Blog Page 23

Not all water in cheese is available to bacteria. Water activity rather than moisture content determines which pathogens can grow and how different cheese styles compare.

The same 60-day aging period that renders one batch of raw milk cheese safe can leave another infectious. For Salmonella, initial bacterial load is the variable that determines the outcome.

Unlike most dairy pathogens, Listeria monocytogenes thrives in the conditions that define aged cheese production. Cold tolerance, salt resistance, and biofilm formation explain why.

The lactic acid fermentation that eliminates most dairy pathogens triggers an adaptive response in E. coli O157:H7 that allows it to survive past 270 days in aged cheese.

Despite causing 1.5 million U.S. infections per year, Campylobacter rarely survives cheesemaking. Here is why oxygen, salt, and acid eliminate it reliably.

Raw milk cheese sold across state lines in the U.S. must be aged 60 days by federal law. Here is where that requirement came from and what it was designed to prevent.

Cheesemaking eliminates some pathogens reliably and leaves others largely intact. A science-based look at salt, water activity, lactic acid, and the 60-day aging rule.

One confirmed raw milk death in 15 years of federal surveillance. Cattle kill 22 Americans per year. Two numbers that are rarely considered together.

A 1946 map labeled Australia’s outback useless. Today it holds over a million feral camels and a growing camel milk dairy industry.

Pasteur never used the word “pasteurization.” Others coined it as an honorific, first in French, then in English in 1881, applied to wine. The path to milk took another decade.

Every conventional milk carton bears his name, but Pasteur never pasteurized milk. His study of fermentation developed a heat-treatment for wine in 1865 and beer in 1871.

Harold J. Harris’s 1945 Coronet article “Raw Milk Can Kill You” shaped American pasteurization law on a fictional epidemic and survey data the author knew was misleading.