When Jackie’s 9-year-old son came down with a low-grade fever in October, she chalked it up to a typical back-to-school bug. But his illness worsened over the next couple of days. “His skin tone looked gray,” she said, and near-constant diarrhea left him unable to sleep and too weak to stand.
After two emergency room visits and a three-day hospitalization, he finally began to recover, said Jackie, who lives in Southern California and requested to be identified only by her first name to protect her family’s privacy. A stool culture revealed that he had been infected with salmonella.
A public health investigator asked Jackie to recount everything her son had consumed during the two weeks before his illness, and to detail the products in her fridge. A week later, they identified the source of his illness: unpasteurized milk from Raw Farm, a dairy producer in Fresno, Calif.
Jackie’s son was one of 171 people sickened and 22 hospitalized from September 2023 to March 2024 in a salmonella outbreak linked to unpasteurized milk from Raw Farm, according to the California Department of Public Health. The size of the outbreak — the largest recorded outbreak connected to unpasteurized milk in more than two decades — only came to light after a preliminary count of 165 cases was released last week. Before that, the latest public notifications of the size of the outbreak were on Oct. 25, 2023, and listed 19 cases in San Diego County and Orange County.
“This outbreak could be many times larger than the 171 cases reported,” said Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. People don’t always see a doctor when they are ill, and if they do, they may not be tested for food-borne illnesses or cooperate with public health investigations, he said.
Nearly 40 percent of those infected during the outbreak were younger than 5, California health officials said, and cases were reported in California, Washington State, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Texas. Sales of unpasteurized milk, which has not been heated to a temperature that would kill potentially harmful bacteria, are illegal or heavily restricted in nearly two dozen states. But retail sales are legal in California and a growing number of states.
Public health officials have long warned that drinking raw milk could cause food-borne illness, which in rare cases can be deadly, especially for children, older adults and those who are pregnant or who have weakened immune systems. In milder cases, it can cause symptoms like diarrhea, stomach cramping and vomiting. The concern about raw milk has been heightened this year by the rapid spread of bird flu among dairy cattle in the United States. Yet consumer interest in raw milk seems only to have grown — retail sales were about 35 percent higher this June compared with a year earlier, according to data from the market research firm NielsenIQ.
“Drinking raw milk has always been playing Russian roulette with your health,” said Dr. Michael Payne, a researcher at the Western Institute of Food Safety and Security at the University of California, Davis.
What’s alarming, experts said, is how little the public seems to understand about the seriousness of those risks. In a survey of 1,031 U.S. adults conducted in June, 24 percent of respondents thought raw milk was as safe or safer than pasteurized milk, and 30 percent were unsure.
Jackie knew that drinking unpasteurized milk came with some risk, but she believed that the lack of processing made it a healthier choice for her family. And she trusted Raw Farm, which states on its website that it tests every tank of milk for pathogens before bottling it or making it into cheese, butter or other dairy products.
“This was the only company I chose to buy raw milk from because of their reputation and safety,” Jackie said. She had been a loyal customer of the farm for 10 years, but is now a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Raw Farm. “I have a hard time understanding how this could happen.”
Raw Farm voluntarily recalled all of its milk and heavy cream for one week in October, and most of the salmonella illnesses occurred during the fall. State health officials said they “found strong evidence linking the outbreak to Raw Farm’s milk products.” Most of the people sickened reported consuming raw milk from the dairy, and the genetic sequences of the salmonella in infected people matched those in Raw Farm milk.
Aaron McAfee, the president of Raw Farm, said that their usual milk tank tests didn’t detect the salmonella that caused the outbreak. It was a “learning opportunity” that led the farm to improve its testing protocols, he said. The farm has about 1,600 milking cows and produces 75,000 gallons of raw milk each week, Mr. McAfee said.
“To any families that were part of that learning experience, we are sorry,” Mr. McAfee said. “The improvements that we made have dramatically increased our food safety,” he added.
But experts said they are skeptical that ramped up testing could prevent future problems. “You can’t test your way to food safety,” Dr. Payne said. Pathogens like salmonella may not be detectable in a cow’s milk but can be shed in manure, which can easily contaminate milk on a farm, he said. Without pasteurization, “you are always going to be at risk for contamination,” Dr. Payne said.
No raw milk dairy in the United States can guarantee that they don’t potentially have “a lethal product that they’re selling,” Dr. Osterholm said.
And people don’t often hear about food recalls, which may be posted on grocery store bulletin boards or government social media accounts, said Vanessa Coffman, director of the Alliance to Stop Foodborne Illness. “It’s a communications failure on a lot of ends,” she said.
Raw Farm was linked to a multistate outbreak of E. coli in raw Cheddar cheese earlier this year, and in 2023, recalls of raw Cheddar cheese for salmonella and raw milk for campylobacter. Under a previous name, Organic Pastures Dairy Company, the farm was implicated in E. coli outbreaks that occurred in 2016, 2011 and 2006, as well as multiple recalls when salmonella, campylobacter and listeria had been found in their products.
Mark McAfee, the founder and chief executive of Raw Farm, said in an email that the company has “had very few illnesses in the last 25 years.”
“Pathogens are entirely natural,” he said, adding that “our consumers are seeking to rebuild that relationship with the farm and the bugs that naturally live there.” He also said that the company’s products are labeled with warnings that they may contain disease-causing microbes, as required by state law.
In 2006, then-7-year-old Christopher Martin was infected with a dangerous strain of E. coli from raw milk from Organic Pastures. He developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, a severe condition that affects the kidneys, and was hospitalized for 56 days, said Mary McGonigle-Martin, his mother. “I made a choice that almost killed my child,” she said.
It is “tragic” to see children continue to be sickened by raw milk from the same farm, Ms. McGonigle-Martin said. “It just makes me so sad for these families.”
Jackie’s son has fully recovered; he’s back to swimming and hanging out with his friends, she said. She and her husband still believe there are certain health benefits of raw milk. But they now buy pasteurized milk, which her son won’t drink. After his hospitalization, he lost his appetite for milk altogether.
The post As Interest in Raw Milk Surges, New Data Sheds Light on a Major Salmonella Outbreak appeared first on New York Times.
