Dear Valerie

I found some of your comments regarding mastitis and the dairy industry very
interesting although I think its really important not to discount the
research done into mastitis in cows as not being of any use to us. All
knowledge gained is useful and often just requires a lateral approach to
extract those pieces of knowledge that may have some application to the
problem in women. For instance  your comment

>The dairy industry is about a factory system geered to
>overproduction.  Cows do not supply their young with their milk, they are
>stimulated to oversupply milk for humans.  So the system is already out of
>wack and may have little correlation to human breastfeeding.

I actually think this may tell us something important about women and
mastitis. There are no other mammals suckling their young that share the
high incidence of mastitis that is seen in breastfeeding women - However
cows that are (as you say) bred to overproduce and have artificially high
volumes of milk present for long periods, do experience a similarly high
incidence of mastitis. This could be telling us that it is the modern
evolution of breastfeeding that has some part to play. Feeding frequencies
has changed from the average time between feeds of 35mins  (still seen in
some underdeveloped cultures) where the breast was always kept reasonably
drained, to encouraging longer intervals between feeds that see breasts
having to hold larger volumes for longer periods of time. This state may
indeed be mimicking the state of the cow's udder that is frequently overfull
and so prone to develop mastitis

 Your comments regarding the use of rBST are I think a really good example
of a lateral approach to examining this problem although I am very sceptical
that  that this particular recombinant hormone is directly responsible for a
15% rise in mastitis in cows (how did they show this?).  The link may be
indirect in that it is the overproduction and stasis resulting from
administration of the hormone that contributes to higher incidences of
mastitis.

 keep comments coming, they always provide great food for thought.

Regards
Cathy Fetherston
Perth Western Australia

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