Re: Fwd: LA Times Article--U--need 2 read this

[Guest guest]

Can you post the actual article? It's gone from the link you

posted...too old of a story apparantly.

Bob

>

>

>

> I've been waiting for this.

>

http://www.latimes.com/features/magazine/west/la-tm-rawmilk49dec03,0,165925.

> story?coll=la-home-magazine

> Ruth

>

[Guest guest]

http://www.latimes.com/features/magazine/west/la-tm-rawmilk49dec03,0,165925.

> story?coll=la-home-magazine

I tried too,, and it says page unavailable

[Guest guest]

This is a current story. You have to copy the entire link and past it into

your browser to get there. Part of the link is not highlighted in the email.

It's a story on Mark M.

LHR Manufacturing

Setting The Standard for Portable Milking Machines

http://www.milking-machines.com

Re: Fwd: LA Times Article--U--need 2 read this

Can you post the actual article? It's gone from the link you

posted...too old of a story apparantly.

Bob

>

>

>

> I've been waiting for this.

>

http://www.latimes.com/features/magazine/west/la-tm-rawmilk49dec03,0,165925.

> story?coll=la-home-magazine

> Ruth

>

PLEASE BE KIND AND TRIM YOUR POSTS WHEN REPLYING!

Visit our Raw Dairy Files for a wealth of information!

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RawDairy/files/

Archive search: http://onibasu.com

[Guest guest]

This should work for you all:

Also be sure to look at the photos!

http://www.latimes.com/features/magazine/west/la-tm-rawmilk49dec03,0,165925.story?coll=la-home-magazine

LHR Manufacturing Setting The Standard for Portable Milking Machines http://www.milking-machines.com

-----Original Message-----From: RawDairy [mailto:RawDairy ]On Behalf Of Twilitelaughfarm@...Sent: Sunday, December 03, 2006 8:11 AMTo: RawDairy Subject: Re: Re: Fwd: LA Times Article--U--need 2 read this

http://www.latimes.com/features/magazine/west/la-tm-rawmilk49dec03,0,165925. > story?coll=la-home-magazine I tried too,, and it says page unavailable

[Guest guest]

http://www.latimes.com/features/magazine/west/la-tm-rawmilk49dec03,0,165925.story?coll=la-home-magazine

That is the whole link … (I had to copy and paste it

in pieces because it was not complete in the original post – Yahoo mail

seems to sometimes cut up long url’s.) Here is the article; it’s

quiet long. Apparently it is from today’s (Sunday, December 03, 2006)

L.A. Time’s Home Magazine (I don’t get the Times so I’m not

sure exactly the name of the magazine).

Can

This Cow Make You Sick?

After children become ill from a virulent

bacteria, a hunt is launched for the culprit. The raw-milk revolution goes

under the microscope.

By Mark Arax, Times

Staff Writer

December 3, 2006

Photo Gallery

E. coli hunt

In the days and weeks of the great

E. coli hunt of 2006, it was hard to find farmers more befuddled than the

spinach farmers of central California.

Their crop had sickened hundreds of people across the country—three were

dead—and now they had come out of the fields to stand in the open, where

no farmer wants to stand. They looked like victims of a hit and run. How the

Escherichia coli bacteria known as O157:H7 had managed to strike their perfect

rows of spinach they couldn't begin to explain. Whether by water or wind or

compost or wild swine, the vector was as much a mystery to them as it was to

the scores of state and federal investigators now ransacking their fields. The

farmers would not rest until they personally had tracked down the pathogen's

source and wiped it clean from the Salinas

Valley.

Then one evening in late September, the mass dumping of spinach gave way to a

new threat hiding out in the refrigerator, and a farmer with a different face

showed up on TV. He hadn't shaved in a week and his eyes had the look of a man

with two hands squeezed around his throat. His name was Mark McAfee, and he ran

a dairy and grew almonds 100 miles to the south in the San Joaquin Valley.

The state of California

had just linked five distinct cases of E. coli poisoning to his milk—raw

organic milk—and imposed a quarantine and recall. All of the victims were

children. A 7-year-old boy from Riverside

County and a 10-year-old girl from San Bernardino County

were fighting for their lives inside the same intensive-care unit at Loma

University Medical

Center. This sub strain

of O157:H7 was intricately different from the sub strain carried by the

spinach. Indeed, this incarnation of E. coli had never been seen in the U.S.

Yet rather than dump the milk, the hard-core among McAfee's 15,000

customers in California,

who regarded the recall as nothing more than a government conspiracy to deny

them " living food, " raced for the last bottles on the health-food

market shelves. McAfee—the nation's biggest producer of raw milk, milk

not pasteurized or homogenized, milk straight from the cow's udder to a child's

mouth with only a cotton sock filter in between—did not discourage them.

Before he could bring himself to believe that his cows had sickened anyone, the

state would have to find the fingerprints of the O157:H7 subtype in his milk or

at his dairy, just as investigators had done with the spinach. And that hadn't

happened, at least not yet.

