Norwegian footballer Erling Haaland, one of the standout stars of this summer’s World Cup, drinks raw, unpasteurized milk and openly calls it a superfood, crediting it as part of what fuels how he feels and how he trains. He isn’t an outlier — millions of people online are making the exact same argument in favor of raw milk, and each month it’s getting easier for more of them to actually buy it. The surge in demand traces back to 2020, shaped by two forces feeding off each other: a broader loss of trust in public health institutions in the wake of COVID, and a wellness culture that has rebranded raw milk as something “natural,” a near-magical “cure-all,” and a symbol of rejecting expert consensus altogether. States, meanwhile, keep chipping away at the rules that once restricted it. Oklahoma is a recent example — lawmakers there just raised the state’s legal sales cap fifteen-fold, and they did it while an active outbreak was still unfolding.
The 2026 raw-milk outbreaks are already here
This spring alone, close to 60 people in Idaho got sick after drinking raw milk, with most of those infections traced back to Campylobacter. Additional cases have since been reported in both Louisiana and California. In New Mexico, a health advisory was issued after a newborn died — the mother had consumed raw milk contaminated with Listeria while pregnant. Separately, a California dairy producer recalled a batch of raw cheddar after it was linked to an E. coli O157:H7 outbreak that put a child into kidney failure. When you compare the two ounce for ounce, unpasteurized dairy is responsible for roughly 840 times more illness than pasteurized milk.
How pasteurization won over the objections of raw-milk advocates
Go back to 1891, and about one out of every four babies born in New York City didn’t survive past their first birthday — and contaminated raw milk was one of the leading reasons why, since it carried tuberculosis, typhoid, salmonella, and diphtheria. Decades before that, in the 1860s, Louis Pasteur had already proven that gentle heating could destroy the microbes responsible for spoiling wine and beer. It took years of persistent effort from public health reformers to apply that same logic to milk. One of those reformers was Macy’s co-owner Nathan Straus, a man who had lost several of his own children to illnesses spread through milk. He responded by opening free pasteurized-milk stations across poor neighborhoods in the city. Over four years, he fed roughly 20,000 children through these stations, and only six of them died — a mortality rate of about 0.03%, a striking contrast to the city’s overall infant mortality rate of 24% at the time. Even with evidence like that, cities didn’t make pasteurization mandatory without a fight, and the opposition came from “certified raw milk” advocates who dismissed heat treatment as unnecessary. Strip away the century, and it’s almost word-for-word the same argument being made by raw milk supporters today.
Safety claims rest on shaky numbers
According to the industry, raw milk is only getting safer over time. The Raw Milk Institute, a group that lobbies on the product’s behalf, points to a study which claims raw milk outbreak rates are trending downward even as more people are drinking it. What the Institute doesn’t emphasize is that its own founder also owns Raw Farm — the same company responsible for the cheddar recall tied to the E. coli O157:H7 outbreak, and a business that regulators have already connected to 233 separate illness cases stretching back over two decades.
CDC’s FoodNet went from eight germs to two
Here’s the catch: any claim that outbreak rates are falling only holds up if someone is actually keeping count. And starting July 1, 2025, the federal government stopped requiring most of that counting altogether. The CDC scaled back FoodNet, its most important food-safety surveillance program, cutting the number of pathogens it mandates tracking for from eight down to just two. Salmonella and Shiga toxin-producing E. coli remain mandatory, but Campylobacter, Cyclospora, Listeria, Shigella, Vibrio, and Yersinia all shifted to optional status.
What makes this significant is that all six of those newly optional pathogens are the exact ones associated with raw milk. The Idaho outbreak, for instance, was driven by Campylobacter. Testing for Listeria — the pathogen that killed the newborn in New Mexico and poses a risk to every pregnancy — is no longer required. The single raw-milk-linked pathogen that’s still mandatory to track is STEC, the toxin responsible for the cheddar recall. In other words, at the exact same moment states were making raw milk more accessible to buy, the federal government was making it harder to monitor the germs inside it.
It helps to understand what FoodNet actually does. The network was set up in 1995, in direct response to the Jack-in-the-Box E. coli deaths, and since then it has carried out active surveillance covering about 15% of the U.S. population across 10 state-based sites. Its job includes auditing laboratories to make sure every diagnosed case actually gets reported. It’s also the source behind some of the most widely cited food-safety statistics: 48 million Americans sickened by food-borne illness every year, 128,000 hospitalized, and 3,000 who die.
Two of the six pathogens that lost mandatory status are among the deadliest ones the system tracks. Listeria ranks as the third-leading cause of death from food-borne illness, and among people sick enough to get diagnosed, somewhere between 15% and 20% die from it. Campylobacter sickens an estimated 1.5 million Americans every year — and even that number is considered an undercount. For certain pathogens, the gap between reported and actual cases is enormous: the CDC estimates that for every one Vibrio infection it officially records, roughly 130 more go undiagnosed. FoodNet’s active surveillance was precisely the mechanism that let the CDC adjust its estimates for that kind of undercounting.
The government’s reassurance that “states can continue to monitor” on their own really just means the baseline of protection is now a patchwork. Minnesota and Maryland have said they plan to keep tracking all eight pathogens regardless of the new federal rule; Colorado has signaled it might scale its own tracking back. It’s the same underlying pattern already playing out with raw milk regulation itself — some states stay careful, others leave the job undone, and how protected you are ends up depending largely on your zip code.
Scaling back surveillance doesn’t actually make raw milk any safer — it just makes the harm harder to see. The very statistic the raw milk lobby relies on to argue the product is getting safer was generated by the same surveillance system that is now being stripped of funding.
Who can actually fix this
This isn’t a problem that can be solved by consumers being more careful in the dairy aisle. It’s simply not possible for a shopper to weigh a risk that has effectively been erased from the available data. The real levers of change sit with a small group of decision-makers: HHS leadership, who made the call to scale back FoodNet and pointed to funding as the reason; the members of Congress who control appropriations and decide whether FoodNet remains a funding priority; and the ten state health departments now each independently deciding whether to step in and cover the gap left behind by the federal government’s retreat.
When an outbreak happens in a state that has stopped keeping count, it isn’t just bad luck — it’s what public health experts describe as a “never event,” the kind of entirely preventable harm that a functioning surveillance system exists specifically to stop from happening in the first place.