>> "Raw milk is healthier than pasteurized"

Oh dear, my very own pet peeve.

Anecdotally this is common also between anti-vaxxers or vaccine skeptics or what have you. It makes sense because those ideas really form a continuum that is basically denying the Germ Theory of Disease, i.e. the knowledge that humanity has acquired in the last couple hundred years that there exist micro-organisms that are the direct causal agents of some diseases. It's like a return to the bad parts of the Middle Ages were people got sick and died and nobody could tell why.

It's also a particularly dangerous belief to hold. People have destroyed their own kids' kidneys for life with it: drinking raw milk infected with Shiga-toxin producing E-coli can cause Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome (HUS) which particularly affects children with under-developed immune systems, and which can really destroy young ones' kidneys [1,2]. It's insane and heartbreaking and infuriating and omg I cannot think of anything more terrifying than living with the knowledge that I've caused so much harm to my own children because I was too stupid to understand the risks and thought I was doing them good [3].

>> “There has definitely been a growing number of people who question widely accepted scientific evidence,” agrees Heidi Larson, who studies confidence in vaccines at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “It’s important to pay attention to.”

OK but this I really have to push back on. Who the hell really knows and understands "the scientific evidence"? When you start throwing around shibboleths like that, that's when people lose the plot and think they're doing the right thing and "doing their own research" and so on. Scientists train for years to be able to understand "the scientific evidence". The lay public can't be expected to have the same ability. You have to take scientists at their word.

And that means that scientists have the responsibility to build trust. I don't know how that's done. Thank god I'm only a computer scientist and my work can hardly poison or kill anyone, I mean unless someone ends up running my software on a kamikaze drone or something [4].

And anyway science is a debate and "the scientific evidence" keeps changing year after year. My friend tells this story where her two grandmothers, one a farmer (though well-educated), the other a biologist, were talking about ... eggs. Grandmother A, the farmer, had hens and one year Grandmother B, the biologist, advised her to wash the eggs because the latest scientific evidence was that this reduced the risk of food-borne illnesses. A few years later, Grandmother B told Grandmother A that the scientific evidence had changed and it was now considered riskier to wash eggs because that could cause contaminants to permeate the shell. "So better stop washing them" said Grandmother B. "Oh, don't worry", said Grandmother A, "I never started washing them anyway".

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[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10919754/

[2] https://academic.oup.com/cid/article-abstract/48/11/1637/348...

[3] And I don't even have children.

[4] Unlikely.