People die from drinking raw milk. It is genuinely a risky thing to do. Not everyone will die but enough that society should work hard to limit it as much as possible.
So maybe let's not be so quick to jeer at the people here who report they have been doing it with no ill effects. Especially since most of them don't appear to be proselytizing, just relaying their personal experience. I agree there's no need for anyone to drink milk raw in the 21st century, and that it is always going to have some inherent risk compared with drinking pasteurized milk. The same can be said for many uncooked foodstuffs that we consume, and other enjoyable but non-risk-free activities we undertake.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5424a4.htm#:~:te....
Pasteurization is for when you cannot, which is the case for most.
Also pasteurization was invented in the mid 1800s, while mass market electric refrigeration was invented in in the early 1900s. Before that it was a bunch of awkward ice boxes, and not used much.
Fresh milk from a dirty udder, or from an infected cow, or sitting in a bucket that has traces of yesterday's milk, is not safe to drink. Pasteurization (or boiling or fermentation and other preservation methods before that) are all ways to make pretty sure that the milk is safe to drink, regardless of freshness.
OP did not said pasteurizarion is folly. You do it to preserve milk for longer term. Which something entirely different then drinking milk right after it was taken out of cow.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5424a4.htm#:~:te....
EDIT: This is exactly the problem that I am trying to point out. You (likely an otherwise very educated person) assume that pasteurization is intended to preserve milk because that is the (unscientific) tone of these comments, when in fact that is very far from the reason (you can preserve unpasteurized milk as yogurt/cheese, we've known how to do that for centuries, but it will still potentially give you TB).
I don’t mean this in a negative way. HN is what it is and I love it. But don’t confuse it with a scientific journal.
Also, some commenters ignore the relevant distinction between pasteurization and homogenization and fat separation.
Bacteria like TB do not need a significant time out of the udder to infect a human with TB.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5424a4.htm#:~:te....
It is of course possible to say “I was fine but probably was lucky”, which is at least acknowledging that food science is a thing and probably closer to the truth than your singular personal experience.
GP is pointing out that people take personal stories and turn them into some science-sounding conclusion.
If the internet existed in the 18th century people would talk about how London didn’t have sanitation systems but loads of people survived so all this nonsense about sewage management is silly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30809207 Making some argument that our bodies could handle it if we had more bacteria
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30809218 Literal “I was fine so it’s fine”
Lots of “is this just factory farming being an issue” comments which are at least in good faith and usually questions, though! So people are trying to get more details
It’s not every comment but lots of it.
There's plenty of things that are dangerous and can kill you, but we don't and shouldn't prohibit it all. Instead, society should aim to educate, and also put in warning labels etc.
That’s private benefit and socialized risk.
If you’re going to be taking communal resources then you should need to uphold some community standards.
Public healthcare is not a justification for slavery.