Got Pus?
Imagine if there was a nasty bug infecting over 40 percent of Canadian dairy herds, and pasteurisation was only partially effective in killing it.No need to imagine.
The bug is called MAP (Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis), and it causes an incurable bowel disorder called Johne's disease in domestic sheep and cattle. Johne's is a virtual replica of Crohn’s disease, which "chronically" afflicts nearly 100,000 Canadians.
Michael Greger, M.D., believes the resemblance between Johne's and Crohn's is more than coincidental. It's communicable.
"Since transmission of this bacteria is facilitated by its presence inside pus cells, American milk drinkers may be at particularly high risk since the US has the highest permitted upper limit of milk pus cell concentration in the world," Geiger writes.
In 1997, the USDA did a laboratory simulation test which purported to show that MAP is obliterated by normal pasteurisation. But a year later in Ireland, other researchers successfully cultured MAP from six out of 31 cartons of pasteurised milk.
Alarm bells rang across Europe. Still reeling from the Mad Cow disaster, Europeans had been worried about MAP since 1996 when John Hermon-Taylor, a professor and surgeon at St. Georges Hospital in London, announced that he and his colleagues had isolated MAP from the intestines of two thirds of patients with Crohn's but from no one without it. Now there was a smoking Irish milk carton.
Evidence mounted. At the University of Central Florida, Saleh A. Naser and his associates were able to distinguish with 74% to 98% accuracy between 53 patients with Crohn's and 45 controls by comparing how their blood reacted to MAP proteins. They also found MAP in the breast milk of women with Crohn's.
This December, the BBC reported that Hermon-Taylor "said that it was almost certain that MAP was responsible for Crohn's, and that medication to wipe out MAP could cure the disease." The British government was finally poised to apply the "precautionary principle." It recommended longer pasteurisation time and (possibly) "improved hygiene on dairy farms."
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) has found MAP in between 47 and 72 percent of Canadian dairy herds. This fall, when CTV News asked Health Canada what they were doing about it, they received no reply. But according to a report last spring in La Presse, Health Canada is aware that preliminary results from Guelph University confirm that MAP survives pasteurisation.
VERDICT: Milk could give you a permanent "stomach ache." Until governments apply the precautionary principle, milk drinkers will have to consider applying it themselves.
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