Native authorities in Missoula, MT, are warning individuals to not eat uncooked milk offered at a farmers market as a result of it got here from a herd the place cows examined optimistic for Coxiella burnetii, which is the micro organism that causes Q fever.
The unpasteurized, uncooked milk was offered at a farmers market in Missoula County, in response to the Missoula Metropolis-County Well being Division. The division didn’t specify what farmers market is concerned.
“We don’t know if the cow was shedding the micro organism on the time it was milked, or if that cow’s milk was offered on the farmers market,” mentioned Environmental Well being Director Shannon Therriault. “So we are able to’t say for certain whether or not anybody was uncovered. Nevertheless, what we do know is that unpasteurized milk can include dangerous micro organism that may make you and your family members sick.”
The well being division warned that unpasteurized milk merchandise have been linked to outbreaks of E. coli, campylobacter, salmonella, brucella, listeria and cryptosporidium along with Q fever. Within the case of Q fever, signs can take two or three weeks to grow to be obvious following publicity. Based on the U.S. Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention, signs of Q fever embody fever, chills, fatigue, headache, muscle aches, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, chest ache, abdomen ache, weight reduction and a non-productive cough.
“Whereas consuming ‘uncooked’ milk has grow to be extra widespread lately, we wish individuals to know that it could actually simply be contaminated with dangerous micro organism, even when the milking operation is well-run,” Therriault mentioned.
Within the Eighties, Missoula skilled a big salmonella outbreak attributable to unpasteurized milk from an area dairy. Greater than 100 circumstances had been linked to the outbreak, and half of these circumstances had been kids 14 and youthful, in response to the well being division.
The pressure of salmonella was multi-drug resistant, and 15 % of those that bought sick had been hospitalized. An inspection of the dairy revealed no sanitation legal guidelines or practices on the books at the moment had been damaged, however individuals nonetheless bought sick.
After that outbreak, Montana handed a regulation that each one milk offered to customers needed to be pasteurized. The CDC studies that when milk pasteurization necessities started within the early Nineties, deaths and diarrheal diseases in younger kids declined dramatically.
In 2021, the legislature reversed course, and unpasteurized milk gross sales are actually allowed in Montana below sure, restricted situations. Unpasteurized milk may be offered at a farm, farmers markets and different conventional neighborhood occasions, so long as the herd is 5 lactating cows or fewer, and the vendor informs the top client that the product will not be licensed, licensed, packaged, labeled or inspected below any official laws.