“There were 1,400 illnesses attributed to raw milk over the last 30 years.
Last year there were 285,000 bicycle accidents involving children under 14. Should we ban bicycles?”
- Anon bike riding microbiologist (via foodsafetytalk)
Um, don’t they teach microbiologists about denominators? Gosh, I hope this wasn’t one of your students!
Divide by the number of raw milk drinkers (<500,000?) and by the number of children on bikes (~30,000,000?). Then adjust for under-reporting of foodborne illnesses (very high: 50-1700 population cases per reported outbreak case) and of bike accidents (very low due to ease of measurement and population surveys). I’d bet that only does this even things out, I bet raw milk looks more than 10 times worse than bike riding.
Or put more simply: if the number of kids who ride bikes drank raw milk, there’d be dead f***ing kids all over the place.
I’ve no problem with free-thinking adults drinking all the raw milk they want, but maybe we should leave the math to the professionals jerks.
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