Edwin Shank is puzzled by an announcement yesterday from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture (PDA) linking raw milk from his farm to a Campylobacter outbreak that has sickened five people. But Shank, the owner of Family Cow in Chambersburg, PA, told his customers in a Facebook posting that the farm has halted raw milk sales while they await word from a third-party, state-certified pathogen lab on tests of a current batch of milk.
After it was linked to a 2012 raw milk Campylobacter outbreak that sickened 80 people in four states, Family Cow began on-farm testing of each bottle of milk it sells. So, Shank was surprised by PDA’s announcement that it had discovered Campylobacter in a bottle of raw milk from Family Cow farm and that the state health department had confirmed five cases of Campylobacter infection in consumers who drank the milk.
“The state’s report is puzzling to our family. We are not sure what to make of it. As you know, we have our own on-farm laboratory where we pre-test every single lot of raw milk before we release it for sale to you. I guess that’s why we are surprised by the state report. We already know how clean the milk was that the state is questioning. The Coliform Count (CC) of the milk was 5 times lower/ml than state requirements for raw sales and the Standard Plate Count (SPC) was over 13 times lower/ml than the state regulations require. This was some very clean milk, folks! This is even cleaner than pasteurization standards. And these low numbers are not unusual for our milk. These are the kinds of low numbers that allows our raw milk to sometimes stay fresh for up to three weeks, as some of you report it does,” Shank wrote on the farm’s Facebook page.
Standard plate counts are considered a reliable method for testing overall bacterial counts, but it is possible for pathogens to be present when counts are in an acceptable range. In fact, pathogenic bacteria are not evenly distributed in milk, so testing will not find all bacteria that may be present.
Although his posting did not mention any illnesses, Shank apologized to his customers for the inconvenience of interrupted service. He told them to discard what they have and that he would replace it when raw mik distribution resumes.
