Kylee Young was 23 months old when she contracted an E. coli O157:H7 infection from drinking raw milk. The illness hospitalized her for months, caused her to have a stroke and eventually required her to receive a kidney transplanted from her mother.
Kylee’s parents, Jill Brown and Jason Young, are now speaking out to urge other parents not to feed raw milk to their children, as children are especially vulnerable to foodborne pathogens potentially present in unpasteurized milk.
“There might be some benefits of raw milk, but there are huge risks,” said Brown, Kylee’s mother. “There needs to be more public awareness that this is a high-risk food. If I had known what I know now, I would never have fed it to my daughter.”
The owners of the family dairy that supplied her milk, Brad and Tricia Salyers, also suffered through four of their five children contracting E. coli infections. Like Kylee’s parents, they, too, are warning parents not to feed raw milk to their children.
Food Safety News published an in-depth story on Kylee’s experience yesterday: “A Mom and Dairyman Plead: Don’t Feed Children Raw Milk”
To help inform other parents about their family’s experience, Brown and Young participated in a video interview with videographer Terry Tainter. Watch it below:
