American milk also has anti-biotics and bovine growth hormone in it. I was fairly disappointed when they recently started allowing American milk to be sold here. Luckily it has to be labelled.
Milk is tested frequently and antibiotics are very rarely found [1]. Milk tankers that test positive for antibiotics are discarded and this milk never enters into the human consumption stream.
>While the administration of growth hormones known as BST or rBGH to dairy cows is allowed in the US, it is illegal in Canada and therefore not permitted for use with any dairy cows.
>In both Canada and the United States, all milk sold must be antibiotic-free, so the issue is more about potential antibiotic-resistance than actually consuming antibiotics through milk. In Canada, a farmer who provides a dairy with milk containing antibiotics will have to pay for all expenses related to the milk that is thrown out. That means farmers take their commitment to providing antibiotic-free milk seriously.
There's another, simple reason which predates the very real concerns another antibiotic resistance these days; it's impossible to make cheese or other dairy products with even slightly antibiotic contaminated milk.
Source - grew up on a NZ dairy farm. Every milk collection from every farm was sampled and tested for bacteria, and antibiotics. Too much of the first, and you were penalised with a lower payment for a start. Any of the latter, and you paid for disposal of all the milk in the tanker load, from your farm, and the others it collected. This was thirty years ago, if anything it will be stricter now.
Solution was simple, look after the cattle, and keep the medicated ones out of the milking herd.
You have to search fairly hard in the States to find a jug of rBGH milk anymore. Maybe the absolute bottom of the shelf stuff if you're "lucky". I assume that milk is going towards cheese production and related industries instead.
The food industry has QC out the @$$ (until you get to the final step before the consumer where things can be hit or miss) because their margins are so thin for the volume that they move that you can't afford not to have really good process control. Letting bad stuff out for a week could put you in the red for a very long time going forward.
Nobody wants out of spec milk because it's not useful. You can't sell it because it will come back to bite you.
