Here:
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/food-safety
tl;dr raw milk and dairy is the main source of infection with Campylobacter, enterotoxic E. coli and Listeria.
I could also add a few other typical zoonoses caused by raw milk and dairy, off the top of my head: bovine tuberculosis, Brucellocis, Q-Fever, Staphylococcus aureus, various Clostridia etc.
I don't get it to be honest. Back in the day, people didn't know anything about microbes, so there was no reason for them not to drink milk raw. Today, we know a lot more. And yet, people keep following bizzarre nutrition fads that essentially seek to take us back to primitive times, when we didn't understand anything about microbes and disease, and didn't even know how to cook our food to make it safe to eat. It's like some kind of strange, self-destructive atavism, as if the discovery of fire itself never happened. It's incomprehensible and stupid and sad like a cult of Cthulhu.
Pasteurization is useful for commerce because it allows milk to be transported greater distances and stored for longer. But raw milk is not inherently dangerous if consumed fresh.
There is some evidence that pasteurization lowers/changes the nutrient content of the milk, which is unsurprising given how many constituents are present in milk and the temperatures at which proteins denature [0].
[0] https://www.realmilk.com/pasteurization-does-harm-real-milk/
Categorically and emphatically: N o p e. Raw milk can be contaminated at the point of collection already.
It doesn't matter if milk is fresh. Pathogenic bacteria contaminating raw milk can grow just fine in your gut and make you sick, they don't need to grow in the milk during transportation. In fact, transporation, in this day and age, is by refrigerated truck so it's a more hostile environment for many pathogens than your digestive tract.
At larger scales there is simply a larger chance for contamination, but that is mainly because large dairies collect milk from multiple smaller producers, so their milk can be contaminated from multiple sources thus aggregating both the chance of contamination and the number of pathogens. But each individual small farmer can produce contaminated milk, no problem.
If you have one animal, its milk can be contaminated and you can get ill from drinking it.
If you want to drink raw milk, go ahead, but don't go into it making false assumptions about safety and don't spread misinformation that risks harming others' health on the internet, please.
Edit: also, the "Real Milk" folks are fanatical, swivel-eye loons who don't give a shit about anyone's safety and only care about promoting their agenda of drinking raw milk. For some incomprehensible reason. No, pasteurisation doesn't damage milk. This is just rank bollocks of the lowest degree.
If they cared about "evidence" and they were in for a scientific debate, as they like to pretend, they wouldn't be promoting their Campaign for Real Milk with as much zealotry as they do, because there is simply not nearly enough evidence to make a strong case. All the "evidence" that I've seen are studies by their members, or studies of others that they have grossly misrepresented, or often not even a study but a poster at a convention etc. These are textbook quacks. Stay away.
Pasteurized milk prevents illness from contamination but it may not be as well tolerated by some people. Some children show greater skin-prick reactivity to treated milk over untreated milk [0][1], treated milk tends to have a lower threshold of provoking an allergic reaction [2], and heat treatment is shown to abolish the allergy-protective effects of milk [3]. Children who were exposed to raw milk tend to have better allergy tolerance as adults compared to those who consumed processed milk [3].
There are small farmers all over industrialized countries who have no problem drinking raw milk (most of them probably, because the machines are expensive). There are people in rural, non-industrialized Sub-Saharan Africa where non-Pasteurized milk is a staple. The key is that the milk is coming from mostly healthy cows and is drunk fresh. Here is a thought experiment: why do human infants tolerate raw human milk and calves tolerate raw cow milk despite having undeveloped immune systems? It's consumed fresh.
Edit:
> because there is simply not nearly enough evidence to make a strong case
I would also add that the burden of proof and Precautionary Principle cuts both ways. Pasteurization was standardized at a time in history before biochemistry, immunology, and modern nutritional studies. The assumption that the nutritional quality of milk (in vivo) is unaffected by flash heating is what needs to be demonstrated.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30945370/
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3284399/
I know this is threadomancy, two weeks later, but - how the hell would you know that?
If a farmer in Ghana gets the shitters for a week after drinking raw milk, how would you know? If their kid gets meningitis caused by Listeria and needs to have a hand amputated, or a foot, how would you know?
You wouldn't. But the WHO and a bunch of other health agencies around the world collect data on this sort of thing. And the sad truth that emerges is that the majority of food poisoning happens in non-industrialised, developing countries.
Got that? In countries were people don't have a food industry, where raw milk and dairy is all the dairy they can consume, and where everything is fresh, as fresh as fresh can be, that's where most of the food-borne diseases happen.
You wanna know why? Because modern standards of hygiene work, bitches. That's why. And that includes pasteurisation which is basically a method to scrub milk clean of pathogens.
> There are small farmers all over industrialized countries who have no problem drinking raw milk (most of them probably, because the machines are expensive). There are people in rural, non-industrialized Sub-Saharan Africa where non-Pasteurized milk is a staple. The key is that the milk is coming from mostly healthy cows and is drunk fresh. Here is a thought experiment: why do human infants tolerate raw human milk and calves tolerate raw cow milk despite having undeveloped immune systems? It's consumed fresh.
Yes, people around the world drink raw milk all the time. And they get food poisoning all the time. As the WHO link I posted above points out, raw milk and dairy is the main source of infection with Campylobacter, enterotoxic E. coli and Listeria. And a bunch of other pathogens besides, like Brucella, C. Burnetii, S. aureus, Salmonella etc.
Which, again, can contaminate fresh milk from healthy cows just fine.
Btw, you can consume raw milk that isn't fresh without trouble if it is clear of pathogenic bacteria. But you won't know that unless you can actually test its microbial load at the very least. It's not the freshness of the milk that matters, it's what's living inside it that can make you sick.
I don't understand why all this is so hard to understand. Again, atavism and return to nature. "If it's fresh, it's good".
Which brings me to your thought experiment: cows happily take a shit, step on it, smear it all over the grass and then eat the grass. Is that OK because it's fresh, what do you think?
P.S.
> Pasteurization was standardized at a time in history before biochemistry, immunology, and modern nutritional studies
Mnyeah, not really. Pasteurization kept being "standardized" well into the 1980's, when it was determined that C. burnetii (the most heat-tolerant of bacteria targeted by pasteurization) was not destroyed by heating milk to 61C for 30 minutes, as was until then standard practice targeted at Mycobacterium bovis, which was considered to be the most heat tolerant raw milk contaminant. As a result, modern practice of heating milk to 63C for 30 minutes or 72C for 15 seconds was established because it was found to destroy all individual cells of C. burnetii with good certainty. In fact there's a range of times and temperatures determined by experimentally verified heat death curves. All that is from 1986, in the International Dairy Federation Bulletin.
I wonder who told you that bit about "before biochemistry". The swivel-eye loons, I guess?
In the same vein I wouldn't eat raw beef from a supermarket but high quality beef can be enjoyed as steak tartare without worry, same with sashimi...
No.
Come on, think. Why would it make any difference if the milk is from a small or big farm? Why do you think "a small village" is a less hospitable environment for pathogens than "an industrial farm"? Who do you think has more means to test the microbial load of their milk and decontaminate milking machines, animal areas etc? The large company or the small farmer?
This is just one more time the naturalistic fallacy: it's natural, from a village, so it must be healthier!
Well, it isn't. I don't know if you pay attention to dairy news items in the press. I do and every once in a while I find a news item about a batch of French raw milk cheeses being recalled because it was contaminated by some dangerous pathogen. This happens to small-scale dairies with a tiny production converting a few hundred liters of milk from their own farm-raised animals a day.
Except, when it happens to French cheesemakers, because they know their shit, they perform routine tests on their products, and they won't let them reach the consumer and cause disease.
But if you trust the "Real Milk" clowns, who happily claim that raw milk is 100% risk free and it never causes any trouble, then you're just flying blind.
