Yes, dragonfly. How dumb can some people be? I asked myself the same question after I've read your comment. Just out of curiosity, have u ever eaten any of the following raw products: cheese, oysters (not chicken), sushi etc?
Hmmmm, you must feel pretty dumb yourself right now... Don't worry, you are only IGNORANT.

*IF* real data was being presented, this outbreak would indeed be an alarm bell, at least for this one instance at this one farm. However, the officials reporting the "outbreak" cherry picked the data to skew toward raw milk as being the culprit. Please see http://hartkeisonline.com/2009/09/22/wes... for more information.

My husband worked on dairy farms for the first 7 years of our marriage and part of our benefits was milk. I never had to buy it and we loved it. Never got sick and even my toddlers drank it. What do you think they did in the old days when that was all they had??? This was probably an isolated incident and now they are making a big deal about it.

It never ceases to amaze me how agribusiness can dictate press coverage for farming issues. I might suggest that the readers address their attention to the front page of The New York Time, Friday, September 18, 2009, to an article titled HEALTH ILLS ABOUND as FARM RUNOFF FOULS WELLS.
I am quite confident more people are sickened by the legal farming practices than raw milk. When I was a child growing up on raw milk we did not use the term raw milk, we just called it milk.

While working on a small farm outside of Afton we drank raw milk for quite a few years. Each cow's milk tastes different. We made butter out of the cream that rose to the top of the milk. My son drank it too. He was never sick the whole time we worked on the farm. You have to watch the bacterial count but otherwise it is really good for you.

Growing up, I had friends raised on farms. No one ever got sick from fresh dairy (that I knew of...) I remember watching the cleaning process of equipment, the sterilization and handling seemed safe, but then, I was only 10 years old. We churned butter because it was "old fashioned". We thought it was "cool". Better than that, it tasted fabulous!

I doubt this was something that happened due to error on the farms' part. More likely heat related...

We have to pasteurize milk because of our industrial food system. Before that, any outbreak of disease was very local. Today it could effect thousands.

Milk is pasteurized for a reason. Just ask the people who got sick from drinking raw milk from this farm.

dragonfly - Raw milk is natural milk. I have consumed it, both from cows and goats. It has many benefits, which are nullified by pasteurization and homogenization. (What happened at this particular farm I don't know). Check it out for yourself! I have been looking for a good source of raw milk for awhile now...

Why would anyone want to consume raw milk? Why don't ya get some raw chicken for dinner to have along w/ your milk? How dumb can some people be?