The white stuff

Milk is always seen as a healthy drink. But dairy allergies are on the increase ? and they can be life-threatening, reports Roger Dobson

Ice cream, chocolate, sweets, cakes – all the good things in a six-year-old's life could be lethal for Layla Hanif. So serious is the threat, the youngster has her own minder at school, eats on her own, and carries an adrenalin kit should she have a severe, life-threatening reaction. "She can't touch other children, she can't go to other people's houses. Even someone walking down the street with an ice cream is a potential hazard," says Julia, her mother.

Layla is just one of an increasing number of people who are either allergic to cow's milk, or who have an intolerance to dairy products. New research suggests that for some milk can be responsible for chronic disease and general ill-health. It can even affect a child's handwriting and lead to allegations of child maltreatment.

Each year, we get through several billion litres of milk. It's promoted as a healthy drink, full of goodness, but for many it's also a health problem, and researchers are questioning the wisdom of drinking so much. "Milk marketing organisations have promoted the value of milk for health and fitness to such an extent that the medical and nursing professions, as well as the general public, have become convinced that milk is good for you. The idea that milk can also be very bad for you has become almost heresy, and the fact that cow's milk was intended for baby cows, not for baby humans, seems to have been forgotten," says Dr Harry Morrow-Brown, the Derby-basedphysician and allergist.

There is no doubt that milk contains important nutrients, including protein and riboflavin. Probably its most important constituent is easily absorbed calcium to boost bones and teeth. But milk also has its downside, causing both allergies and intolerance.

Before 1950, an allergy to cow's milk was considered to be very rare. But now, according to a team of French researchers, it's suspected to affect 10 per cent of infants and five per cent of older children. The immediate reactions caused by an allergy are in sharp contrast to intolerance, in which normal amounts of milk slowly produce chronic effects.

Although research has produced increasing evidence that dairy products can cause negative effects, this is not a new idea. As long ago as 1936, researchers reported that eczema was seven times as common in formula-milk-fed infants as in those who were breast-fed. In a new report on intolerance, Dr Morrow-Brown says that over the last two decades, the incidence of food allergies has been increasing at an alarming rate.

"We now consume milk from the cradle to the grave in much greater quantities than our grandparents ever did. This is a major change in diet, which many of us may not be able to tolerate, so that subtle and infinitely variable presentations of milk intolerance can appear at any age," he says. He has put together a dossier on a wide variety of individual cases in which reactions to milk have been implicated in conditions including asthma, eczema, arthritis and irritable bowel syndrome.

He says that milk can also have effects on the emotions: "Milk-intolerant children often have a short attention span, cannot sit still, and have tantrums, poor co-ordination, a tendency to self-injury and destructiveness, which occur repeatedly after consumption of milk."

Dr Morrow-Brown described the case of an eight-year-old girl who was bedwetting and hyperactive, and who also had tantrums. She was a miserable, unhappy child. Her school performance was poor because she could not concentrate or sit still. After three months on a milk-free diet she was a happy, bright child with a changed personality, and her writing had improved remarkably," he says. In his report he also says that milk intolerance can result, too, in self-injury and allegations of child assault.

"A boy was first seen aged nine and had a history of severe problems with milk formula. It started when he was 13 months old when he began to scream incessantly and bang his head on the cot. By the age of two he tended to wander off. He would inflict pain on himself and would throw himself down the stairs. A cut head required stitching at hospital, and when he was found to be covered in bruises his mother was accused of battering him. Milk was avoided, and within a week the boy's behaviour improved."

Milk and cheese consumption may also be responsible for the increase in prostate and testicular cancers in the UK and other western countries. Researchers from the Medical University of Yamanashi in Japan looked at cancer rates and diet in 42 countries and found significant links between cheese and testicular cancer, and milk and prostate cancer. They found that those with a high consumption of dairy products also had high rates of cancers. The UK, with a testicular cancer rate of 13 per 100,000 had a cheese consumption rate of 12 grams a day. In Algeria with a zero rate for the cancer, cheese consumption was less than three grams a day.

Other teams of researchers have found links between milk and a range of other diseases and health problems, including insulin-dependant diabetes, heart disease, infertility, and colic in babies. This has fuelled claims that cow's milk is not a natural food for humans.

Michelle Berriedale-Johnson, the editor of Inside Story, a journal for people on a restrictive diet, said: "We are the only mammal that continues to drink milk of any kind after weaning and certainly the only one that drinks the milk of another species. People in the Far East are naturally lactose intolerant, but due to the Americanisation of their diet they are learning to tolerate lactose."

A wide range of cow's milk alternatives are available, including soya, goat's, sheep's, and rice milk, as well as lactose-reduced milk. All are good alternative sources of calcium for those who can't tolerate cow's milk or who wish to reduce their consumption of it. However, some animal milks can also cause allergies. Calcium is also found in sardines, watercress, figs, rhubarb, and many nuts. Fresh fruit and vegetables are a good source, too.

For those adversely affected by milk, such as six-year-old Layla, the effect of the faintest of contacts with dairy produce can be severe: "We first discovered it when I was breast-feeding, and she started getting swollen eyes and eczema. I stopped breast-feeding at eight months and gave her a bottle. She reacted so badly we had to take her to casualty," says Layla's mother.

"Unfortunately, as a one-day-old baby in hospital she had been given a bottle of milk, which had sensitised her body. If she hadn't been given that bottle, her reaction would probably not have been so severe. When I gave her the second bottle, after I stopped breast-feeding, she went completely red all over and had a nasty attack.

"At school the children had ice cream for pudding and although Layla eats alone, she later touched a child who had eaten ice cream and then put her finger in her mouth and that was enough to make her throat swell. She had to use her adrenalin kit. She has to take anti-histamines every day and other medication twice a week.

"One of the problems is that milk seems to be in so many things. We have to be very thorough. We have a separate refrigerator area for Layla and any time we handle dairy products we have to wash our hands to make them what we call Layla-proof. Most sweets are out, and she can't have cakes."

American and Finnish researchers have identified a genetic mutation for lactose intolerance that could lead to better tests and new treatments. Dr Leena Peltonen, from the University of California, looked at people from a wide range of backgrounds and found that each of them showed the same mutation in their DNA. "That we found the same DNA variant in all lactose-intolerant people across distant ethnic groups indicates to us that it is very old. We believe that the variant we identified in patients is the original form of the gene that mutated to tolerate milk products when early humans adopted dairy farming," she says. That means, she suggests, that everyone suffered from lactose intolerance at one time.