Raw Milk - Better for Us than Industrially Produced Milk?

I'm not fully on the raw milk boat BUT I find the raw milk movement interesting and the news about it provocative.

from a recent article:

"The revolution will not be pasteurized: Inside the raw-milk underground" by Nathanael Johnson (Harper's Magazine)

"In a 2006 study of thousands of children living on farms in Shropshire, England, Strachan and another scientist, Michael Perkin, found that raw-milk drinkers were unlikely to have eczema or to react to allergens in skin-p***k tests. “The protective effect of unpasteurized milk consumption was remarkably robust,” Strachan and Perkin wrote. Then, in May of 2007, a group of scientists published a paper after surveying almost 15,000 children around Europe. They found that children who drank raw milk were less likely to have any among a wide range of allergies. Either there’s something about industrial milk that’s harmful, Perkin wrote in a commentary that accompanied the paper, or there’s something in raw milk that’s beneficial. None of these findings mean that raw milk is safe. Every single study contains the caveat that raw milk often harbors pathogens. From an epidemiological perspective, Bruce German told me, advising raw-milk consumption at this point “would be crazy.” Health officials certainly should have a high level of confidence before approving anything risky. But in light of the new evidence, it was becoming harder to deny that something beneficial was being lost during pasteurization. And health offiicials also have an obligation to ensure that they are not outlawing what makes us healthy."


"...there was another theory I’d been hearing from scientists working to explain why O157:H7 had burst onto the scene in the 1980s with such virulence. Maybe, they said, it wasn’t that the bacteria had changed but that we had changed. In Brazil outbreaks of E. coli O157:H7 are unheard of, though the bacteria exist there. A pair of recent studies show that Brazilian women have antibodies protecting them against O157:H7 and that they pass these antibodies to their children through the placenta and their breast milk. I found this interesting, especially in light of the fact that in every case I learned about, the victims of the Organic Pastures outbreak had just started drinking McAfee’s milk. Perhaps those who had been drinking the milk longer had developed the antibodies."