[bigstrat2003]

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.

[biimugan]

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.

[cyanydeez]

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.