An observation

I've commented on here before about my concern about the "ahistoricality" of some of my generation and younger.

Well, I just saw another example: on a bulletin board I read, someone talking about drinking raw milk, and sniffing about how "the Corporations" insist on it being pasteurized, when "we all know" that there are life-giving, immune-enhancing bacteria in fresh raw milk.

Um, yeah. While I don't dispute that VERY CLEAN milk from a VERY CAREFUL dairy is safe to drink raw - at least most of the time, at least as long as the cow is healthy and has no sores on its udder - I would suspect that large-scale milk production going raw would be a nightmare. Lots of people would get sick. (I mean - we can't even seem to sell raw spinach free of potentially pathogenic bacteria, and milk is an even better medium for bacterial growth). And it irks me that there are people who seem to believe that pasteurization is some kind of evil plot to deprive them of the joys of raw milk.

E. coli can grow in milk. Campylobacter can grow in milk. I am pretty sure Listeria can grow in milk (after all, it does in unpasteurized cheeses). I suspect even worse bacteria could make a home in milk.

I'm not saying raw milk should be BANNED - if people want to buy it and drink it, that's their business. But they should realize that not everything that's "natural" is necessarily healthful. (And I sometimes eat raw milk cheese myself - but I buy it from a reputable source and if it gets to looking or smelling iffy, I throw it out.)

I see similar mindsets in the people who refuse to vaccinate their children because they either see vaccines as some kind of product of the "military-medical complex" (and yes, I've heard that phrase used). Or that they're some kind of mind-control thing. Or they cause autism (first: no link was ever established. And second: thimerosol, the preservative popularly blamed for "causing" autism, has been removed from the childhood vaccines). It's probably because no one in my generation has seen a child die of polio - or seen a child made blind and deaf as a (rare, but possible) side-effect of measles - that people are so able to blithely dismiss vaccines.

(I had an aunt who raised her children during the height of the 1950s polio scare. She told stories that were very unsettling to a child of the "vaccine era." Luckily, none of her children contracted the disease - but she remembered summers when she kept her kids home from swimming, and movie theaters closed, and children weren't allowed to have birthday parties - all out of fear of the contagion passing where anyone gathered.)

I've also heard people slam water treatment - chlorination of drinking water. It's unnatural, they say. It makes compounds that can cause cancer in some cases. It pollutes the world. It makes the water taste bad!

And I just kind of shake my head and wonder if they've ever heard of cholera. Or dysentery. Or any of the dozens of diseases that carry off millions of people in less-developed countries every year.

(I would argue that sanitation, and water hygiene, has probably been the "medical" or technological advance that's saved the most lives over the years).

I don't know. On the one hand, I want people to KNOW. I want them to be able to make an informed choice, where they have the science to hand (and where they don't dismiss it with some kind of New Age-y handwaving). On the other hand, I want to protect my own right to clean water and deadly-bacteria-free milk by not permitting the spread of unscientific ideas about what are actually great advances in hygiene and cleanliness. (After all - whenever irradiation is brought up as a possible solution to bacteria-infested food, people are terrified that their food will become radioactive. That is not true. It is really not much different from x-raying food. The main problem that seems to happen is SOME vitamins in food might be reduced - but when the choice is a week of food poisoning vs. a slightly lower vitamin C level, you can bet what side I'd go with.)

I don't know. Perhaps we need to include a "health history" unit in the schools - with films of the polio days and good instruction into all the bacteria that can infest water. Because I don't want some ill-informed future populace voting to take out the chlorine from water treatment (without replacing it with something better). But when you hear some of these fringe-y people speak, it gets kind of worrisome - some of them are VERY persuasive and some of them will shout down anyone who tries to bring up "bad old" science.