MOUNT GILEAD, Ohio - Vehicles regularly rumble down a long gravel drive to the dairy farm. Day in and day out, the drivers enter the milk house and fill their glass jars from a 1,000-gallon tank. Many of these travelers make the trip to this rural part of Morrow County from Columbus, 50 miles to the south, taking turns picking up milk for one another. It's one measure of how passionate consumers can be about raw - or unpasteurized - milk.

MOUNT GILEAD, Ohio � Vehicles regularly rumble down a long gravel drive to the dairy farm. Day in and day out, the drivers enter the milk house and fill their glass jars from a 1,000-gallon tank.

Many of these travelers make the trip to this rural part of Morrow County from Columbus, 50 miles to the south, taking turns picking up milk for one another. It�s one measure of how passionate consumers can be about raw � or unpasteurized � milk.

�People are becoming more and more aware,� said dairy-farm owner and operator Steve Miller, who is 62. �The food supply in this country is not all that healthy.

�The Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture don�t do that great of a job of protecting us from food-borne illness like salmonella and E. coli.�

The raw-milk movement has been fueled in part by skepticism of long-accepted public-health mandates that milk should be pasteurized before consumption to kill bacteria. Raw-milk sales for human consumption are illegal in Ohio and 23 other states.

Ohio does allow the sale of unpasteurized juice or cider where it is produced if it includes a warning label. Restaurants and grocery stores also are permitted to produce unpasteurized juice and serve it on site.

Visitors to Miller�s farm bypass the raw-milk ban, paying $60 for a share of Miller�s herd and paying a monthly boarding fee of $25 per share. In return, they�re entitled to a gallon of milk a week from the farm�s 80-cow organic herd.

Dairy farmers can legally drink their own milk straight from their tank, where the milk has been filtered but remains unprocessed. As owners of herd shares, consumers also have access to an unpasteurized product that many consider to be wholesome, nutritious � and safe.

Lisa Armstrong, 44, of Sharon Township, provides milk to her three children from Miller�s farm and has been a herd-share owner there for a decade. She prefers milk from a dairy farm such as Miller�s where the cows graze on grass, are not confined and are not given grain or antibiotics.

She trusts her experience with raw milk over warnings from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the product�s risks.

�We feel like what we choose as educated individuals ought to be our choice. We�re not going haphazardly into something,� said Armstrong, a local chapter leader for the Weston A. Price Foundation, which advocates consumption of �clean, certified raw milk,� according to its website.

The foundation�s president, Sally Fallon Morell, supports reasonable regulation of raw milk, such as mandated testing of its bacteria levels. The milk provides too many benefits for ailments such as asthma to be kept off-limits, she said. �We desperately need to get our children back on this food.�

In Ohio, two court cases have expanded access to raw milk.

A Darke County judge overturned the state Department of Agriculture�s revocation of a dairy farmer�s milk license in 2006, saying the department hadn�t shown that the farmer illegally provided raw milk to

165 Dayton-area herd-share owners. The Department of Agriculture had revoked the license after three people who had consumed raw milk became sick and one was hospitalized.

Two years later, a Washington County judge found that state agriculture officials improperly kept two Marietta-area farmers from using raw milk as an ingredient in pet food. Fagan�s Farm in the county still sells raw milk as pet food and is the only Ohio farm licensed to do so.

The department�s crackdown on dairy farmers cooled after such court decisions. But that hasn�t reduced the health risks posed by raw milk, public-health officials said.

Outbreaks of illness in which raw milk was the suspected or confirmed source left 121 people sick and seven people hospitalized in Ohio between 2002 and 2012, according to a CDC database. No deaths were reported. The data include only outbreaks, not cases in which one person was sickened.

Nationwide, there were 1,768 illnesses and 111 hospitalizations in which raw milk was suspected or confirmed to be the source during that period, according to the database. Those statistics don�t include outbreaks associated with cheese and other products made from raw milk.

The vast majority of Ohio illnesses and hospitalizations linked to raw milk stem from a 2002 outbreak at a Clark County dairy farm and restaurant that, at the time, legally sold raw dairy products to the public.

The outbreak did not originate with the dairy�s cows. Contamination might have occurred during the milking, bottling or capping process, according to the CDC. The farm no longer sells raw milk to the public.

Illness from raw milk probably is underreported, said Jamie Higley, food-safety program administrator with the Ohio Department of Health.

�The issue with raw milk is that many times it�s implicated in a food-borne illness, but it�s not confirmed,� Higley said. �Occasionally, from what I�ve heard and seen, the victims will not admit to drinking raw milk. I think that�s because they don�t want to get the farm in trouble, because it�s illegal to sell it.�

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has found no evidence that pasteurization reduces the nutritional value of dairy products, Higley said.

The risks associated with drinking raw milk versus pasteurized milk can be hard to gauge. Just as it�s unknown how many people have been sickened by consuming raw milk, information is scant on how many people actually drink it.

CDC surveys have found that as many as 3 percent of U.S. residents consume raw milk regularly, and recent CDC-published research suggests that outbreaks associated with non-pasteurized dairy products are 150 times greater per unit of dairy consumed than outbreaks associated with pasteurized dairy products.

While no firm count exists, Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund co-founder and general counsel Gary Cox estimates that at least 20 Ohio dairy farms sell herd shares.

Researchers with the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center, part of Ohio State University, met with

80 raw- and pasteurized-milk consumers in and outside the Columbus metropolitan area through focus groups.

They found that people in urban areas who consumed unpasteurized milk had less trust of institutions that regulate the safety of the food supply and also had a lower level of knowledge about food safety.

The researchers are now expanding that study nationwide.

�Trust is a very strong issue,� said Lydia Medeiros, study co-author, dietitian and professor emeritus of food safety. �We have to establish trust as educators and public-health workers.�

�The raw-milk debate is not a scientific debate about whether it�s safe or not,� added fellow researcher Jeff LeJeune, a professor of food safety and head of the OARDC�s food-animal-health research program. �The issue we�re debating here is the political parameters that surround access.�& amp; amp; amp; amp; amp; amp; lt; /p>

bsutherly@dispatch.com

@BenSutherly