The Deadly Cost of Health "Freedom."

In this case freedom is not just a word when there is nothing left to lose - there is a lot to lose.

Raw milk is not a “superfood.” It is milk that contains, as it has for millennia, the potential for salmonella, listeria, E. coli, and campylobacter—pathogens that pasteurization, that unglamorous Victorian-era innovation, eliminates with boring reliability. Before Louis Pasteur’s breakthrough, milk was one of the leading vectors for tuberculosis. The infant mortality statistics of the 1890s are not a lifestyle to which we should aspire, however fetchingly they might be photographed for Instagram.

But here we are, in an America where the Secretary of Health and Human Services—a man whose department oversees the CDC, FDA, and NIH—has recruited Mark McAfee, proprietor of a California raw milk operation with a résumé of recalls and outbreaks, to draft federal certification standards.

The timing is flawless in its recklessness. H5N1 avian influenza is currently rampaging through American dairy herds. The virus concentrates in infected udders at levels virologists describe with something app…