The "milk-sick" came to the Lincoln family

[Eva Elisabeth]

Donna, there's an article about milk sickness on wikipedia:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_sickness


Regarding your last question it says:
Nursing calves and lambs may have died from their mothers' milk contaminated with snakeroot, although the adult cows and sheep showed no signs of poisoning. Cattle, horses, and sheep are the animals most often poisoned.

According to this article, tremetol is not inactivated by pasteurization:

Current practices of animal husbandry generally control the pastures and feed of cattle, and the pooling of milk from many producers lowers the risk of tremetol present in dangerous amounts. The poison tremetol is not inactivated by pasteurization.
Although extremely rare, milk sickness can occur if a person drinks contaminated milk or eats dairy products gathered from a single cow or from a smaller herd that has fed on the white snakeroot plant.

BTW: In the 1990ies scientists of the Swiss pharmaceutical compamy Ciba-Geigy (today Novartis) found out that cows suffering from certain illnesses (and held almost wildly on Alp meadows) eat certain combinations of herbs to cure themselves. Obviously they instinctly know what is good for them.