Infant dies of listeria after mother consumes raw milk during pregnancy

[thewayne]

Sigh. And it happened in my state of New Mexico.

Raw milk is something that Robert FUCKING Kennedy Junior Mint advocates for, claiming it's healthy. It is decidedly not. It's swarming with pathogens that can be quite deadly which is why the death rate went down after pasteurization became a dairy industry standard practice.

So all together now: Hey, Hey, RFK: how many kids have you killed today!

The medical examiner can't directly tie the infant's death to the raw milk consumption of the mother except noting there's not many other places the child could have contracted listeria from.


What's worse, I just read today that women are now training for pregnancy like they train for doing a triathlon. Including the consumption of raw milk. Thus I expect this is just the first such report that we'll be seeing like this.

https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/02/newborns-death-spurs-raw-milk-warning-in-new-mexico/

Comments

[disneydream06]

OMg!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
People are insanely STUPID!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Is it wrong of me to say, the babies don't deserve it, but the adults do. :o :o :o
Hugs, Jon

[armiphlage]

My grandparents owned a dairy farm.

My grandmother's health improved greatly when they sold the cows, and she started drinking pasteurized milk from the store.

[thewayne]

I read a description of what the milking shed is like.  I plan on never visiting a milking shed.  Or a dairy farm.

[disneydream06]

That is great to hear. :)

[thewayne]

An adult legitimately has the right to poison themselves.  People do it with alcohol and other drugs on a regular basis.  They do not have the right to do it to infants and minors.

[disneydream06]

AMEN to that. :o

[halfshellvenus]

Oh, that's sad. And this country, at least, seems to be full of spectacularly stupid people. Whose numbers have only increased with RFK's deadly incompetence. :(

[devilc]

I am SO SO glad I live in a state where the sale of raw milk is illegal.

[thewayne]

That is so cool!  I would class that as a major selling point to recruit people to NV, speaking as an immune-compromised person to whom raw milk consumption would be very dangerous.

[arlie]

I feel certain it's possible to produce known safe raw milk, but it would require a lot of monitoring, and damned if I know what you'd do about the tendency of a cow's tail to sweep both her anus and her udders, transferring material from the former to the latter. (Actually, it's more likely the tail picks up the cow shit from her legs; the anus thing is just a catchy sound bite. Either way, you end up with cow shit on the udder.)

You'd probably have to test every single small batch of milk, and discard a lot of them, which would be expensive. Providers would have a strong financial temptation to cut corners, so they'd need to be monitored closely - as well as themselves needing to closely monitor their own production process.

The problem is that this kind of monitoring is more attention intensive than merely heating all milk to a critical temperature - but not higher - on its route from cow to consumer. That requires monitoring too - otherwise some dodgy and/or inept providers won't bother with the extra step, or not do it consistently. But it's at least rather easier to monitor.

More raw milk is exactly what no one needs when the FDA (or whatever agency does this sort of monitoring; it might be state level) is understaffed already and a target for "starving the beast".

But the rest of us are OK until cheapskate providers find they can get away with passing off raw milk as pasteurized, saving some trivial amount of their money in the process. Fortunately (?) homogenization generally goes along with pasteurization, and a consumer can readily identify un-homogenized milk. But AFAIK, there's no consumer accessible way to easily identify non-pasteurized milk.

[thewayne]

I read a reply, I think on Ars Technica, from someone who lived on a milk farm.  From what he described, there's absolutely no way you can keep the cow's udders and teats clean in even a moderately-sized operation, or even the milking equipment sterile, so they basically don't try - they don't have the man-power, if they did the price of milk would soar.  They do hose out the milk house between milkings.  Their grass diet makes their feces very wet, and they still dump while being milked, which is another problem with trying to keep the milking equipment sterile.  They simply can't do it.  Each milking station has a paper filter, which is replaced between the two daily milking sessions, but not between cows.  It's an extremely filthy operation.  Pasteurization is very important, and the only way I'll consume it since I'm immune-compromised.

[arlie]

Yeesh! It's even worse than I realized.

[thewayne]

Milk production is pretty horrible.  And what I wrote is very tamed down from what I read!

[moxie_man]

And once again, I'd like to know what it was I did as a dumb kid that got me thrown into this punishment timeline. Did I break one too many mirrors in the abandoned junk lot? Did I step on the wrong butterfly? What was it?

[thewayne]

You didn't turn left.

[moxie_man]

The last time I passed through Albuquerque (a long time ago), I made sure to turn left. Maybe it was a different point that I was supposed to turn left...

[kaishin108]

Man the overall health care in the states is going down so fast. It's creepy. :-(

And kind of related, I just heard (hope it's not true) that AI is going to help decide what is covered or not on insurance. Shaking my head...

[thewayne]

Some health plans already use AI for making claim decisions.  The companies just don't talk about it.

[kaishin108]

It's not a wonder many mistakes on coverage are being made, sigh.

[motodraconis]

Did you hear that the ghastly Ballerina Farm gits had to stop selling raw milk as it was riddled with bacteria? Article also contains a photo of one of their kids drinking from a filthy cup with some sort of gross shit (blood? Shit? Pus?) at the bottom of it.

[thewayne]

I read a reply, I believe it was on the Ars Technica story, that described how dairy farms operate.  This wasn't a huge one, perhaps 500 cows, and it is truly disgusting how dairy farms operate at scale.  Yeah, you really want milk to be processed properly and filtered and pasteurized!  I can possibly see a small farmer safely producing milk for his family and keeping his equipment sterile and cleaning the cow's udder and teats before milking, but at any larger scale it is completely impossible.  But I won't touch the stuff.

[silveradept]

And you know that the people who insist that this "natural" consumption is somehow healthier for all of us will dismiss the death of a newborn as just not being strong enough for the world and a sad tragedy, rather than a completely preventable death through the use of products that are actually safe to consume.

[white_aster]

My inner microbiologist is screaming. This is generally a well-known tendency for most health risks (like vaccinatable diseases) - people forget how fricking terrible pertussis and major flu epidemics and polio and rubella and smallpox and listeriosis from raw milk, etc etc are. They forget how terrible it is for so many children to die. They forget why their great-grandparents embraced these technologies because they wanted their families to SURVIVE. The consequences have become so rare that people instead worry about much less dangerous things and ignore the 800-lb gorilla of childhood mortality.

Unfortunately, folks who are willing to say "yes, let's drink raw milk, surely that is safe" are unlikely to listen to their doctors. They need it to be shown to them via an actual sickness in their family before they realize that they gravely misjudged the risk they were taking. It happened with COVID vaccination, it's happening with measles, and it's gonna keep happening so long as these shysters keep hawking their products.

[thewayne]

(nods in agreement)  I was born with a heart/lung condition and had pneumonia when I was less than a year old.  They didn't isolate new-borns back at that time, and one of my relatives had a cold when they 'came to see the baby'.  I can't imagine how sick I got!  Heart surgery when I was 18 months resolved it, I've since had asthma all my life, and now a crashed immune system.  I just can't get over how some people can ignore science with things like raw milk.

(I keep current on my DPT and recently received an RSV vax)