Home | Nutrition | Food | How Safe Is the Milk?

How Safe Is the Milk?

Font size: Decrease font Enlarge font

By Martha Rosenberg


All dairy cows and “22 to 70 percent of calves” receive antibiotics on dairy farms, admitted Robert D. Byrne, PhD, vice president of scientific and regulatory affairs of the National Milk Producers Federation at Capitol Hill hearings about the overuse of livestock antibiotics in 2008. The drugs are used only to “reduce the level of potentially harmful bacteria which result infections and sickness,” and are FDA-approved Byrne added. There is also a drug “withdrawal time” to make sure milk isn’t contaminated, and milk is “screened” before it is accepted into a processing plant.


The dairy industry has vehemently fought antibiotic restrictions by the government. John J. Wilson, a senior vice president for Dairy Farmers of America, said that the idea of testing for more antibiotics was “very damaging to innocent dairy farmers,” and that there was little reason to think that the slaughterhouse findings of high drug residues “would be replicated in tests of the milk supply.”

And when the FDA proposed testing for more drugs in 2011 the dairy industry got so furious, it used the d-word. Agri-Mark, a Northeast cooperative, sent a letter to its members instructing them to DUMP milk if it had been tested by the FDA, “to ensure that all of our milk sales, cheese, butter and other products are in no danger of recall.”

Dairies whose animals harbor high levels of antibiotics are disturbingly common. “Our investigation found that you hold animals under conditions which are so inadequate that diseased and/or medicated animals bearing potentially harmful drug residues in edible tissues are likely to enter the food supply,” reads a letter from the FDA to Dennis H. Eldred, the owner of Willet Dairy, in 2005. Four years later Willet Dairy, New York’s largest dairy, was shown on Nightline practicing shocking cruelty against its dairy animals.




  • email Email to a friend
  • print Print version