Dairy Death

[Cora Auch]

ProPublicais a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. This article was co-published with the USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin and El Faro.

We need your help to understand the challenges facing dairy farm workers. We especially want to hear from farmers, medical professionals, regulators and anyone else with perspective from inside the community.

One factor to consider is the growth of the dairy industry. Between 2008 and 2013, the state saw a 187 percent increase in milk production. In comparison, the previous 63 years saw a 400 percent increase, according to research published by the Journal of Animal Science. Greek yogurt, in particular, has driven the growth. It requires three times as much milk as regular yogurt, and has led to intensified production practices on dairy farms. The Buffalo News reported that between 2008 and 2012, New York Greek yogurt sales increased from 2.5 percent of the U.S. market to 36 percent.

A significant downside to the OSHA program is that it only covers farms with 11 or more workers as Congress has deemed the regulations too burdensome for smaller businesses. Even a fatality on a dairy farm with fewer than 11 non-family employees would not trigger an OSHA investigation.

Adults who consume the most dairy, compared with the least, are at the highest risk for early death, according to a study published in the BMJ. Among 217,755 participants from three large Harvard cohorts, the Nurses' Health Study, Nurses' Health Study II, and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, those who consumed the most dairy products had the highest risk for total mortality, cardiovascular mortality, and cancer mortality. The researchers also found that when dairy is replaced with beans, whole grains, or nuts the risk for death decreases. When dairy is replaced with red and processed meat, the risk increases. Replacing meat with dairy may explain why some studies find a reduced risk for death with dairy consumption. However, the most protective diet excludes both meat and dairy.

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Purpose: To investigate whether the consumption of dairy products and their subgroups is associated with the risk of death from cardiovascular disease (CVD) after 8-year follow-up, and verify if dairy products predict changes in high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) between two follow-up visits of the Brazilian Longitudinal Study of Adult Health (ELSA-Brasil).

Methods: Prospective study with 6671 participants without CVD at baseline. Consumption in grams/day of total dairy, full-fat and low-fat dairy, fermented dairy, and milk was obtained through a food frequency questionnaire and categorized into sex-specific quartiles. Cox regression and linear mixed-effect models were used to estimate associations of dairy products intake with death from CVD and changes in hs-CRP levels, respectively.

Conclusion: Results suggest beneficial effects of total dairy and milk, but only low-to-moderate full-fat dairy consumption, on the risk of death from CVD. Assuming true effects, public policies should encourage the consumption of dairy products, especially milk.

Dairy products like cheese, butter, and whole milk contain saturated fats. Past research has shown that diets with high levels of saturated fats can increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, such as heart disease and stroke. Saturated fats have also been linked to increased mortality rates. Understanding the health effects of dairy fats is challenging because dairy products are complex. They contain many nutrients like calcium that have health benefits.

The study included nearly 3,000 adults in California, Maryland, North Carolina, or Pennsylvania who were older than 65 and free of heart disease at the start of the study. The participants had physical exams and lab tests, and answered questionnaires. The team assessed three fatty acids that reflect dairy intake (pentadecanoic, heptadecanoic, and trans-palmitoleic fatty acids) in blood samples obtained at the start, at six years, and at 13 years. The results appeared online in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition on July 11, 2018.

More than 2,400 people died over the course of the 22-year study period. The researchers accounted for demographic, lifestyle, cardiovascular, and dietary factors. They found no significant links between overall risk of death and long-term exposure to the three dairy fatty acids.

A father of three young children, Temoxtle left his family behind in Mexico and headed to the United States to work. He had nearly saved up enough money to return home, his family says, when he met an unexpected and unthinkable end: he drowned in a manure pit while training on a new job at a LaSalle dairy.

Records reviewed by Rocky Mountain PBS show the agency has investigated at least 10 similar fatalities at dairies across the country, dating back to 1997. In each incident, work equipment or a vehicle ended up in a liquid manure pit, leaving the worker unable to escape.

Yet OSHA said it does not have specific regulations aimed at preventing this particular type of accident, such as requirements for physical barriers around manure pits or required safety training for employees working around the hazardous manure liquids.

Advocates for farmworker health say the lack of specific workplace safety regulation in the agriculture industry means it is up to individual farm and dairy operators to research and implement safety controls.

The U.S. dairy industry estimates its economic impact in the hundreds of billions of dollars. But in the ten prior manure pit fatalities reviewed by Rocky Mountain PBS (nine of which resulted in fines being handed down by OSHA) initial fines averaged less than $7,000.

Lawmakers listened. They debated whether anything in the legislation specifically addressed prevention of incidents like what happened to Temoxtle, and whether the new provisions would impact some farmers' ability to stay in business.

Ultimately, the bill passed and Governor Jared Polis signed it into law in June. Among the protections provided, sponsors said it gives workers the right to unionize, take water breaks during hot summer days, report safety concerns without fear of retaliation, and potentially earn overtime pay.

Then by having better data, patterns can start to show up in particular areas of the dairy that need to be addressed. Maybe more cows are dying during or after calving, showing that changes are needed in the maternity pen or how fresh cows are handled.

The regular decrease of female fertility over time is a major concern in modern dairy cattle industry. Only half of this decrease is explained by indirect response to selection on milk production, suggesting the existence of other factors such as embryonic lethal genetic defects. Genomic regions harboring recessive deleterious mutations were detected in three dairy cattle breeds by identifying frequent haplotypes (>1%) showing a deficit in homozygotes among Illumina Bovine 50k Beadchip haplotyping data from the French genomic selection database (47,878 Holstein, 16,833 Montbliarde, and 11,466 Normande animals). Thirty-four candidate haplotypes (p

Copyright: 2013 Fritz et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Competing interests: Genotypes originated from three projects funded by ANR and ApisGene, and from genomic selection activity generated by seven French cattle breeding companies (Creavia, Amelis, Genes Diffusion, Midatest, Umotest, Jura Betail, Interselection Normande). The whole genome sequence data originated from the CartoSeq project funded by ANR and ApisGene. There are no patents, products in development or marketed products to declare. This does not alter the authors' adherence to all the PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

Most dairy cattle breeds are genetically small populations formed few centuries ago from a limited number of founders. In the last 60 years, their genetic pool was further reduced by the wide use of a limited number of elite sires via artificial insemination and strong selection on small number of traits. As a consequence, typical dairy cattle breeds display an average inbreeding rate around 1% per generation corresponding to an effective size of 50 [1], [2] and fifty percent of their gene pool are explained by only 10 to 20 ancestors. Such an inbreeding trend, associated to a corresponding increase in homozygosity, is favorable to the expression of recessive defects. Consequently nearly all dairy cattle breeds are characterized by segregation of genetic abnormalities and new emergences are regularly observed such as Bovine Leukocyte Adhesion Deficiency (BLAD [3]), Complex Vertebral Malformation (CVM, [4]), Syndactyly [5] or Brachyspina [6], [7] in Holstein.

In recent years, implementation of dedicated observatories in different countries (such as in Denmark [8] and in France [9]), and use of homozygosity mapping based on high density SNP genotyping data [10], [11] have proven very efficient tools enabling the detection of novel genetic defects and identification of associated mutations in a very short period of time with a limited number of cases. However, this process rely on the observation of clinical cases (i.e. on animals still alive up to birth and showing clinical signs) and except rare cases of late abortion (as for CVM or Brachyspina), most of the defects responsible for embryonic or fetal death are missed. Female fertility is yet a major concern in modern dairy industry. Calving rate is known to regularly decrease over time [12] and only half of this decrease is explained by indirect response to selection on milk production, suggesting the existence of other factors including embryonic lethal genetic defects.

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