What?! Pus in my Milk?

Turning dairy cows into milk machines has led to epidemics of so-called “production-related diseases,” such as lameness and mastitis (udder infections), the two leading causes of dairy cow mortality in the United States. We all remember the Humane Society of the United States investigation  showing sick and crippled dairy cows being beaten and dragged into the California dairy cow slaughter plant en route to the national school  lunch program, triggering the largest meat recall in history. That loss  of body condition is a result of the extreme genetic manipulation for unnaturally high milk yields. Because of the mastitis epidemic in the U.S. dairy herd, the dairy industry continues  to demand that American milk retain the highest allowable “somatic  cell” concentration in the world. Somatic cell count, according to the  industry’s own National Mastitis Council, “reflects the levels of infection and resultant inflammation in the  mammary gland of dairy cows,” but somatic cells are not synonymous with  pus cells, as has sometimes been misleadingly  suggested. Somatic just means “body.” Just as normal human breast milk  has somatic cells—mostly non-inflammatory white blood cells and  epithelial cells sloughed off from the mammary gland ducts—so does milk  from healthy cows. The problem is that many of our cows are not healthy. According to the USDA,  1 in 6 dairy cows in the United States suffers from clinical mastitis,  which is responsible for 1 in 6 dairy cow deaths on U.S. dairy farms.  This level of disease is reflected in the concentration of somatic cells  in the American milk supply. Somatic cell counts greater than a million  per teaspoon are abnormal and “almost always” caused by mastitis. When a cow is infected, greater than 90% of the somatic cells in her milk are neutrophils, the inflammatory immune cells that form pus. The average somatic cell count in U.S. milk per spoonful is 1,120,000. So how much pus is there in a glass of milk? Not much. A million  cells per spoonful sounds like a lot, but pus is really concentrated.  According to my calculations* based on USDA data  released last month, the average cup of milk in the United States would  not be expected to contain more than a single drop of pus. As the dairy industry points out,  the accumulation of pus is a natural part of an animal’s defense  system. So pus itself isn’t a bad thing, we just may not want to have it  in our mouth. And you can taste the difference. A study published in the Journal of Dairy Science  found that cheese made from high somatic cell count milk had both  texture and flavor defects as well as increased clotting time compared  to milk conforming to the much more stringent European standards. The  U.S. dairy industry, however, insists  that there is no food safety risk. If the udders of our factory-farmed  dairy cows are inflamed and infected, industry folks say, it doesn’t  matter, because we pasteurize—the pus gets cooked. But just as parents  may not want to feed their children fecal matter in meat even if it’s irradiated fecal matter, they might not want to feed their children pasteurized pus. -Michael Greger, M.D. 

Article from nutritionfacts.org