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Comment by MilaM | Hacker News Reader

Just yesterday, I bought a raw milk, aged cheese. Now I wonder if it is reasonably safe to consume them in light of this development.

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Cheese is a little different because the aging process kills some pathogens. But I'd check with your local food safety authorities.

Edit: SciAm says a qualified "mostly safe": https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-raw-milk-chees...

I am aware, that ageing has a positive effects with regard to food safety. What I'm less certain of is if this is also true for viruses.

I'm no expert so don't treat my comments as health advice, but viruses are large complex molecules and they don't tend to survive intact very long outside of living cells, do they?

When smallpox was eradicated, the WHO organized teams to collect and destroy samples of smallpox used in remote places for variolation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variolation#Decline IIRC the samples they found were too old and did not contain viable virus, but they were afraid they could start a new smallpox epidemic. So ... I guess they think virus can survive for a long time.

So avoid the creme fraiche, dive into the parmigiana?

Really depends on where you buy it. Some real cheese maker, or some random crappy industrial brand?

In France we eat cheese made from raw milk all the time, it's almost never a problem, it's so rare that when it does it makes the news and products are recalled.

It is a French cheese, but bought in a German supermarket. So most likely more industrial production for the mass market. It's still tasty, but probably not the best one you can buy out there.

Cheese would be fine. Most pathogens will be outcompeted and killed by the "good" microbes. It's the milk itself you want to avoid

I would suggest not. From what I've heard, raw milk, in general, is pretty dangerous.

Louis Pasteur won all kinds of awards for doing things like figuring out how to treat milk. Some of the bugs you can get from raw milk are not fun.

Lots of European cheeses are made from raw milk and cases of people getting sick from anything commercially prepared are vanishingly rare, even when the end product looks and smells like death.

I suspect most of them are.

I'll bet that the process of becoming cheese treats the bugs.

From what I hear, consuming raw milk is what's dangerous.

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