[fizgig]

I think the risks are greatly overstated by the dairy lobby. My family drank raw milk from our own cows and goats for the better part of 10 years, and none of us ever got sick as a result.

Of course our animal accommodations and milking practices were much cleaner than what one might find at commercial scale. But that's not a problem inherent in raw milk, but rather the same unsanitary conditions that plague the industry at large.

[Retric]

It's important to look for actual statistics, milk is a leading cause of food born illness even with pasteurization. Abstractly the risk is not that high however food safty is a major issue: the overall annual estimate of the total burden of disease due to contaminated food consumed in the United States is 47.8 million illnesses, 127,839 hospitalizations, and 3,037 deaths. https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/questions-and-answers.ht...

[fizgig]

Milk is a funny thing, being a rich medium for bacteria.

Take a pint of fresh-from-the-cow milk and a pint of your typical store-bought pasteurized milk and leave them open on the counter for 2 or 3 days at room temperature. The former will turn into a tart, pleasant smelling mix of curds and whey I'd be willing to taste and possibly consume while the latter will be a smelly, gag-inducing spoiled mess that will almost certainly make you ill.

I've witnessed this first-hand.

Raw milk is loaded with beneficial bacteria that can be naturally culture itself to various ends, more often then not out-competing environmental bad bacterial. Pasteurized milk, devoid of most bacteria to start, will (most often) be overrun by bacteria that will make people ill. I does not surprise me that our "normal" milk is a non-trivial vector of food-borne illness.

[Retric]

While I can understand the assumption Raw milk is far more likely to be associated with food born illness for exactly the reasons you mention. However while overall consumption well below 1% it's still responsible for a and much higher than expected fraction of illnesses and a few deaths.

Importantly, people are more likely to die from food that looks good but can kill them than they are to eat food that looks and tastes nasty.