Editorial Roundup: Pennsylvania

LNP/LancasterOnline. May 22, 2024

Rep. Zimmerman says that the demand for raw milk is “out there.”

It is out there, all right, though not in the sense the lawmaker means. He says consumers are asking for raw milk and, in some areas, traveling “a long way” to get it.

That does not mean they should get it. And this seems so obvious — like, don’t-play-golf-in-a-thunderstorm obvious — that we can’t believe we even have to write it.

Drinking raw milk has never been safe. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that pasteurization is “crucial for milk safety,” and consuming “raw milk can lead to serious health risks, especially for certain vulnerable populations” — children younger than 5, adults older than 65, pregnant women and people with weakened immune systems.

Drinking or eating products made from raw milk can expose people to germs such as E. coli, listeria and salmonella, the CDC warns, and the outcomes of foodborne illnesses can be severe.

And now the avian flu virus has been detected in dairy cows in other states.

Avian flu can be deadly to poultry — and, as we saw in 2022, it can threaten the livelihoods of Lancaster County poultry farmers.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture and other government agencies continue to investigate an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza virus impacting dairy cows in multiple states. Fortunately, so far at least, the avian flu virus has not been detected in Pennsylvania cows. But it has been found in dairy cattle in our neighboring state of Ohio.

According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration website, there is no concern that avian flu in dairy cows “poses a risk to consumer health, or … affects the safety of the interstate commercial milk supply because products are pasteurized before entering the market.”

But raw dairy products are not pasteurized. That’s their supposed selling point to those who claim — without evidence — that they contain more nutrients than pasteurized dairy products.

The FDA notes that because research and information are limited, it’s not known at this time whether avian flu viruses can be transmitted through the “consumption of unpasteurized (raw) milk and products (such as cheese) made from raw milk from infected cows. However, we have long known that raw milk can harbor dangerous microorganisms (germs) that can pose serious health risks to consumers.”

Please read that last sentence carefully. We’ve put it in italics to emphasize it, because we hope that everyone heeds this warning.

In Pennsylvania, raw milk only may be sold by farmers who have permits from the state Department of Agriculture. Those farmers must abide by strict safety standards.

County farmer Amos Miller does not have such a permit because he refuses to adhere to state food-safety regulations. He has sold raw milk containing the dangerous bacteria known as listeria. In 2016, raw milk from Miller’s Organic Farm was linked to the 2014 death of a person in Florida.

In January, Pennsylvania agriculture officials executed a search warrant on Miller’s farm after being notified by public health officials in New York and Michigan of illnesses reported in individuals who consumed raw eggnog and other raw dairy products from Miller’s Organic Farm. Both states said tests were positive for Shiga toxin-producing E. coli, which can cause severe stomach cramps, bloody diarrhea and a type of kidney failure. And E. coli, as LNP ‘ LancasterOnline’s Dan Nephin reported at the time, “almost always originate in feces.”

How is that for a selling point? Buy raw dairy products and you might get some bonus E. coli bacteria.

Zimmerman, who grew up on a dairy farm, said his proposed legislation wasn’t created with Miller in mind. And, in fact, as LNP ‘ LancasterOnline’s White reported, Zimmerman specifically addressed Miller’s refusal to cooperate with state officials in a Jan. 17 Facebook post. “Is it too much to ask our farmers to follow these basic requirements to ensure food safety?”

It is not too much to ask.

In a similar vein, though, we’d ask if it’s not too much to ask state lawmakers to work for the actual well-being of their constituents.

Earlier this month, state officials reported that a person who consumed raw milk from Apple Valley Creamery, sold under the Pure Pastures Dairy label, had become ill with campylobacteriosis, which causes diarrhea (often bloody), fever and stomach cramps.

Consumers who bought that milk with sell-by dates of April 3 through May 2 were urged to discard it immediately. The raw milk was produced by an Adams County business, but it was sold in Lancaster County at Lemon Street Market, according to a Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture news release.

The appeal of raw milk, with its associated health risks, escapes us. Unfortunately, raw dairy has been embraced as a token of freedom by some who spurn government food-safety regulations and other science-based rules aimed at keeping people from dying.

If people believe the labels “organic,” “raw” and “pure” automatically equate to “healthy,” they might want to think again.

If people want to demonstrate their freedom from government regulation by risking their health and consuming raw dairy products, that’s up to them.

But state lawmakers shouldn’t make it easier for them.

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Philadelphia Daily News/Inquirer. May 23, 2024

The resegregation of America’s public schools has led to the same inequitable public education funding that prompted the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision.

Was anyone really surprised when it was reported on the 70th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s supposedly groundbreaking Brown v. Board of Education decision that many schools are as much or more segregated than they were decades ago? Anyone watching the children headed to urban schools each day — most of them Black and brown — had already figured that out.

Almost half of all public school students nationally are white, but the percentage of schools with fewer than 10% white students has nearly tripled over the past 30 years, from 7% to 20%. These “intensely segregated” schools are mostly in urban areas, where public school students are typically at least 75% Black or Latino.

