• Question: what is the biggest or most amount of bugs youve found in a dairy product

    Asked by holly18 to Aoife on 14 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Aoife McHugh

      Aoife McHugh answered on 14 Nov 2019:

      Raw milk can have loads of microbes!

      Raw milk is milk before pasteurisation. All milk we get from supermarkets is pasteurised. This involves heating the milk to a high temperature, for a short period of time to kill the microbes. This kills most of the microbes and especially any dangerous ones.

      Milk is very nutritious for us, but microbes love it too. If the milk is held in tanks (on farms or in processors) before it is pasteurised the microbes can multiply in numbers, even if it is kept cold at 4 degrees.
      Milks on farms or in processors before pasteurisation can have tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of microbes per ml (100,000/ml)! Once the milk is pasteurised most of these microbes die, including any that can make us sick, and there might only be 100 microbes per ml (100/ml) left.

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