chains.

Your question isn’t very clear.

Raw milk itself isn’t bad, it’s just very very easy to get contaminated with pathogenic bacteria.

Proponents of raw milk claim it has health benefits due to the lack of cooking, both on a chemical level and a bacterial level.

This is such a HN answer.

"It's not bad for you, it just makes it incredibly likely to get contaminated with pathogenic bacteria"

I mean I’m not advocating raw milk consumption. I was just trying to give a sober and even handed answer to the question.

Raw milk itself is fine, it’s in fact incredibly nutritious- which is why it’s so difficult to keep it from being contaminated. It’s a great breeding ground for pathogens.

In my mind, anti pasteurization types are like anti vaxx light, they didn’t have to live through times where food borne illnesses ran rampant, and therefore don’t appreciate what our scientific ancestors have blessed us with.

Raw milk and pasteurized milk should be equally easy to get contaminated with pathogenic bacteria if you do the same things with them. But the pasteurization process does a “reset” after some of the riskiest behavior that happens pre-sale, after which repeating said risky behavior is specifically avoided.

“tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid, Campylobacter, Listeria, Brucella, E. coli, Salmonella, and streptococcal infections” apparently.

Sounds like a bad run through the Oregon Trail

Not without dysentery it isn’t

FTA:

>“Raw milk is not pasteurized, or heated up to a temperature of 140 degrees F for 20 minutes, a process that kills off bacteria that can cause foodborne illness, including Salmonella, listeria, and E. coli.

TL;DR: food poisoning

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