" I told the state, 'Have at it. Take your probes and poke into every

crevice and crack on these 400 acres.' So 16 state inspectors in their little

plastic spacesuits came here and took hundreds of samples. I lifted my kilt for

full inspection and they did every test in the book. They tested the milk, the

drains, the bottling machines, the milkers, the rear ends of cows, the fresh

manure in the pasture, the fresh manure off the udders. Not a pathogen

anywhere. No O157:H7. No salmonella. No listeria. So why am I still shut

down? " He glared. " Because they're afraid of the revolution. "

McAfee watched himself on the news that night. He wondered if people saw the

same thing he saw. Isn't that Rodger McAfee's son? Sounds just like the old

man. Commie father. Commie son. A thousand revolutions left undone. Isn't that

the same land Rodger used to bail out of jail? Wasn't his youngest

son killed because of all his malarkey? As hard as Mark McAfee had tried to

suppress the traits of his father, it was plain to see the patrimony. In some

ways, that bit of Rodger was the best part of his oldest son. How else could he

explain, after all, that he, too, had become a heretic on the land?

Mark McAfee had come to believe, like the physicians of the first half of the

20th century believed, that raw milk is powerful medicine. Through the

chemistry of what is known in the naturopathic movement as probiotics, McAfee

had seen his milk cure asthma in kids and irritable bowels in adults. For

thousands of years, man and cow had shared the same space. The farther we as a

society had moved away from our cows and our soil, science was showing, the

more sick we had become. Without our barns and our pastures, we didn't have the

inoculation of the farm to help us fight off the bad bugs. Raw fresh milk, in

all its living, breathing culture, was the blood of the farm sent straight to

the city. All those steroid inhalers, all those little purple pills to treat

the old-fashioned heartburn that the pharmaceutical industry had turned into

billion-dollar diseases with the acronyms of war—I.B.S.,

G.E.R.D.—were rubbish as far as Mark McAfee was concerned. They were just

one glass of fresh raw milk removed from the trash heap.

" The industrialized form of agriculture is killing us, " he explained.

" We're chronically ill, we're obese, we're sick and immune-depressed. The

giants of the marketplace have processed our food to death to extend shelf life

and expand distribution. The raw milk revolution grows right out of this

disorder. People are saying, 'We don't want factory farm foods. We don't want

foods that are sterilized or pasteurized or irradiated. We want real, whole,

biodiverse, enzyme-rich foods from natural sources.' We're talking about a

massive paradigm shift. It's the difference between killing everything to make

it well versus growing good things to counter the bad. It's antibiotic versus

probiotic. It's nuking Mother Nature versus trusting Mother Nature. "

Microbes weren't some foreign invaders. They existed by the billions in each

speck of fertile soil on his pasture. There were good bacteria and bad

bacteria, and it was pure hubris to think we could get rid of any one of them,

at least for very long. Like us, they had been infused with the spirit of

Manifest Destiny, only they were infinitely more equipped to go places we could

never think of going. To the ocean vents that shot 480-degree water from the

earth's core, for one. They gave us life and they gave us disease and sometimes

even death. Of the few hundred basic strains of E. coli, only a handful

actually made us sick. The rest colonized our gut and allowed us to digest all

that factory food. The sheer mass of bacteria rivaled the mass of all other living

forms put together. They ran the earth. We were their guests. The trick wasn't

to kill the bad ones by sterilizing the farm in the manner sought by the

spinach police. The trick was to build up a system, a foundation, where the

good bacteria held the malevolent bacteria in check.

The entire operation at McAfee's Organic Pastures Dairy, a dozen miles west of Fresno, was devoted to

this notion. To come upon it from the path of Tulare County, you had to first

go through the land of mega-milking plants with their giant corrugated roofs

and concrete pens, where thousands of cows, stall by stall, lay confined in

their own waste. You had to hold your nose as you passed by dairies with

swarming flies and endless troughs of corn and lagoons brimming with shit water.

To come out of that and onto McAfee's dairy was to be struck dumb by the sight

of cows—not cattle—grazing a green expanse of California pasture. What stared back at you

here were 250 Holsteins and Jerseys feeding straight from the land, dropping

their excrement into a mix of Sweet Clover, Bermuda

and grass—cow pies ground into fertilizer by the millstone of

microbes. Because the cows never left the pasture, McAfee had built a

one-of-a-kind mobile milking barn that actually traveled to them. " No one

has ever heard of 'free-range cows,' " he said with a grin. " But

there they are. Those happy cows on TV—that's a million-dollar picture

that the California

dairy industry dreamed up with computer animation. It's a brilliant ad, but the

whole thing is bullshit. Even cows at big organic dairies live in confined pens

and maybe are let out to roam now and then. But these cows—they've all

got a name—are truly happy cows. "

