Oh hey, I looked into this one when one of my friend's aunts went on about raw milk.

So basically, she's done research on the microbiota of raw vs pasteurised milk and concluded the beneficial bacteria of raw milk can outweigh the risks for non-immunocompromised people. People can still get pasteurised if they wish. Another argument is that products with a higher fatality rate are still legal.

However, the flaws in her research don't account for are this:

• If huge corporations are allowed to simply not sterilise their milk, they will do so, meaning raw will be the cheaper product and therefore more likely to be purchased by the average person, who may or may not understand the risks involved. A struggling family doing their groceries will choose the cheaper milk and possibly put their elderly/infant family members at risk.

• Her research is done with samples of raw milk that are a lot more controlled. The difference in risks between a sample of milk from a healthy cow directly into a sterile vessel into a lab environment is vastly different to milk produced en masse under capitalism, where cows are crowded together in battery farms, fed with the cheapest grains available, and milked with the same equipment that's milked a thousand other cows, and all the milk is pooled together where it's impossible to separate "safer" raw milk and contaminated milk from sick cows are then to be cooled and bottled. Her research simply does not account for the corners that will definitely be cut in an industrial capitalist scale

• Dying from alcohol poisoning because you drank perfectly legal 180 proof alcohol is different to dying from H5N1 milk because alcohol poisoning isn't contagious.