The "milk-sick" came to the Lincoln family

[Houmes]

(07-31-2013 09:20 PM)Donna McCreary Wrote:  Betty - I have always been told that pasteurization prevents the illness today. However, drinking raw milk (which many people do) increases the chance of milk-born diseases. My uncle was a dairy farmer, not a doctor, so there is probably much more information available elsewhere.

Is it possible the Brooner family and the Sparrow family were drinking milk from the same cow? or at least eating milk products from the same cow? If the cow is infected, does the cow also die?

Milk sickness is due to a chemical called tremetol, found in the snakeroot plant. Toxic effects are cumulative--meaning if you don't ingest a great deal, you can survive, although often suffering ongoing fatigue for weeks or months. Pioneers used to call that "the slows." The primary source for poisoning occurs in animals which graze (primarily cattle, horses, sheep, and deer), or feed on carcasses of affected animals. Young offspring acquire it via mother's milk. With a high enough toxin level, the animal will die just as easily as a human. Pasteurization of milk will not inactivate the poison and neither will frost. The plant grows as a weed and historically the animals were exposed when grazing in forests or woods near water. Today milk sickness is virtually unheard of in humans (last large U.S. outbreak was in the 1960s) due to use of herbicides, keeping livestock in confinement lots or supervised pastures, or pooling of milk from many producers, which dilutes the contaminant. Symptoms include vomiting, belly pain and constipation. The cause of death is by acid build up in the body (the chemical is a ketone the body metabolizes into acid), producing a condition very much like out of control diabetes. Interestingly, more than half of the recorded deaths in Dubois county, Indiana--approximately ten miles north of where the Lincolns lived--in the early 1800s was caused by milk sickness.