That disappoints some people, while others accept it as yet another lingering issue in America that they no longer expect to see resolved. Immigration reform is on that list, too. It’s not that these issues lack solutions, but this country seems to have lost the resolve it once mustered when trying to battle past entrenched attitudes and find common ground.

Losing resolve is somewhat understandable when it comes to desegregating schools. No one wants a repeat of the decades-long war that broke out after the Supreme Court, on May 17, 1954, ruled states could no longer maintain segregated public school systems that often didn’t even pretend to fund and equip Black classrooms as well as white ones.

That war raged from Birmingham, Ala., to Boston, as angry white parents railed against court-ordered desegregation plans, which in some instances included mandatory busing. When protests that sometimes became mob gatherings didn’t work, many white families moved to suburban neighborhoods to flee schools with growing numbers of Black students.

The new suburbanites took their tax dollars with them, thus enriching suburban school districts while leaving urban school systems with less money to educate larger numbers of low-income and special-needs students whose education required more funding than their now tax-deficient school boards could provide. That’s right: The resegregation of America’s public schools has led to the same inequitable distribution of tax dollars for public education that led to the Brown decision in the first place.

Blame that on presidential appointments over the past 70 years that replaced Supreme Court justices and lower court judges with conservatives who diluted past court orders and never included suburban schools in desegregation plans that would bring more Black students to them.

Despite white flight, all public schools have become more diverse. That’s largely due to immigration. More than 80% of all public school students were white in 1968. By 2021, they made up only 45% of the student body. During that same period, the percentage of Latino students increased from 5% to 28% and Black students remained just under 15%. Since the 1990s, the percentage of Asian students has doubled to 6%, while Native American students have never been more than 1%.

That greater diversity, however, hasn’t achieved the fair funding Brown sought.

“Black students may no longer need to be escorted to school by U.S. marshals, and they may no longer face angry mobs on their way to school or eat at separate lunch tables, but today, we have a system where we have normalized underinvesting in schools that serve a majority of Black communities,” said U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona at a White House celebration of Brown’s 70th anniversary.

The fight to adequately fund public schools won’t be in the federal courts; it will be in the individual state legislatures that control taxes and expenditures. It’s estimated that this country spends $150 billion less than needed to educate its children. Included in that figure is a $2.5 billion funding gap for Pennsylvania and $1.3 billion for New Jersey. No matter the state, poor, mostly Black and brown students in urban school districts are more likely to need the added educational help that better funding would provide.

Cheryl Brown Henderson, whose father, Oliver Brown, was the lead plaintiff in Brown, said adequate school funding would be a fitting legacy for the court case. “I always like to say that schools were the battle, but society was the target,” Henderson said. “We’re still fighting the battle over whose children do we invest in. Any time we can talk about failing, underfunded public schools, there is a problem.”

Seventy years later, we can’t afford to quit trying to solve it. Our children deserve better than that.

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Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. May 28, 2024

Tennessee and Delaware are the first states to create a Medicaid program offering low-income parents free diapers. It’s a move Pennsylvania should copy, for the good babies, parents and all Commonwealth communities.

Diaper costs have risen dramatically in the last five years, and with most newborns using up to 10 a day, the costs quickly add up. Without enough diapers, babies may be left in the ones they have longer, risking rashes and infections. But now, parents in Tennessee’s Medicaid system will be able to pick up diapers free of charge at their local pharmacies.

The Tennessee program won’t cover all of a baby’s diaper needs – only about a third of the 300 diapers most newborns use a month. Still, that’s another $30 for low-income families to put towards other necessities, ones that social safety nets like SNAP or WIC could cover.

And if a state like Tennessee, famous for rebuffing federal funds for Medicaid and other safety net programs, is able to get a simple program like this off the ground with bipartisan support, Pennsylvania should have no trouble doing the same. For liberals, it’s a natural extension of the social safety net. For conservatives, removing economic hurdles to having children should be seen as a pro-life measure that indicates state support for childrearing by helping families both before and after their babies are born.

Besides the inherent social responsibility to encourage and to protect babies, the economic impacts of free diapers are huge. Connecticut launched a nonprofit diaper bank in 2004, and analyzed its impacts in a 2018 report. The results were “unambiguously positive” — so positive that the researchers were “more than a little surprised.”

Most families benefiting from the Connecticut diaper program were working parents. Without a days’ worth of diapers, many daycares won’t accept babies, directly undercutting parents’ ability to earn income. Parents with access to diapers increased their earnings, and their tax contributions, when diapers were more readily accessible. The findings were even more positive for parents in school: For them, the added access to education and the ensuing increase in income were even steeper.

The Connecticut study also lamented the limited reach of the program, and highlighted how many parents could still use more support. This is where a statewide program could make the most difference. While Pittsburgh benefits from a diaper bank run by United Way, as well as other efforts from nonprofits and religious organizations, residents outside the city don’t have that same access.

Pennsylvania should take a cue from Tennessee and Delaware and launch a Medicaid-backed free diaper program. It’s good for babies, and for the budget.