Raw Milk Roulette
Louisiana Republicans come up with yet another clever way to kill or maim their supporters
Is there anything more emblematic of the Louisiana Republican Party’s descent into cultish anti-public health madness than its bizarre embrace of raw milk?
It’s not enough that leaders of a party supposedly dedicated to “life” have become enemies of life-saving vaccines. And it’s not just COVID vaccines they’ve spurned. They’re welcoming a wide variety of once-dormant diseases back into our midst with their hostility to sensible public health measures in schools and workplaces.
In the recent legislative session, lawmakers approved a bill that prohibits any daycare, school, college, or university from imposing a COVID-19 vaccine mandate. Lawmakers also approved legislation to force schools to include information about the right to reject all kinds of vaccines in any communication to parents about immunization requirements. Gov. Jeff Landry hasn’t yet signed these bills, although there’s no reason to believe he won’t.
But it’s Republicans’ passion for encouraging people to endanger their lives by guzzling raw milk that’s most indicative of the party’s strange desire to damage the health of their followers and loved ones . . . all to own the libs, I guess.
As the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported:
A bill legalizing the sale of raw milk in Louisiana is set to become law, despite warnings from state and federal agencies that consuming it is risky amid an outbreak of H5N1, or bird flu, in cattle.
The bill, HB467, passed unanimously in the House to a chorus of mooing lawmakers last month. The bill was later watered down in the Senate after the Louisiana Department of Health estimated it would take roughly $900,000 a year and seven employees to regulate raw milk for human consumption.
Eventually, legislators agreed raw milk could be sold, but only with labels that say "not for human consumption" and warn of the potential for "harmful bacteria." Lawmakers acknowledged that the label likely would not prevent people from drinking it, which is legal.
Landry hasn’t yet signed the bill sponsored by Ponchatoula Republican Rep. Kim Landry Coates, but given his longstanding hostility to sensible public health policies, he’ll surely drink the Kool-Aid raw milk.
And shame on those House and Senate Democrats who know better but went along with this reckless bill. Several House and Senate Democrats voted against it or didn’t vote.
The absurdity of encouraging people to ingest raw milk while warning them that it’s unfit for human consumption is akin to passing legislation encouraging a soft drink company to sell bottles of unfiltered Mississippi River water — maybe something called “Mighty Sip” or “Delta Dew” — to consumers, so long as the bottles include a label saying, “Perhaps you shouldn’t drink this stuff.”
Maybe you won’t get E. coli, but maybe you will. But hey, drink up to show the liberals you believe in liberty!
And while you’re at it, why not consider a Clorox cocktail to ward off your next case of COVID?
Earlier this week, the rightwing group Turning Point USA embraced the movement and encouraged its followers to drink raw milk. The group is even selling t-shirts promoting it.
The t-shirt description on the group’s website reads, “Spread the word about the perks of raw milk, like good-for-you bacteria and essential nutrients, that get lost in the pasteurization process with this adorable crop top t-shirt printed using eco-friendly inks!”
This is insane, potentially deadly stuff.
How dangerous is drinking raw milk?
Allow me to quote Landry’s Louisiana Department of Health on this subject. In a pamphlet online, LDH says:
Raw milk can carry harmful bacteria and other germs that can make you very sick or kill you. While it is possible to get foodborne illnesses from many different foods, raw milk is one of the riskiest of all.
Getting sick from raw milk can mean many days of diarrhea, stomach cramping, and vomiting. Less commonly, it can mean kidney failure, paralysis, chronic disorders, and even death.
Many people who chose raw milk thinking they would improve their health instead found themselves (or their loved ones) sick in a hospital for several weeks fighting for their lives from infections caused by germs in raw milk. For example, a person can develop severe or even life-threatening diseases, such as Guillain-Barré syndrome, which can cause paralysis, and hemolytic uremic syndrome, which can result in kidney failure and stroke.
That pamphlet was published before the very real danger of contracting bird flu from unpasteurized milk.
Don’t think this legislation is only about the misguided belief that raw milk has magical health benefits. This is mostly about the Republican Party’s hostility to public health because, if the pandemic taught them anything, it’s that government has no legitimate role to play in preventing the needless deaths of millions from communicable diseases. That’s the reason Coates and others promoted the bill with the slogan “Taste the Liberty,” not “Taste the Health Benefits.”
This is also about the GOP’s growing aversion to science. As the Guardian reported in January:
Food safety experts are “absolutely horrified” by the growing raw milk trend, says Dr Marion Nestle, the Paulette Goddard professor emerita of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University.
“Pasteurizing milk is one of the great public health achievements of the 20th century,” Nestle says. “Drinking cow’s milk used to kill babies.”
Nestle adds that she thinks the embrace of raw milk goes beyond an anxiety about ultra-processed foods – which pasteurized milk, she underscores, is not. “It’s part of the whole anti-authoritarian, anti-science, anti-expertise waves that we’re seeing in this country right now.”
If any Louisiana resident should die in the next few months after ingesting raw milk tainted with deadly bacteria, Landry, Coates, and others who pushed this bill surely won’t blame themselves for their role in recklessly endangering lives.
But if they cared as much about being members of an actual “pro-life” party, they’d quit finding creative ways to help their followers kill themselves.
Over time, contra health science attitudes currently pervading conservative and libertarian thought in the name of individual liberty should dwindle and approach extinction according to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which generally favors intelligence in the game of survival.
My late father in law detested milk. I asked him why. Seems he had undulant fever (brucellosis) as an adolescent; from drinking raw milk "fresh from the cow." No penicillin in those days; and symptoms like joint pain and anemia plagued him until he died.