By KEVIN WALKER
Michigan Correspondent

LIVINGSTON COUNTY, Mich. — Three adults recently became ill – one seriously ill – after they consumed raw milk at a farm in Livingston County.
According to the Michigan Department of Community Health (MDCH), three Michigan residents who said they consumed the raw, or unpasteurized, milk from the farm came down with Q fever, a communicable disease that can cause high fevers, severe headache, joint and body aches, fatigue, chills, sweats and other symptoms.

The three individuals are part of a cow-share program, in which one can legally acquire and consume unpasteurized milk. (The MDCH declined to identify any of the women or the farm in question.)

Although most people recover from Q fever, in some cases a sufferer develops a more serious illness. The serious symptoms may include pneumonia and inflammation of other organs including the liver, heart and central nervous system. Pregnant women, those with compromised immune systems and anyone with heart valve damage or a blood vessel graft are most at risk for the serious kind.

Two of those who fell ill are from Washtenaw County and one is from Monroe County. All are women in their thirties or forties. One had to be hospitalized for what the agency described as a prolonged period for Q fever meningitis, but she has since been released.

“The public should be aware that raw milk and other unpasteurized dairy products have not been heat-treated and therefore, pose a potentially serious risk to human health,” said Dean Sienko, interim chief medical executive for the MDCH. “Unpasteurized milk and other dairy products may contain many types of disease-causing germs, such as E. coli, salmonella and campylobacter.”
Elaine Brown, executive director of Michigan Food and Farming Systems (MIFFS), called the outbreak of Q fever unfortunate.

“I think farmers are doing their best to inform their members about what’s going on, and they’re doing their best to provide a quality, safe product,” she said. “What we’ve been doing is facilitating a discussion for the past three years, to decide what access one should have to raw milk in Michigan.”

MIFFS is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to help small and medium-sized farms be viable. It’s loosely affiliated with Michigan State University, MSU extension and other groups. She said her organization is pretty nonjudgmental toward the sale and consumption of raw milk. About half of states allow the consumption and sale of raw milk while the other half do not, Brown said.

“Farmers are looking for lots of ways to provide value-added,” she said. “Raw milk is another way to provide value-added.”

While raw milk has its passionate advocates, government officials tend not to mince words about what they think of the practice of its consumption. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, routine pasteurization of milk began in the United States in the 1920s and led to dramatic reductions in the number of people getting sick from diseases that had previously been transmitted commonly by milk.

According to the agency, for “some people, drinking contaminated raw milk just once could make them really sick. Even if you trust the farmer and your store, raw milk is never a guaranteed safe product. Drinking raw milk means taking a real risk of getting very sick.”