Milk: It Does a Body Good – but not if the media tells you it doesn’t.

Last Wednesday, KSL Channel 5 posted an Associated Press piece that reported Utah County Issues Health Warning After Severe Food-borne Illness Outbreak.

Here is the article, followed by what happened next:

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Utah County health officials issued a warning against raw milk consumption after seven cases of a severe food-borne illness were linked to products from the same dairy.

Utah’s Department of Agriculture and Food has issued a notice of investigation Wednesday to Woolsey’s Dairy in Payson, where the sick consumers said they purchased raw milk.

State investigators spent Wednesday at the dairy collecting milk samples that will be tested through the weekend, said Richard Clark, who oversees the division in charge of dairy regulation.

“It will help us be able to determine if the milk currently being produced is contaminated or not and it will help us locate and focus on whether it’s in the animal or in the production,” he said.

There have been 15 confirmed cases of the illness and seven of the cases were traced back to raw milk from Woolsey’s Dairy.

All of the cases have tested positive for Campylobacter, a common bacterial infection that can cause diarrhea, cramping, abdominal pain and fever usually lasting about one week, health department spokesman Lance Madigan said.

Severe cases can result in a life-threating infection. Most people fall ill within 1-to-10 days after exposure.

Doctors are required to report the disease, which was first brought to the health department’s attention on Monday, he said.

Only one person has been hospitalized and several of the sick are from the same family.

Last year the county recorded 39 cases of the disease, but not all were linked to the consumption of raw food products, Madigan said.

“You can contract it in other ways. It’s not necessarily a given that it came from raw milk. We’re still investigating,” Madigan said.

Epidemiologists are conducting DNA tests and looking at 16 markers to determine if all 15 cases are linked, he said.

A telephone message left for Lars Woolsey, the dairy’s listed owner and operator was not immediately returned.

Woolsey’s Dairy produces about 100 gallons of raw milk daily and is believed to sell that within a 48 hour period, Clark said. Dairies are inspected four times annually. Clark did not know when the dairy had last been inspected or if there was a documented history of problems there.

Health department officials recommend consumers discard any recently purchased raw milk and see a doctors if they begin to suffer any symptoms of the illness.

Now of course there were customers of Woolsey’s that dropped their business immediately and this business is reported to have been significantly hurt by this report.

But guess what? The milk was tested and the preliminary lab tests that were sent to Washington state by Woolsey’s with the results being that testers are 99% sure that there is no campolbacter found in Woolsey’s milk samples. The final results will be finished on Monday.
Woolsey’s issued this statement, included the information in the above paragraph to its customers:
Just so every one knows if we haven’t talked to you personally in the last few days, the state has interviewed 15 people with the campolbacter bacteria and 7 of those people have used Woolsey dairy milk so they sent out a health bulletin saying that they had proof that this was comming from the dairy without ever testing our milk. The State tests were sent on wed. the same day that they sent out the news media, for the results of this test the milk needs to be cultured for 7 days.
If you are experiencing flu like symptoms I believe that there is a bad bad flu bug going around. I also talked to some people with a virus that has the same symptoms.

This is yet another case of the media being reactionary to something without all the facts and evidence. And in the process, yet another local business was hurt.