ABSTRACT
Dairy products are considered to be relatively safe foods, accounting for 1-3% of reported outbreaks in the United States (70). The majority of outbreaks from dairy products can be attributed to postprocessing contamination (31, 38, 70), since the efficacy of pasteurization processes has been well established. Thermal process ing of milk has been routinely performed since the latter part of the nineteenth cen tury, when it was introduced to combat such diseases as tuberculosis, diphtheria, and typhoid.
