Raw Milk Related Illness Statistics In England, Wales, And Northern Ireland
So I came across some official data from the Food Standards Agency in the UK, from which I calculated the risk of falling ill from regularly drinking raw milk.
I think you'll be surprised by the results, especially after all the scaremongering you hear from the media about how raw milk is brimming with deadly life-threatening microbes.
Raw Milk Disease Outbreak Statistics
In the UK, disease outbreaks from raw milk consumption are extremely rare, but from July 2015 to December 2017, there was a bit of a control issue, where (according to the Food Standards Agency) there were 5 outbreaks involving 103 reported cases of human illness linked to raw milk consumption, the vast majority of these cases being in children.
40 of those cases were laboratory confirmed.
Only 4 of those cases were severe enough to require hospitalisation.
The last outbreak before that was just one outbreak in 2014 (9 cases, of which 7 were children), and the last outbreak before that was way back in 2002.
Raw Milk Consumption Statistics
According to the Food Standards Agency’s raw drinking milk consumer insight report, the percentage of people in England, Wales and Northern Ireland who were regularly drinking raw milk, went from 3% in 2013 to 10% in 2018.
Risk Calculation
Let’s take a worst case scenario and look at the risk during the unusually high outbreak rate between July 2015 and December 2017.
To make it worse still, instead of only looking at the 40 laboratory confirmed cases, let’s include the 63 unconfirmed cases, for a total of 103 cases.
That’s 103 cases over a period of 30 months, so the average number of cases over any given 12 months in that period would have been 41.2 cases. So let’s say there were 41.2 unconfirmed cases in 2016. The average number of hospitalisations in 2016 would have been 1.6.
According to the Office for National Statistics, the combined population of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland in mid-2016 was 60.2 million people.
Let’s say raw milk consumption in 2016 was 6%. 6% of 60.2 million people is 3.6 million, which means 3.6 million people were regularly drinking raw milk in 2016.
So in 2016, your risk of getting an outbreak from drinking raw milk would have been 41.2/3.6 million, which equals around a 1 in 87,000 chance.
So your risk of getting mild to moderate symptoms – a slight stomach upset, some diarrhoea, maybe some vomiting – from drinking raw milk is 1 in 87,000.
The risk of getting hospitalised is 1.6/3.6 million, which is 1 in 2.3 million.
To put that into perspective, the risk of dying from a road traffic accident (RTA) in any given year in the UK is 1 in 20,000.
So you are 115 times more likely to die from a road traffic accident than you are to merely be hospitalised from drinking raw milk. And remember, those raw milk illness stats are from the worst outbreak in recent UK history, and from mostly unconfirmed cases. In any other given year, the risk will be much lower than that.
So what are the risks of dying from drinking raw milk?
Well…
Data from England and Wales show that no deaths have been reported from infective intestinal disease outbreaks associated with raw milk or cream from 1992 to 2017.
So according to the statistics, the chances of dying from raw milk consumption in England and Wales, is a big fat ZERO! And that’s straight from the horse’s mouth, it’s from the Food Standards Agency’s own statistics.
So What’s All The Scaremongering About?
According to the statistics, I would say that raw milk is perfectly safe. But if you're still unsure, check out my in-depth article on the safety of raw milk:
Click here to learn more about the safety of raw milk
