At a busy farmer’s market on the outskirts of Annapolis, Maryland, the line in front of the raw dairy table moved briskly. A pregnant woman paid for a half-gallon as “My Sharona” blared from the overhead speakers.

A man wearing a brown cowboy hat pulled jug after jug out of a cooler next to the table. Some people wanted raw milk cheeses, but most of them were there for the milk itself. He brought 140 half-gallons that Saturday, and a little after 9 in the morning, there were only nine bottles left.

Selling raw milk for human consumption is illegal in Maryland. Each jug the man sold was labeled “Pet Milk” on the side, along with a required warning that unpasteurized milk can cause foodborne illness. But at no point in our conversation did the man ever talk about feeding the milk to pets. Instead, he told me that milk-borne pathogens are a myth, and that raw milk is key to staying healthy.

Sales of unpasteurized milk have increased by as much as 65 percent in the United States since bird flu was detected among cows in March. One raw milk vendor told the Los Angeles Times last month that customers are keen to drink milk contaminated with H5N1 in order to “gain immunity.” With the dairy industry in turmoil, raw milk influencers came out in force on social media, introducing millions of people to the evidence-free claim that pasteurizing milk is bad, actually.

When cows are infected, research shows that enormous quantities of the bird flu virus pass into their unpasteurized milk. Researchers have also found that mice ingesting tainted milk then got sick. So even if the line of people at the farmers market really were buying it for their pets, that’s still a very bad idea. Barn cats on affected dairy farms were extremely susceptible to the highly pathogenic avian influenza, including symptoms like blindness, and half of the cats died. Infecting your cat with H5N1 also means you would be exposed to the virus.

All this is on top of the many germs already found in raw milk. E. coli, salmonella, campylobacter, listeria, and some parasites—what Benjamin Chapman, department head and professor of agricultural and human sciences at North Carolina State University, called the “hit list”—can all be transmitted in milk that hasn’t been pasteurized. None of these illnesses are pleasant, and some can be very dangerous and even deadly, especially in pregnant people, immune-compromised people, children, and the elderly.

The upsides to raw milk, meanwhile,........

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