In the same way that the factory farm had bred the pig to fit the precise

contours of a slaughterhouse saw, so too had we pushed the cow to evolve in a

way that defied its own 9,000 years of history with man. Cows ate grass, not

grain, and yet because we had turned the Midwest

into a subsidized wasteland of corn, it was corn that became the mainstay of

the cow's diet. All that starch didn't go down easily. It had so acidified the

cow's rumen that the animal was burning up from the inside. In our dogged

pursuit to squeeze out ever more from each unit of production (the average cow

was pumping five gallons a session, 730 sessions a year) we were milking the

animal until it dropped. Occasional doses of antibiotics notwithstanding, cows

were becoming sick with pneumonia and mastitis and dying at 4 and 5 years of

age—half the life they lived in the 1960s. The stress meant more and more

cows were having a hard time getting pregnant a second time. So frustrated

dairy farmers were using the genetically engineered hormone BST to take full

advantage of their single lactations. They were milking some cows for 400 days

straight and then culling them out for hamburger meat.

And all that high-energy grain had done something else: It had given rise to a

near indestructible and toxic form of E. coli. In the past, the slight acid in

a cow's lower tract was enough to kill the bacteria. But after enduring

continuous acid baths in the cow's rumen from so much corn, the bacteria had

evolved into a strain that resisted acid. This coat of armor allowed O157:H7 to

survive the journey from a cow's four stomachs to its lower tract and out its

rear end into the world of humans. Likewise, the wear and tear from digesting

the grain meant that some conventional milk headed to the creamery was tainted

with pus from cows suffering mastitis. Yet it hardly mattered to the dairy industry

because all that bacteria would be cooked dead by the machines of

pasteurization.

At Organic Pastures Dairy, the cows were given no BST and no antibiotics and

lived an average of eight years, producing a steady, if unspectacular, two

gallons each milking. Because McAfee had almost completely eliminated corn from

the feed, choosing instead to supplement the pasture with homegrown organic

alfalfa, he was confident that he had shut off the main valve of O157:H7. In

all the years of testing his manure and milk, he had never come across the

pathogen. And yet he was always aware that it might be lurking in some corner

somewhere. Indeed, his whole theory of living systems was predicated on the

possibility that the slightest shift in wind or sun or food or water might

bring the bacteria his way. In fact, he had just come out of one of the hottest

summers on record in the San

Joaquin Valley,

a summer in which tens of thousands of dairy cows had died due to heat stress

and sickness.

What if the immune system of his own herd had been weakened just enough that

0157:H7 had been given a point of entry? What if those children had drunk a

batch of milk produced in the 105-degree heat of late August that was tainted?

Yes, the milk sampled by the state never tested positive for O157:H7. But

McAfee knew something about his milk that made him wonder. It was so mercurial,

so alive, that it could change faces right inside the bottle. As a test, he had

once infected his milk with a pathogen and then measured its presence over the

next several days. Incredibly, the toxin became less and less prevalent before

vanishing altogether. What if that late August milk, in an act of dissembling,

had erased its own O157:H7 fingerprint? What if the pathogen was there when the

children drank the milk on Day 8 but was gone on Day 15 when the state came to

test it?

McAfee, who had been one of the county's top paramedics before he returned to

his father's land and opened the dairy six years earlier, needed to know for

himself. So a few days later, on the morning of Sept. 25, he got into his white

Volvo S80 caked with mud and manure and headed to Loma , where the toxin

produced by O157:H7 had marched out of the stomachs of two Southern California

children and into their kidneys. A dialysis machine was keeping each one alive.

Tony and didn't come to raw milk in the usual fashion. They didn't

drink it as kids on the farm nor did they have a child with asthma or autism.

They weren't followers of naturopathic guru Dr. Mercola or Jordan Rubin's

" Back to the Bible " diet or Sally Fallon's " Weston A.

Price " philosophy of unadulterated animal fats. Tony taught government at

Corona High and was one of the school's guidance counselors. They had

tried for years to have a child of their own, and when a pregnant student

surprised them one day with an offer to adopt her child, they attended the

birth and promised to raise the boy with every advantage. That included a

strict diet of only the healthiest foods. " We know what the food supply in

America

is like, " Tony said. " We did our best to stay away from all that

stuff and eat as much organic foods as we could. "

Whenever drank pasteurized milk, he got the sniffles. Every

medical website his mother turned to declared the same thing: Milk didn't

produce mucus and didn't cause colds. It was all an old wives' tale. Not until

she stumbled upon the online world of naturopathic healing did she find a

theory that explained Chris' reaction to milk and offered up a remedy. The

bacteria killed by pasteurization released histamines that caused some drinkers

to suffer an allergic response. Likewise, pasteurization destroyed the

all-important enzyme lactase that helped humans digest the sugars in milk. Thus

lactose-intolerant groups, which included a majority of Asians, blacks and

Latinos, could drink raw milk without a hitch.

As she kept searching, she came upon the website for Organic Pastures Dairy,

with its blue skies and green pastures and cows named Farah and Tasha:

" Dairy Foods As Nature Intended . . . The Barn that Mooooves . . . Join

the Raw-volution! "

The dairy was " family owned and operated and inspired " and there was

a portrait in the pasture of McAfee, his wife, Blaine, and their two grown

children, and Kaleigh. There were testimonials from customers whose lives

had been changed by drinking the dairy's raw milk and raw colostrum and eating

its raw butter and raw cheese. Eczema was gone. Asthma was gone. A pain in the

knee that had stolen sleep for years was gone. " Finally, I'm

Motrin-free! " What especially caught 's eye were the bacterial

counts that the dairy had put up on the website for all to see. Every batch of

milk was tested. And every batch, it seemed, measured far below the 15,000

per/ml standard for bacteria counts. This is the mark for raw milk set by the

state of California—a

far more stringent standard, by the way, than the one set for milk destined for

pasteurization.

" Top to bottom it was impressive, " said. " It was eight

bucks a half gallon, but we had gotten used to spending a lot for natural

foods. "

There was one caveat: the government warning label on each container stating

that raw milk posed a risk of bacterial illness, especially to children and the

elderly.

But Mark McAfee had a reasonable answer for that. Some people got sick from raw

milk because they had been so starved of living food that they lacked the flora

in their guts to handle it. Raw milk was the perfect source for " seeding

and feeding " beneficial bacteria such as Lactobacillus acidophilus. A

first-time drinker might come down with a bout of diarrhea but not to worry.

" After all, " McAfee wrote on the website, " the intestine has

never seen such an incredible introduction of new and diverse beneficial

bacteria and does not have any idea what to do. " McAfee's pitch had the

sound of an elixir barker. But more and more scientific research, especially

out of Europe, was pointing to healthy gut

flora as a key to a healthy immune system. As for the presence of pathogens in

his milk, it was possible but " highly unlikely, " McAfee wrote. If

this were to happen, " they die off and do not grow " in our milk.

Seven-year-old had been drinking McAfee's milk for only a few weeks when

his parents came home from the Sprouts health food store in Temecula with a new

container, dated Sept. 10. It was Labor Day weekend, and he drank a glass on

Saturday and two more on Sunday and Monday. He was feeling fine and ate a

spinach salad and then headed to tae kwon do with his father. After class, he

felt exhausted and went straight to the couch with a fever. The next morning,

the fever was gone but he couldn't control his bowels. He went to the toilet 19

times that day. His stools were runny and full of blood, and he began to vomit.

His parents rushed him to Kaiser Hospital in Riverside

and a sample of his stool was taken. One of the physicians stated that until

the results came back, the boy was not to be given antibiotics. In the case of

O157:H7, they learned later, antibiotics often caused a mass kill of the

bacteria and a mass release of a toxin known as Shiga, which could shut down a

child's renal system.

It would be five days before the sample came back showing the Shiga toxin. In

the meantime, had been transferred to Kaiser in Fontana where doctors—believing he had

colitis and not factoring in the possibility of O157:H7—had ordered a

dose of two antibiotics. " His blood was normal, and then they hung those

two antibiotics from the line and all of a sudden his blood work exploded, "

his father said. " The Shiga toxin was accumulating in the kidneys. His red

blood cells were popping like balloons. "

was transferred to Kaiser in L.A.

with a condition known as hemolytic uremic syndrome. Doctors said he might need

a kidney transplant. Kaiser didn't have the capacity to do kidney dialysis, so

Tony demanded that his son be sent to Loma . " I am an absolute maniac

at this point. There is not a doctor or nurse on that floor who doesn't know

me, " he said. " I am watching my son dying, and this whole bureaucracy

is moving in slow motion. "

It would take another several hours for Kaiser to approve the paperwork to

airlift the boy to Loma . Doctors there began dialysis immediately, but a

pool of fluid already had built up near his lungs. " All that toxin in his

system and his little chest is pounding, " Tony said. " I can literally

see it rise and fall, 180 beats a minute. The doctors said he was on the verge

of congestive heart failure. 'We need to take over for him now,' they told us.

So they intubated him and put him on a respirator. For days and days, the world

just stopped. There was nothing but me and my son and my wife and that

room. "

Somehow, the news of the tainted spinach filtered in. surmised that

the O157:H7 had come from the spinach salad they had picked up at Sprouts and

served to a day before he got sick. She called the health food store and

told the owners what had happened and asked that the greens be removed from the

bins. A few days later, in the waiting room of the intensive-care unit, she

overheard a mother talking about her own nightmare. Her 10-year-old daughter,

Herzog, was stricken with E. coli poisoning: Antibiotics were given; HUS

ensued. The two mothers compared notes. The girl hadn't eaten spinach but had

consumed a glass of raw milk from a dairy near Fresno. Organic Pastures Dairy.

It now seemed more than likely that it was the raw milk that had sickened

Chris. Yet there was a hole in the epidemiology. His stool sample, for whatever

reason, didn't show O157:H7, much less the unique sub strain that had stricken

Herzog. While it was highly probable that both children suffered from

the same milk-borne pathogen, the uncertainty caused the state not to test

Chris' milk. And a test of 's raw milk failed to turn up the O157:H7 that

appeared in her stools. " We were pretty sure it was the milk, but we

weren't positive, " said. " Then we found out that two more

kids in San Diego

had become ill after drinking the same batch of raw milk. "

As the raw milk recall began to grab its own headlines, Mark McAfee showed up

unannounced at the Loma hospital. A broad-shouldered man who stands over

6 feet tall, he was wearing jeans and brown leather s.

He made a beeline to and introduced himself. He seemed kind and

genuinely concerned. Still, she couldn't help but think he was there on a

mission to clear his milk. He had a dozen questions. How long had been

drinking the milk? Had he showed any signs of trouble before? How much of the

new milk did he consume before he got sick? What was the time lag? Before she

could give him a full answer, her husband walked up. He had slept 90 minutes a

night for 17 straight days.

" Do you know what it's like? " he said, standing eye to eye with

McAfee. " My son drank a glass of milk and now he's fighting to live. "

McAfee said he did. When his 19-year-old daughter was a child, she came down

with a bacterial infection unrelated to raw milk that nearly took her life.

" You don't have a damn clue what we've been through, " Tony

replied. " My son is on a breathing machine, and I can't even communicate

with him. "

McAfee wanted to tell him about all the children whose lives had been changed

for the better because of his milk, but he held back.

" I hope you have insurance, " said. " Because I can

guarantee this. If it turns out that your milk did this to my son, I'm coming

after you. I'm going to own your dairy. "

It was late August, a month before the state's recall, and Mark McAfee stood on

the back of a flatbed trailer in the middle of an almond grove, listening to a

bagpipe player blowing out the strains of " Amazing Grace. " Only a

scattering of people had come to pay their last respects to Rodger McAfee, and

not one of them was a local farmer. It was a gathering that seemed to say a lot

about the elder McAfee and his life. There were three of his five

wives—one white, one black, one Latino. There was McAfee, the

youngest of his four surviving sons, who had come from North

Carolina, where he sat as the principal French horn for the

symphony in Raleigh.

There was the Mexican boy Rodger had adopted and taught how to fly and play

chess and grow almonds the organic way on a farm he had bequeathed to his Our

Land Self Help Movement. There were the urban farmers who had just lost their

10 acres in South Los Angeles, despite the protests of actress Daryl Hannah,

and were now farming a 20-acre plot in Fresno

that Rodger had given them. And there was Chavez, one of Cesar's

brothers, and Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers union.

" When Rodger first came along, it was so early in the game that our own

Latino people weren't sure about us, " Huerta said. " No Chicanos from L.A. dared join us. But

Rodger gave us his time and his money. He stood alone. "

That his two middle sons, once part of the McAfee traveling horn band and the

McAfee Balkan dance troupe, were among those missing also seemed to say a lot

about the man. and Adam were multimillionaire venture capitalists in the

Bay Area who had never quite forgiven their father for putting his causes

first. " I think if they were here, they'd tell you that their incredible

success has something to do with the DNA they got from my father, " Mark

said. " But whereas me and took the good with the bad, my two other

brothers just saw the demons. "

Their eulogies didn't attempt to capture his life. How a 15-year-old Rodger,

the son of two teachers from a long line of Presbyterian missionaries, dropped

out of school and traveled to Israel

to live on a kibbutz. For the rest of his life, he tried to graft the communal

ideal of Beit Hashita onto the soil of the San Joaquin Valley.

" He was a visionary with all these ideas and all this energy, " said

his first wife, Darlene, the mother of five of his six sons. " But his

energy could never stay put in one place. "

He took them to Cuba, Mexico and communist Algeria,

sinking their boat in the Adriatic Sea. Back

home, he tried to be a simple dairy farmer, but it only reminded him of how

much he missed Beit Hashita. In the summer of 1969, he decided to return there

with his family. They worked their way from one kibbutz to the other, but

something wasn't right. Israel

had changed. The soul of the kibbutz had changed. The wars with the Arabs, he

said, had turned his old lefty friends into oppressors of the Palestinians.

Without telling his wife, he sneaked off with Mark and traveled to Cyprus to meet

with Syrian intelligence officers. When he returned to northern Israel several

days later, his kibbutz hat was merely a cover. " He drove to every

military outpost that Israel

had in the desert. He memorized how many tanks, how many personnel, how many

checkpoints and then reported everything back to the Syrians, " Darlene

recalled. " It broke my heart. The kibbutz. He had lost his boyhood

dream. "

He joined the picket lines protesting the Vietnam War, carrying a sign taped to

a Louisville

slugger. On a trip to San Francisco,

he met with supporters of , the Black Panther sympathizer and

Communist, and agreed to put up his family's 400 acres as collateral to bail

her out of jail. He showed up the next day on national TV with cow dung on his

boots. " When 'Good Morning America' and the others started calling, I

pleaded with him. 'Rodger, just don't tell them you're a Communist,' "

Darlene said. " But he went right on TV and told everyone, 'I did it for my

sister. For my fellow Communist.' ''

Overnight, the McAfees became pariahs in the farm belt. Mark, a sixth grader,

was milking cows early one morning when he heard gunshots hit a barn. Nine of

their cows were poisoned with strychnine. He and his brothers were escorted off

school grounds to the shouts of " Goodbye Commies. " As they drove to

town one evening, a bale of hay fell off a farm vehicle and landed in the road.

The brakes locked up, and the car flipped over. , the youngest horn

player, the star Balkan dancer, not a scratch on his face, was dead. The

mechanic told Rodger that the brakes had been tampered with. He went on

believing the rest of his life that some redneck dairyman had found a way to

get even with him.

He spent his last 20 years entrenched in a fight with the federal government

over water wells it had dug on his ranch in Merced County—wells that

turned up dry. Then one afternoon in late August, not far from the spot where

had died, he was killed in a head-on collision. A drunken Mexican

farmworker, of all people, had run a stop sign.

His son Mike flew a Cessna 152 over the almond orchard and scattered his ashes.

He was now part of the soil, Mark said, part of the microbes, organic at that.

" I spent a lot of years running from him, but look where I ended up, a

maverick just like him, trying to subvert the way we produce our food and milk.

In my own way, I'm more radical than he was. I'm more dangerous than he was.

Because I know what I'm trying to change. "

McAfee didn't know it then but working its way through his mobile milking barn

and into his 1,200-gallon stainless steel tank was a batch of raw milk that was

about to change everything.

" ALERT: RAW MILK NEEDS YOU NOW. Our access to raw milk is at stake! "

It had been eight days since officials with the California Department of Food

and Agriculture had pulled his products from 36 Whole Foods markets and scores

of smaller stores around the state. What concerned Mark McAfee wasn't so much

the $12,000 in sales he was losing each day but what the recall was doing to

his dairy's good name. If state health officials had conclusive evidence tying

his milk to the five sick children, they weren't sharing it with him or the

public. Frustrated, he papered the Internet in late September with an urgent

call beseeching raw milk lovers to come to a rally at his dairy.

On the eve of the protest, he had never been more worked up. " This is a

war between me and the state. What they're attempting to do, bottom line, is an

assassination on our brand. They're trying to attack us as bioterrorists and

baby killers. " He was threatening a $100-million lawsuit—not just to

clear his company's name but to clear the honor of raw milk itself. The fact

that he even had to call it " raw milk, " he said, was a concession to

slander. It was milk the way nature intended us to drink cow's milk. It didn't

need the word " raw " in front of it. The other milk was the milk that

needed an adjective: " pasteurized milk. "

The rally drew 100 or so supporters, some from as far away as Seattle. McAfee, for the most part, took the

edge off his words. He had learned just hours before that the state quarantine

had been officially lifted because tests showed his operation was clean, though

it would take another week for his milk to hit the shelves. " We're getting

more orders than ever from all over the state, " he said. " The

government only succeeded in pissing the people off. "

Quietly, though, the state was building an even bigger case to shut down the

dairy once more. Early Halloween morning, as his cows were herded in the dark

to the mobile barn for their 5 a.m. milking, a team of state investigators and

veterinarians descended in their moon suits. They set up a lab—four large

Igloos, boxes of latex surgical gloves and Ziploc bags—and went right to

work. As each milked cow made its way down a chute and back into the pasture,

she was stopped by a state investigator with his right arm gloved finger to

shoulder. He reached a full 2 feet into the animal's rectum and pulled out a

fistful of the freshest manure. " You sure this is enough? " he asked

the vet. " Because if it isn't, I have some more here for you. "

McAfee stood on the side with an ironic smile. " They're frustrated like

crazy, hunting for that strain, " he said. " What they don't realize is

that if it was here, it showed up for just a moment in late summer and was

gone. Poof. "

It took four hours to extract the evidence from 225 milking cows. The results

of this new test wouldn't be complete for another several weeks. In the

meantime, state officials accused McAfee of giving a false impression about the

dairy's sanitation record on his website. In some weeks, state tests showed,

Organic Pastures' raw milk exceeded the standard bacteria counts by

fifteenfold. The high counts, McAfee countered, were rare—only 36 times

in a four-year period—and the only downside to such counts was the milk

might sour a little early. As winter approached, he was still waiting for the

state to produce a single test showing that the bacteria in his bottle were

anything but beneficial.

Even without that smoking gun, the state believed it had a case. The two

8-year-olds in San Diego County were showing an identical pattern of O157:H7,

the same unique sub strain that had struck Herzog and a Nevada City

boy named Adam Chaffee. Like the others, Chaffee had only recently begun to

drink raw milk. He suffered a few days of diarrhea and vomiting, was never

given antibiotics and recovered quickly—the same as the two San Diego children. All

the children have stopped drinking raw milk, though some of their parents

remain believers in its healing powers.

" There's a chance, especially in children new to raw milk, that they can

drink a batch and get sick, " McAfee conceded. " And the next-door

neighbor, a raw milk drinker from way back, can drink the same milk with no

problem. In fact, this is what happened in San Diego. You talk about risk, but there's

not a food we eat that doesn't carry some risk. Spinach. Carrots. Tomatoes. But

I'll bet on raw milk every time. That tiny infinitesimal risk is outweighed by

a ton of benefits. "

Tony now wonders about the calculations of risk. He watched

Herzog leave Loma

Hospital

in early October after four weeks in intensive care. It would take another

month, eight weeks in all, for his son, arms and legs as thin as sprinkler

pipes, to follow her out the door. He faced an uncertain future. One third of

children with HUS continue to have kidney problems later in life. " Five

kids. The same batch of milk. The same symptoms. Four of them with an identical

pattern of O157:H7, " he said. " You ask if it's an open-and-shut case?

Let me put it to you this way. You could put a gun to my head and say, 'If you

don't give your son a glass of raw milk every day, you're a dead man,' I'd be a

dead man. "

A few days before Thanksgiving, standing over the bottling line, McAfee could

only marvel at the industrial flow. He was selling more raw milk than ever

before.

Mark Arax is a senior writer for West. He is

the author of " In My Father's Name " and co-author of " The King

of California:

J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire. "

[Guest guest]

What do you all think of this article? I read it yesterday and I thought

it was quite odd!

*~*~* Jo & Pete *~*~*

@

" Laudo Deum " Farm

kinderfolk_n_liddlebuds@...

Raising quality Kinder and Nigerian Dwarf goats

for small acreage farmers, homesteaders and

families with young children.

(And producing natural soaps for humans and animals.)

[Guest guest]

This is truly a remarkable piece. Lots of stuff to think about. Intense comments from the father of one of the children, long powerful passages from Mark McAfee. Stuff that is probably only slightly relevant, but adds to the impact of the article. A couple of impressions: it is truly remarkable because it appears to be very accurate, including the medical and biology. It is probably factual because lots of the science is directly from Mark McAfee and he is a stickler for completeness and biologically correct. Also, unlike most articles, it does not appear to be tilted in one direction or another, that may be the consequence of not quoting a lot from government agencies. Also Mark has long held that transparency is the key to credibility and honesty the foundation for respect. One other item that is important, medically; the two infants who developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, were reflexsly (an ultimately inappropriately) treated with antibiotics. The lesson is do not treat suspected E. coli 0157:H7 diarrhea with antibiotics. Ted Re: Fwd: LA Times Article--U--need 2 read thishttp://www.latimes.com/features/magazine/west/la-tm-rawmilk49dec03,0,165925.story?coll=la-home-magazineThat is the whole link … (I had to copy and paste it in pieces because it was not complete in the original post – Yahoo mail seems to sometimes cut up long url’s.) Here is the article; it’s quiet long. Apparently it is from today’s (Sunday, December 03, 2006) L.A. Time’s Home Magazine (I don’t get the Times so I’m not sure exactly the name of the magazine)..

[Guest guest]

I

found this article dangerously deceptive and, while I have met Mark McAfee and

believe him to be an honest man in the middle of a very, very difficult fight

that will probably last the rest of his life and whose sacrifices will benefit

us all, I was left resenting him.

The message was

clear - several children were nearly killed, probably damaged for life, and McAfee’s

gotten away scot-free, still raking in $12,000 a day. Not that I agree with the article, but I

seriously doubt that its writer left that impression inadvertently.

Re: Re: Fwd:

LA Times Article--U--need 2 read this

This is truly a remarkable piece.

Lots of stuff to think about. Intense comments from the father of one of

the children, long powerful passages from Mark McAfee. Stuff that is probably

only slightly relevant, but adds to the impact of the article.

A couple of impressions: it is truly

remarkable because it appears to be very accurate, including the medical and

biology. It is probably factual because lots of the science is

directly from Mark McAfee and he is a stickler for completeness and

biologically correct. Also, unlike most articles, it does not

appear to be tilted in one direction or another, that may be the consequence of

not quoting a lot from government agencies. Also Mark has long held that

transparency is the key to credibility and honesty the foundation for respect.

One other item that is important, medically; the two

infants who developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, were reflexsly (an ultimately

inappropriately) treated with antibiotics. The lesson is do

not treat suspected E. coli 0157:H7 diarrhea with antibiotics.

