Outbreak linked to raw cheese grows; 9 cases total, one with kidney failure | Hacker News Reader

Outbreak linked to raw cheese grows; 9 cases total, one with kidney failure

arstechnica.com

15 pointsBrajeshwar8 comments

A lot of traditional European hard cheeses are raw (parmesan, gruyere, Lincolnshire poacher) and I've never heard of anyone getting E coli from parmesan.

I'm guessing this is more down to generally rubbish US food quality than anything else, it's not like raw milk where it's a "health" fad, raw cheese is just normal in a lot of European countries.

Dry aged cheeses are safe to eat unpasteurized. Raw milk and relatively fresh cheddar are a lot riskier.

True, there are some soft cheeses (Brie I think and various French cheeses) that are traditionally unpasteurised. I think pregnant women are normally told not to eat Brie in the UK for this reason.

Even traditional Cheddar is normally pasteurised in the UK

In case anyone's wondering what "raw" cheese is, apparently it's cheese made from unpasteurised milk.

Generally speaking, raw-milk cheeses are much safer to consume than fresh raw dairy milk. However, the dairy in question is a garbage company that has been responsible for numerous outbreaks in the past.

Raw milk is safe to drink too, if it's been kept correctly. I grew up on a dairy farm, and as you might imagine we didn't buy milk from the store when we had our own right there. Never once did I get sick, nor did any of the other farmers we knew doing the same thing. The risk of getting sick is higher, but unless you're not practicing proper hygiene it'll probably be ok.

I am all for requiring raw milk to be prominently disclosed, but banning it entirely is foolishness. Let people make their own choices for the level of risk they are comfortable with; don't make paternalistic decisions for them.

This isn't a binary distinction -- safe vs unsafe. Things you put in your body have a risk profile. The risk profile of raw milk is much higher than pasteurized milk, regardless of how hygienic you think you're being. Cows step in mud, their own feces, the feces of other animals, dirty water, and many other things that can splash up and onto (and into) their udders, contaminating their milk with pathogens.

Letting people make their own choices always has its limits, regardless of what people say (rather casually on the Internet). When nearly all health systems in the world work through the healthy subsidizing the unhealthy, we should be attempting to limit preventable illness.

In any case, I don't think there's any country or state that bans drinking raw milk. If you're on a farm and you want to drink your own milk, go ahead. Just don't claim it's safe enough to sell, because it really isn't.

When we say "safe" it's a regulatory statement about _certainty_ not about any given person's activity. We know pasteurized milk is safe because the process produces a high probability of a safe product.

When we don't do that, it's called raw. From there, we don't need to investigate anything else, whether it's 1 in 100, 1 in 10, or whatever. We know that because it's unprocessed, it's unsafe.

It's always curious when people bring anecdotes to a discussion like this as if what their family did with raw milk is perfectly emulated everywhere.

Same thing happened with surgery in the early century: doctors wouldn't wash their hands because they had some base assumptions about what caused diesease.

In the end, countering these anecdotes rarely work.

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