South Carolina's Ag Commissioner Hugh Weathers says that being one of the few states that allows the sale of raw, unpasteurized milk creates an argument about food safety. In the past couple of years, at the insistance of the states, the Food & Drug Administration has done a better job at listening to state officials before wholesale declaring one product (tomatoes, spinach, milk) a health hazard, decimating that particular crop in all parts of the country. The unpasteurized milk situation was the same, one farm in South Carolina was labeled as the culprit of campylobacteriosis. The FDA jumped into action and warned consumers not to drink raw milk from that diary, and throughout the episode, samples of the diary's raw milk were tested and found to be negative for the pathogen.
Commissioner Weathers says that there's always going to be a risk, the federal governement is striving to start doing a better job protecting consumers by enacting the Food Safety Modernization Act. The goal of the new law is to focus on prevention of problems before they reach the consumer.
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