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According to newly released guidelines in the American Academy of Pediatrics, women that are pregnant, infants and young children should strictly avoid raw or unpasteurized milk and milk products.
In announcing the brand new guidelines, lead author Dr. Yvonne Maldonado noted the amount of raw dairy food available on the market.
“We’ve no scientific evidence that consuming raw milk provides any advantages over pasteurized milk and dairy food,” said Maldonado, a pediatrician at Stanford University’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. “But in accordance with the amount of raw-milk products available on the market, we all do see a disproportionately large number of diseases and illnesses from raw milk.”
According to a 2011 survey by the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture, raw milk and raw-milk goods are legal to sell in 30 states. However, only a few can be sold in supermarkets.
While the Food and Drug Administration banned interstate shipment and sales over state lines of raw milk plus some raw-milk products later, it’s no legal authority of these products for sale inside an individual state’s borders. The FDA does make an exception on cheeses which have been aged at least 60 days, letting them be transported across state lines on the market when the goods are clearly called unpasteurized.
Before pasteurization, contaminated milk was one of the leading reasons for childhood disease and death. Modern-day advocates of raw-milk consumption state that cows are healthier now compared to cows from those years. Maldonado asserted even healthy herds can host organisms that create serious infections in children and pregnant women.
“There has been recent reports demonstrating that even healthy dairy animals in good facilities carry a few of these organisms on their own udders, or the organisms are somewhere in their environment, and the milk could be contaminated with them,” Maldonado said. “When these organisms are ingested, especially by young babies or pregnant women, they can cause certain illness.”
The academy’s guidelines on raw milk act like those put out by the American Medical Association, the American Veterinary Medical Association, the International Association for Food Protection, the National Environmental Health Association, the FDA and the World Health Association. It required a nationwide ban around the sale of unpasteurized milk and dairy food.
In endorsing the prohibition, the statement cited a particular pathogenic strain of E. coli bacteria that can cause severe illness as well as liver failure. The bacterium is capable of doing residing in raw-milk cheese even after 60 days of getting older and it has been linked to E. coli outbreaks. In addition to many species of bacteria, the organization’s statement also cites viruses that may inhabit raw milk, like giardia, rabies and norovirus.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), norovirus is easily the most frequent reason for acute gastroenteritis in the United States, causing between 19 and 21 million illnesses, 56,000 and 71,000 hospitalizations and between 570 and 800 deaths annually.
The statement from the AAP also calls for pediatricians to lobby their state lawmakers in support of state bans.
