Truth and Lies About Raw Milk
“The
health of the people is really the foundation
upon which all their happiness and all their powers
as a state depend.” – Benjamin
Disraeli, English statesman and social reformer
At the end of World War II, 3.7
million of America’s 5.4 million farms had
milk cows. Most still sold raw milk directly
to neighbors and through local distribution channels,
a situation that would change drastically under
relentless official pressure for compulsory pasteurization
of all milk. A series of articles in popular magazines
in 1944, 1945 and 1946 served to frighten the
public into support of these efforts. A side effect
of this movement was the demise of America’s
small farms.
Ladies’
Home Journal began the campaign with the
article “Undulant Fever,” claiming
- without any accurate documentation - that tens
of thousands of people in the US were suffered
from fever and illness because of exposure to
raw milk.[xxi]
The next year, Coronet magazine followed up with
“Raw Milk Can Kill You,” by Robert
Harris, MD.[xxii]
The outright lies in this article were then repeated
in similar articles that appeared in The
Progressive[xxiii]
and The Reader’s
Digest[xxiv]
the following year.
The author of the Coronet
article represented as fact a town and an epidemic
that was entirely fictitious:
“Crossroads, U.S.A.,
is in one of those states in the Midwest area
called the bread basket and milk bowl of America….What
happened to Crossroads might happen to your town
- to your city - might happen almost anywhere
in America.” The author then gives a lurid
account of a frightful epidemic of undulant fever
allegedly caused by raw milk, an epidemic which
“spread rapidly…it struck one out
of every four persons in Crossroads. Despite the
efforts of the two doctors and the State health
department, one out of every four patients died.”
But there was no Crossroads, and
no epidemic! Author Harris admitted this in a
subsequent interview with J. Howard Brown of Johns
Hopkins University.[xxv]
The outbreak was fictitious and represented no
actual occurrence. Harris’ own public statements
both before and after the Coronet article show
that not only was the article a complete fiction,
but that he knew that such a thing could not possibly
happen. In an article he wrote in 1941, Harris
stated: “Mortality in acute cases of undulant
fever was formerly about two percent, but this
has been greatly lowered by modern methods.”
[xxvi]
In a 1946 paper he read before the Maine Veterinary
Medical Association in Portland in 1946, he stated,
“The small proportion of deaths from acute
illness, varying from two to three percent, rarely
higher, can be made almost, if not quite zero.”
[xxvii]
Official statistics of the US Public
Health Service, which compiles such information
on a nationwide basis, show the possible extent
of any undulant fever problems associated with
raw milk in the years prior to the Harris article.
In the years from 1923 through 1944, there were
recorded in the entire United States 32 outbreaks
of undulant fever attributed to milk, with 256
cases and a total of three deaths.[xxviii]
[xxix]
It is clear that Harris’ synthetic epidemic
had no counterpart in reality. The claim that
“what happened to Crossroads might happen
to your town - to your city - might happen almost
anywhere in America” was not only completely
false but indeed malicious.
These claims and many others like
them were repeated in subsequent magazine articles
read by tens of millions of people, as well as
in countless newspaper articles in the ensuing
years. Writing in The
Rural New Yorker in 1947, Jean Bullitt
Darlington made a particularly fine effort to
set the record straight with an article titled
“Why Milk Pasteurization? Sowing the Seeds
of Fear.” [xxx]
Darlington exposes the lies and distortions in
the magazine articles referred to above.
Present day claims against raw milk
are often more subtle but no less vicious. This
is best exemplified in the story of Francis Pottenger.
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