Raw milk drinkers in 19 states at risk of rare, dangerous infectious disease

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Thomas Trutschel )
If the explosion of measles cases hasn’t made you question what year it is, this health alert from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may inspire a double-take at the calendar: Unpasteurized milk may have sickened people in 19 states.
Yes, as the country grapples with five—count’em, five—outbreaks of a vaccine-preventable disease, the CDC is warning that another infectious disease of yore poses a risk to widespread dairy drinkers—at least the ones who soured on the standard, decades-old process to remove deadly pathogens from their milk.
The infectious disease is Brucellosis. It’s a hard-to-define febrile illness caused by Gram-negative Brucella bacterial species that infect a variety of animals and the occasional unlucky human. There are four species that pose particular risks to humans: Brucella suis, found in pigs; Brucella melitensis, found in sheep and goats; Brucella canis, from dogs; and—the one at the center of this current health alert—Brucella abortus, which is carried by cattle. Usually, the disease pops up in developing countries. But in the US, meatpackers, hunters, veterinarians, farmers, and careless microbiologists are at risk—as well as those who consume unpasteurized dairy.
Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments