I figured my previous posting about the middle road wouldn’t sit well with some readers. Actually, it doesn’t sit well with me in important ways. I agree with Sylvia that asking questions about a food-borne illness doesn’t necessarily equate with denial. And with Dave Milano, that this country has implemented so many controls on food and health care, and moved so far from its original ideals, that the middle road may not be all that much in the middle any more.

Part of what I was trying to suggest is that people in the line of fire, like Scott Freeman, the Colorado dairyman dealing with a possible campylobacter outbreak from his milk, need to work within the existing system. It’s so difficult to run a business today in the U.S., what with all the economic and marketplace pressures, that it’s asking too much of people like Scott to fight highly principled legal cases, at the risk of their entire livelihoods, not to mention the raw milk supplies of 200 shareholders. You have to hope that trying to establish an atmosphere of flexibility and compromise, with media watching, can set some precedents that begin to move the pendulum back toward a true middle road over some period of time.

It’s ironic that in the midst of all this discussion about identifying causes and assessing blame in one case of possible raw-milk-triggered food-borne illness, we have a settlement in two others—the cases  involving the serious illnesses from food-borne illness in California of children Chris Martin and Lauren Herzog (pictured above). Mark McAfee of Organic Pastures Dairy Co. announced the settlements in his comment following my previous post:

“We would like to announce that both of (Bill) Marler’s 2006 OPDC raw milk cases have settled.” The parties came together this week at a court-required mediation session in Fresno.

The cases, which were filed by the families in state court in early 2008, were the two most serious of six illnesses in September 2006 attributed by California health officials to tainted Organic Pastures dairy products.

State officials quarantined Organic Pastures in Fresno for several days as they searched the dairy for a match to the E.coli 0157:H7 found in five of the six children who became ill. No match was ever found.

As in nearly all such cases, in which some cash payment is made to victims to avoid a court trial, part of the settlement includes a stipulation that everyone will keep the terms confidential. Everyone has an interest in keeping things quiet—insurance companies don’t want other litigants to know how much was paid out; lawyers don’t want it known how much, or how little, they settled for; and victims don’t want Aunt Millie and Cousin Jim to know about the new cash windfall their relatives have just come in for.

As Mark McAfee makes clear, it’s safe to say that everyone involved in this contentious case is extremely relieved to have it behind them. The two cases were the subject of on-and-off debate, much of it quite acrimonious, since Mary McGonigle-Martin first revealed her family’s experiences dealing with son Chris’ illness in a series of postings I ran in March and April 2007.

If you haven’t been following these cases, you can search the index under “Mary” and begin to get a sense of the intensity of the discussion.

Mark McAfee makes a poignant case for mutual understanding in explaining how he and Bill Marler, the lawyer who represented the families, and was bitterly denunciated on this blog, came together. “Marler and I both agreed to be civil to one another and we shook on it….eye to eye…man to man. I actually really enjoyed meeting him. Let that be a lesson in email and blogging. People are much better in person than how they appear and how they throw email rocks from behind the electronic smoke screen that often increases the nerve and stregthens the spine. What ever happened to good old honest eye to eye communications?”