{"id":2087,"date":"2012-02-23T20:19:48","date_gmt":"2012-02-24T02:19:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/realfoodhouston.com\/?p=2087"},"modified":"2012-02-23T20:19:48","modified_gmt":"2012-02-24T02:19:48","slug":"a-cdc-study-carefully-selects-data-and-criteria-to-support-anti-raw-milk-position","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.realfoodhouston.com\/wp-files\/2012\/02\/23\/a-cdc-study-carefully-selects-data-and-criteria-to-support-anti-raw-milk-position\/","title":{"rendered":"A CDC study carefully selects data and criteria to support anti-raw milk position"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Glass<\/a>“Majority of dairy-related disease outbreaks linked to raw milk”\u00a0 is the title of\u00a0a press release<\/a> from the CDC about a new study just published in the\u00a0journal Emerging infectious Diseases<\/em>.\u00a0 At first\u00a0the\u00a0data makes it look\u00a0really\u00a0bad for raw milk.\u00a0 The\u00a0subtitle of the press release\u00a0is “CDC Report Shows Higher Rates of ‘Raw’ Milk Outbreaks in States Where It’s Legal.”\u00a0\u00a0I was immediately skeptical of these claims\u00a0because they just didn’t agree with the substantial\u00a0research<\/a>\u00a0done by Dr. Ted Beals showing the safety of drinking raw milk.\u00a0 My personal experience with raw milk sure doesn’t support the report’s conclusions.<\/p>\n

I was glad to see the critique\u00a0issued by the\u00a0Weston A. Price Foundation<\/a>, which strongly supports the safety and health benefits of drinking raw milk.\u00a0 Their response is titled “CDC Cherry Picks Data to Make Case Against Raw Milk<\/a>.”\u00a0 Please read all of both press releases to get the whole story about how the data was manipulated to reach the CDC’s necessary anti-raw milk position, but\u00a0I do want to highlight a\u00a0couple of\u00a0things the WAPF\u00a0uncovered\u00a0about how the CDC carefully selected–‘cherry-picked’–its\u00a0data to support their position.<\/p>\n

First:\u00a0 The specific years analyzed in the study, 1993 to 2006, conveniently stopped just before there were significant outbreaks from pasteurized milk in 2007: 135 people became ill, and three people died from\u00a0pasteurized milk contaminated with Listeria.\u00a0 Yes, three people died from pasteurized milk<\/em>.\u00a0 Also,\u00a0the years just before the study began analyzing data, the 1980’s,\u00a0were particularly bad for pasteurized milk.\u00a0 For example, in 1985 “there were over 16,000 confirmed cases of Salmonella infection that were traced back to pasteurized milk from a single dairy.” Estimates of the total number of illness involved in that outbreak\u00a0were over 168,000, “the largest outbreak of salmonellosis ever identified in the United States” at that time.\u00a0 The study authors chose their time period well, didn’t they?\u00a0 The same kind of data were available for the years omitted just like those included in the study, but the omitted\u00a0years weren’t as favorable to pasteurized milk.<\/p>\n

Also, I found it especially significant that the analysts chose to\u00a0compare data based on number of\u00a0“outbreaks” not number of “illnesses.”\u00a0 Since an “‘outbreak’ of foodborne illness can consist of two people with minor stomachaches\u00a0to thousands of people with bloody diarrhea” the study’s choice of\u00a0comparing ‘outbreaks’\u00a0distorts the seriousness of the\u00a0illnesses by giving the same weight to all ‘outbreaks.’\u00a0\u00a0A comparison based on the number of illnesses would have provided a more accurate picture.\u00a0\u00a0Judith McGeary well counters the study’s\u00a0conclusion that there\u00a0more ‘outbreaks’ in\u00a0states where raw milk is legal\u00a0than in states where it’s illegal.\u00a0 She says, “had the authors looked at actual risk of illness, instead of the artificially defined \u201coutbreaks,\u201d there would have been no significant results to report.”\u00a0 It’s fairly clear why they chose to use ‘outbreaks.’<\/p>\n

Others have also noted that the timing of this press release was suspiciously close to the Harvard Raw Milk Debate<\/a> just a few days before, and\u00a0the subtitle is not\u00a0very subtle while several states are currently considering bills that would allow the legal sale of raw milk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Majority of dairy-related disease outbreaks linked to raw milk”\u00a0 is the title of\u00a0a press release from the CDC about a new study just published in the\u00a0journal Emerging infectious Diseases.\u00a0 At first\u00a0the\u00a0data makes it look\u00a0really\u00a0bad for raw milk.\u00a0 The\u00a0subtitle of the …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14,63,6,19],"tags":[64,84,24,29],"class_list":["post-2087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-access-to-real-food","category-food-safety","category-raw-milk","category-real-food","tag-food-safety-2","tag-health-2","tag-raw-milk-2","tag-wapf"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p70SEj-xF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.realfoodhouston.com\/wp-files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.realfoodhouston.com\/wp-files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.realfoodhouston.com\/wp-files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.realfoodhouston.com\/wp-files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.realfoodhouston.com\/wp-files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2087"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/www.realfoodhouston.com\/wp-files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2087\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2100,"href":"http:\/\/www.realfoodhouston.com\/wp-files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2087\/revisions\/2100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.realfoodhouston.com\/wp-files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.realfoodhouston.com\/wp-files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.realfoodhouston.com\/wp-files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}