The Crohnie

Source: The Independent (London), 24th January 2000.
URL:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/UK/Health/2000-01/PAmilk240100.shtml

Health scare over milk

By Karen Edwards, PA News

24 January 2000

A bug found in pasteurised milk causes Crohn’s disease, a leading medical researcher said today.

Professor John Hermon-Taylor of St George’s Medical School in London says the bug, an organism known as MAP (Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis) is present in everyday milk.

The pasteurisation process fails to wipe out the disease, according to Professor Hermon-Taylor.

Crohn’s disease is not a killer, but causes chronic diarrhoea, daily abdominal pain, weight loss, extreme tiredness and psychological problems.

It affects an unknown number of people, believed to be up to 80,000 in the UK. It is thought there are 4,000-8,000 new cases every year. Figures are unclear because Crohn’s disease is not a notifiable condition.

But it is estimated to cost the nation as much as GBP 240 million each year in direct health care costs alone.

Professor Hermon-Taylor, who was funded by medical research charity Action Research, said: “The problems currently caused by MAP in the milk supply constitute a public health disaster of tragic proportions for which a range of remedial measures are urgently needed, and for which the government must take responsibility.

“Both through our own work and new research evidence from the USA I am absolutely certain that MAP causes a substantial proportion of Crohn’s disease.”

Professor Hermon-Taylor said the answer is to test dairy herds for MAP and adopt more stringent milk pasteurisation processes.

Some information about Crohns in Asia and diet in Asia.

Crohns disease was almost unknown in most parts of Asia until very recently. If it did exist before the last few years, it is likely that it would have been confused with intestinal tuberculosis.

For a table of statistics of prevalence of Crohns disease across the world, including Hong Kong and Japan, with references to the medical studies that derived the figures, see the URLs

http://crohn.ie/archive/epidem.htm
http://crohn.ie/archive/epistats.htm

In this table you will find several studies which refer to migrants who move from countries with low CD prevalence to countries with high CD prevalance, for example Morrocans moving to Belgium, West Indians moving to England, and South Asians moving to England. In all cases, the migrants were as likely to develop CD as the people of their new home country, thus lending credence to the theory that CD is caused by an environmental agent.

A recent study in Japan searched for a correlation between diet change and development of CD. They found that CD was highly correlated with a change in diet from the traditional fish/vegetarian based diet to a more western meat/dairy based diet. A strong correlation was found between CD and Japanese people who had changed to a meat based diet, but the strongest correlation was found in Japanese people who had changed their diet to include dairy products. To see an abstract of this study, see the URL

http://crohn.ie/archive/research/misc/japprot.htm

A possible explanation for this high correlation is the fact there is a very high risk that dairy products contain bacteria of the species Mycobacterium paratuberculosis, an organism which has for years been theorized to cause Crohns disease. Recent studies have provided further evidence that CD is indeed caused by this enteric pathogen, which causes a chronic intestinal disease, identical to Crohns disease, in many species of animals, including sub-human primates, cattle, sheep, goats, dogs, deer, chickens, gerbils, horses, llamas, etc.

If you wish to read more about this topic, I have gathered together the relevent research into one web site. The URL for this site is

http://crohn.ie/archive/welcome.htm