Got Puss? PETA Campaign

Have some … pus with your cookies? If you down a glass of cow’s milk, you will. It may be white, but researchers say that every cupful contains somatic cells, i.e., pus.

The dairy industry knows that there is a problem with pus in milk. Accordingly, it has developed a system known as the “somatic cell count” to measure the amount of pus in milk. The somatic cell count is the standard used to gauge milk quality. The higher the somatic cell count, the more pus in the milk.

Any milk with a somatic cell count of higher than 200 million per liter should not enter the human food supply, according to the dairy industry. Therefore, anyone living in a state where the somatic cell count is higher than 200 million shouldn’t be drinking milk. There’s only one problem—every state but Hawaii is producing milk with pus levels so high that it shouldn’t enter the human food supply! At the bottom of this page, you can see how high the pus levels in your state’s milk are. Even the national average, at 322 million, is well above the industry’s limit.

One culprit causing the hundreds of millions of pus cells in every liter of milk may be “bovine growth hormone,” the Monsanto chemical company’s growth hormone marketed as Posilac. Posilac is now widely used by dairy farmers to increase the amount of milk that their already overburdened cows produce. Because cows are not built to produce this much milk, they are prone to a painful udder infection called mastitis. When they are milked, pus and bacteria from the infection flow right along with the milk. The journal Nature reported that Posilac increases somatic cells—pus—in the milk by a whopping 19 percent! Researchers estimate that an ordinary glass of milk contains between one and seven drops of pus. This isn’t just disgusting—it can also be dangerous. Pus can contain paratuberculosis bacteria, which are believed to cause Crohn’s disease in human beings.

Dairy farmers try to control the rampant mastitis with large doses of antibiotics—but these antibiotics also wind up in the milk. Children are particularly vulnerable to the effects of too many antibiotics, which researchers believe can inhibit the development of the immune system.

Dairy farmers don’t tell consumers that every glass of milk is contaminated with pus, bacteria, and perhaps with paratuberculosis. The only way to avoid drinking pus is to avoid cow’s milk.

PETA is calling on the USDA to lower the legal limit of allowable pus cells in milk to the limit used by the rest of the industrialized world. Presently, our limit is nearly twice that. Seventeen states are producing milk that would be illegal to sell in Europe!

http://www.milksucks.com/pus.asp