NO TO RAW MILK
I read the articles concerning ‘raw milk’ with horror. Has everybody forgotten why milk is processed by the ‘pasteur’ method? In the distant past the number that died from tuberculosis was truly appalling (on my paternal line I can positively identify at least five in a hundred years) and virtually every town had its sanatorium.
Pasteur, like many others, spent a great deal of time researching to develop a method of producing safe milk to eliminate the scourge.
I can remember the physical wrecks that pottered about the closed grounds of a sanatorium near where I was born in England. It is a horrible way to die and the quickest method of acquiring it is drinking raw milk. At some time in the distant past I must have got it (but not from milk) and beaten it, as I react to the tests for the antibodies – I was lucky!
Whilst vets test herds for this, a beast could easily pick up TB from a cow ‘nosing’ a dead possum and have spread TB via milk before the next test – this is why farmers trap and kill possums around their properties.
The next risk is leptospirosis, a very nasty ‘spirochete’ and difficult to get rid of. Syphilis is another spirochete. I know, as I have contracted ‘lepto’ twice: once in a freezing works and the second at an A&P show. Infants are unlikely to survive it, adults are very ill.
Yet another risk is brucellosis. It’s like having a bad bout of ‘flu every four or five days, combined with severe depression, for months and months and years until it burns itself out. My wife contracted this