Ted

Re: Fwd: LA Times Article--U--need 2 read this

http://www.latimes.com/features/magazine/west/la-tm-rawmilk49dec03,0,165925.story?coll=la-home-magazine

That is the whole link … (I had to copy and

paste it in pieces because it was not complete in the original post –

Yahoo mail seems to sometimes cut up long url’s.) Here is the article;

it’s quiet long. Apparently it is from today’s (Sunday, December

03, 2006) L.A. Time’s Home Magazine (I don’t get the Times so

I’m not sure exactly the name of the magazine).

..

[Guest guest]

Ditto. The article comes across loud and clear

against Mark, and raw milk.

--- topoftheworldfarm

wrote:

> I found this article dangerously deceptive and,

> while I have met Mark

> McAfee and believe him to be an honest man in the

> middle of a very, very

> difficult fight that will probably last the rest of

> his life and whose

> sacrifices will benefit us all, I was left resenting

> him.

>

> The message was clear - several children were nearly

> killed, probably

> damaged for life, and McAfee's gotten away

> scot-free, still raking in

> $12,000 a day. Not that I agree with the article,

> but I seriously doubt

> that its writer left that impression inadvertently.

>

>

>

>

> Re: Re: Fwd: LA Times

> Article--U--need 2 read this

>

> This is truly a remarkable piece. Lots of stuff

> to think about.

> Intense comments from the father of one of the

> children, long powerful

> passages from Mark McAfee. Stuff that is probably

> only slightly

> relevant, but adds to the impact of the article.

>

> A couple of impressions: it is truly remarkable

> because it appears to

> be very accurate, including the medical and biology.

> It is probably

> factual because lots of the science is directly from

> Mark McAfee and he

> is a stickler for completeness and biologically

> correct. Also, unlike

> most articles, it does not appear to be tilted in

> one direction or

> another, that may be the consequence of not quoting

> a lot from

> government agencies. Also Mark has long held that

> transparency is the

> key to credibility and honesty the foundation for

> respect.

>

> One other item that is important, medically; the two

> infants who

> developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, were reflexsly

> (an ultimately

> inappropriately) treated with antibiotics. The

> lesson is do not treat

> suspected E. coli 0157:H7 diarrhea with antibiotics.

>

> Ted

> Re: Fwd: LA Times

> Article--U--need 2 read this

>

> http://www.latimes.

>

<http://www.latimes.com/features/magazine/west/la-tm-rawmilk49dec03,0,16

> 5925.story?coll=la-home-magazine>

>

com/features/magazine/west/la-tm-rawmilk49dec03,0,165925.story?coll=la-h

> ome-magazine

> That is the whole link . (I had to copy and paste it

> in pieces because

> it was not complete in the original post - Yahoo

> mail seems to sometimes

> cut up long url's.) Here is the article; it's quiet

> long. Apparently it

> is from today's (Sunday, December 03, 2006) L.A.

> Time's Home Magazine (I

> don't get the Times so I'm not sure exactly the name

> of the magazine).

> .

>

>

<http://geo.yahoo.com/serv?s=97359714/grpId=10960943/grpspId=1705060950/

>

msgId=27311/stime=1165166703/nc1=3848445/nc2=3848644/nc3=4025377>

>

>

>

>

>

[Guest guest]

The article reminds me of the "yellow journalism" that the Hearst

papers were famous for 50 years ago.

It implied they had discovered a smoking gun. However, given the tenor

of the article, if they really had found one they would have crucified

him. It reminded me of the old Salem witch hunts in which someone had

to be guilty because God had sent a disease among them.

Ironically, they made the spinach farmers sound like heroes for trying

discover the source of the ir E.Coli problems, but never mentioned that

the source was the runoff from the concentration camp cows right up the

road.

Mark's operation stands as a shining example of what to do and yet they

laud the culprit dairies because they pasteurize. This is a perfect

example of "blaming the solution for the problem."

The article also uses the worst kinds of faulty logic from "guilt by

association" to leaps from the general to the specific. It would be a

wonderful example in a philosophy class of how NOT to reason.

Odd that it appears at this point. The elves tell me to "follow the

money" and see who is behind this.

Langlois

Krtil wrote:

Ditto. The article comes across loud and clear

against Mark, and raw milk.

--- topoftheworldfarm <topoftheworldfarmhughes (DOT) net>

wrote:

>

[Guest guest]

I have to agree. I thought it had wonderful momentum until

the last couple paragraphs. It seemed unbiased, presents the science rather

well, and appeared the paint the picture of the benefits of raw milk in a very

positive light. For some reason, the entire tone of the article changed towards

the end; even a friend of mine who understands the difference between real milk

and the killed stuff was left scratching her head and asking me questions. It

was unfortunate that such a good article was squashed at the end and ended up

appearing anti-real milk and anti-OP.

~Brit