Kennedy has championed raw milk despite outbreaks, pediatricians warn
The American Academy of Pediatrics has reaffirmed its call for a nationwide ban on the sale and distribution of raw milk and other unpasteurized dairy products, according to a revised policy statement the organization published earlier this week.
The revised guidance warns of serious health risks from raw dairy, particularly for children as well as for pregnant and immunocompromised people. AAP President Dr. Andrew Racine said the academy’s role was to publish what he called the “accurate, evidence-based information” about those risks.
“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,” Racine said in comments provided to ProPublica. “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 statement updates a 2014 policy in which the academy first endorsed a nationwide raw-milk ban and encouraged its members to lobby state representatives for restrictions. The revised document also adds a section warning about highly pathogenic avian influenza, which it says has been shown to contaminate unpasteurized milk.
More than 10 million Americans now drink raw milk, according to ProPublica. The academy and the broader scientific consensus maintain that unpasteurized milk has no significant, proven nutritional benefits over pasteurized milk and cannot treat or cure disease. Raw dairy carries more than 100 times the risk of foodborne illness compared with pasteurized products, the policy statement says, and children face especially severe danger. Before milk pasteurization was widely adopted a century ago, thousands of children died each year from diseases linked to contaminated dairy.
Outbreaks tied to raw dairy have risen sharply. In the past two years, nine states have experienced outbreaks that regulators have linked to raw dairy, according to the academy. Just last month, federal regulators linked an E. coli outbreak to unpasteurized cheese that sickened 13 people, more than half of whom were young children.
As those reports have come in, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has publicly championed raw milk. In his federal role, Kennedy has said he was “advocating” for raw milk and celebrated the release of a Make America Healthy Again report with a toast of “raw-milk shooters” at the White House. The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the academy’s revised guidance or its call for a ban.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who chairs the Congressional Food Safety Caucus, told ProPublica she is taking the academy’s call “very seriously.”
“They see firsthand what these illnesses can do to children,” DeLauro 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 warning labels on raw-milk products and maintaining funding for outbreak prevention and tracking.
Federal law restricts the sale of raw milk across state lines, but states set within-state rules. Consumers can legally buy raw milk in all but a handful of states, either directly from stores or farmers, or sometimes marketed as “pet food.”
The revised statement draws on prior ProPublica reporting. 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 mother of one of the girls, a toddler who nearly died, had read about the purported benefits of unpasteurized milk on the website of the Raw Milk Institute, a nonprofit founded by raw-milk producer Mark McAfee. ProPublica reported that social media influencers have helped McAfee build what is now a roughly $30 million-a-year business, even as regulators have linked it to more than a dozen recalls and outbreaks that have sickened hundreds. McAfee has defended the institute’s claims and maintained to ProPublica that raw milk has therapeutic benefits.
Members of the academy told ProPublica they read the outlet’s reporting while drafting the revised 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 revised policy. “They don’t see the risks, and unwittingly they end up making a decision that is much more dangerous.”
Racine told ProPublica the policy was also updated because 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.”