Food Safety News reports, despite the somewhat commonplace occurrence of illness outbreaks associated with unpasteurized milk, the number of illnesses linked to drinking raw milk is much higher than those counted in outbreak reports, according to an analysis published by the Minnesota Department of Health on Wednesday.
Looking at 10 years of health department data between 2001 and 2010, researchers found that the number of patients in Minnesota with laboratory-confirmed foodborne infections who said they drank raw milk within a week of falling ill was 25 times greater than the number of cases involved in raw milk outbreaks over the same time period.