The nation’s largest professional group of pediatricians has renewed its call for a nationwide ban on the sale and distribution of unpasteurized milk and other raw dairy products, according to a policy statement it published earlier this week.
The revised guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics warns of the serious health risks from consuming raw dairy products, particularly for children, as well as pregnant and immunocompromised people.
“More and more people are discussing this as a potentially healthful thing to do, when in fact it’s a highly risky thing to do,” said the academy’s president, Dr. Andrew Racine. “So our responsibility, as the leading voice of pediatric healthcare in the United States that’s dedicated to the health and well-being of children, is to make sure that the accurate, evidence-based information is out there.”
The revised statement follows ProPublica reporting that dived deep into the causes and severe consequences of America’s current fascination with raw milk, which has not been heated to kill off harmful bacteria. Once limited to the fringes of health-food culture, unpasteurized milk has morphed into a widespread movement rooted in wellness trends and institutional distrust. Today, more than 10 million Americans drink it.
Most scientists and health experts agree that raw milk has no significant, proven nutritional benefits over its pasteurized counterpart and that it cannot treat or cure any disease. It also subjects its consumers to over 100 times the risk of foodborne illness, which can be especially dangerous for young children. Before milk pasteurization was widely adopted a century ago, thousands of children died each year from diseases linked to contaminated dairy.
As it has grown in popularity in recent years, raw dairy products have contributed to numerous outbreaks of pathogenic diseases, such as salmonella and E. coli. Over the past two years, nine states have experienced outbreaks that regulators have linked to raw dairy. Just last month, federal regulators linked an E. coli outbreak to unpasteurized cheese. Thirteen people fell ill, more than half of whom were young children.
As illnesses have surged, high-level lawmakers and government officials, including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have championed the industry instead of curbing it. In his federal role, Kennedy said he was “advocating” for raw milk and celebrated the release of a report to Make America Healthy Again with a toast of raw-milk shooters in the White House. The health department did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the new professional guidance or the pediatric group’s call for a ban on raw milk sales.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who chairs the Congressional Food Safety Caucus, told ProPublica that she is taking the guidance of the academy “very seriously.”
“They see firsthand what these illnesses can do to children,” she said in an emailed statement. “Right now, Secretary of Health and Human Services RFK Jr. cannot even bring himself to tell parents not to give it to their kids.”
DeLauro said she was “supportive of any policy that reduces risk of exposure to harmful foods,” including putting warning labels on raw-milk products and maintaining adequate funding for outbreak prevention and tracking.
Federal law restricts the sale of raw milk across state lines, but states can decide how it can be sold within their boundaries. In recent years, proponents have fought to increase access to raw milk within states, often opposing efforts to limit its sales. People can legally purchase raw milk in all but a handful of states, either directly from a store or from a farmer, or even as “pet food.”
Last week, ProPublica detailed the case of two girls severely sickened last year after consuming raw goat milk from an unregulated farm in southern California. The state, which is teeming with black-market dairies, did little to punish the farmer who sold the families the milk. It allowed her to provide her own sample for testing, weeks after the outbreak began, and did not independently sample her grounds for traces of the pathogen, as state investigators have done in other cases. (The farmer told ProPublica that her milk, which tested negative for pathogens, did not cause the outbreak and claimed the families had knowingly bought milk that was not for human consumption, which they deny.)
The mother of one of the girls, a toddler who nearly died, had read about the purported benefits of unpasteurized milk on a site for the Raw Milk Institute, a nonprofit founded by Mark McAfee, one of the nation’s most prolific sellers. In a profile of the California farmer, ProPublica chronicled how social media influencers have amplified his claims and helped him build what is now a $30 million-a-year business even as regulators have linked it to more than a dozen recalls and outbreaks that have sickened hundreds. (McAfee previously defended the claims made on the institute’s website and maintained to ProPublica that raw milk still has therapeutic benefits.)
Members of the academy said they read and circulated ProPublica’s reporting as they drafted their statement.
“This product is being marketed to families as being beneficial for their kids,” said Dr. Adam Ratner, a pediatric infectious disease doctor in New York City and one of the lead authors of the academy’s revised statement. “They don’t see the risks, and unwittingly they end up making a decision that is much more dangerous.”
The academy first published a policy statement on raw milk in 2014, endorsing a nationwide ban on its sale and encouraging its members to reach out to state representatives to advocate for such a restriction. The statement published this week reaffirms this appeal with recent epidemiological evidence. In addition, it cites a growing concern of highly pathogenic avian influenza, which has been shown to contaminate unpasteurized milk.
Racine, the academy’s president, told ProPublica that the policy was also updated on account of “the rise in the discussion about the alleged benefits of raw milk and the fact that more people are experimenting with using it.”
“Prevention really is the best single way to keep children healthy and safe, and this is a preventive move,” he said. “The more that we can disseminate this information to a greater number of people, the healthier we’re going to be able to keep the children of this country.”
