"Transfer Factor" Colostrum Hyperimmune Milk
 

by Karl Loren
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Here is a simple explanation of what transfer factor is and how it works.

If you are in great healthy shape, that bacteria may get inside somehow but your immune system attacks the bug before the bug can even turn around.

The first time one of those bugs comes in -- they can cause you to get sick.  But, your immune system is working hard to manufacturer "anti-germs" (also called "antibodies") that attack the bugs.  It takes your immune system quite a while to do that. In some cases it may take 10 to 14 days to manufacture the new antibodies. Your temperature may already be high because of the infection. 

The Invading Bugs!

As the antibodies start to kill the bugs, your temperature will go lower.  DO NOT STOP there -- this is the primary mistake of most antibiotic administration.  You quit too soon -- all the bugs are not yet killed -- the antibiotic is stopped -- those bugs not yet killed are now not likely to be killed by the same antibiotic -- you need a new antibiotic -- all of this because doctors don't insist that you take the antibiotic properly.  There is such a constant demand for "new" antibiotics that every drug company wants to get on this gravy train.  Sometimes they get caught making bad ones!  Click here to see how Eli Lilly, again, proved itself to be one of the worst drug companies from which to buy anything.  Some of the new antibiotics simply turn out to be killers.  Pfizer's antibiotic, Trovan, seems to cause liver failure -- so Pfizer lost a billion-dollar winner in the antibiotic sweepstakes!  Click here for that story.

The next time that same bug (more technically called an antigen) comes into your body, those anti-germs (antibodies) that were made the first time, are ready to attack instantly.  You don't have to wait for the body to start manufacturing some of them.  Some of those antibodies start attacking immediately while the body then starts making more.  You might not need more if the first attack was enough to kill the bugs.

The immune system does NOT handle toxic lead in your body. That is another job -- for detoxification, not for a stronger immune system.  However, toxic metals, such as toxic lead, can cause a tremendous increase in the number of "free radicals" in your body and THEY, in turn, cause cancer and other diseases.  Once the toxic metal causes cancer, then the cancer is subject to control by the immune system.

The first rule of health is like part of the Hippocratic Oath:  "First Do No Harm!"  The first rule would be, don't allow toxins and bugs into your body.  The next step, once you have allowed that stuff to enter, is to get rid of it.  The immune system is your first line of defense -- drugs are usually effective on a short-term basis, but often damage the immune system so that it is no longer available and you are all the more dependent on drugs in the future.

The immune system is very basic to your health, but even more basic, of course, would be to NOT put poisons and toxic substances into your body in the first place.  You should also find a good way to get them out if they are there now.  The standard approach to ridding yourself of toxic metals is with an oral chelation formula.  Don't overlook, either the remarkable ability of Methyl Sulfonyl Methane to reverse malignant cancers into benign tumors!

The immune system goes after "organic" things -- mostly alive, like germs, but also it goes after protein substances that are not alive.  While a virus is NOT alive, your immune system should be able to handle any of them.  Also parasites and fungus problems.  You will find that traditional medicine almost completely ignores the immune system -- thinking that the only solution for a sore throat is an antibiotic.  (Click Here to read a traditional description and remedy for a sore throat.)

So, every time you get a NEW bug, they body has to go through this fairly slow process of making a NEW anti-germ for that particular bug.  If it DOES take 10 to 14 days to make the new antibody, that is how much time the bug has had to swarm through your body, leaving little fast-growing families everywhere -- perhaps a joint that later becomes arthritic.

Antibodies Are Your Friends

After several years you can see that you would have a whole army of anti-germs, each one different from the other -- each one having been used at least once in your body to handle an invading bug.

So, you have an immune system -- made up of all sorts of "anti-germs" and other guys who fight the bad guys.

Not that easy!

The Missing Factor -- Recognition!

It seems that as people get older their immune system is often also going downhill.  As scientists studied this they found that one particular part of the immune system seemed to suffer the most in old age.

Now, Dorothy is 67 years old, and along comes bug X -- again.  This time, even though she has some antibodies specifically designed for bug X, the immune system doesn't recognize that it is bug X and thinks that this is a new bug -- Bug X2!

The body starts making antibodies for Bug X2.  That would be OK, because the mechanism for making antibodies is still working and the body will actually make new antibodies for bug X -- even though it already had done that years ago, and even thought here might even be a supply of them (already made earlier) available.  But, because the body was slow in RECOGNIZING that it was bug X, the bug got a start before the immune system could make enough "new" antibodies.

So, you have old age -- and a declining immune system.

AIDS is a disease where the recognition process isn't working either.  (Click here for a lengthy article by Karl Loren about the AIDS virus.  Note that the link goes to a different web site, that the article has its own links to more than 100 pages.  You might want to bookmark THIS page to get back to it easily.)

It is the immune system's FAILURE TO RECOGNIZE that it has already made an antibody for that invading bug which slows down the response.  As a lot of this goes on, you can see that the body might not be able to develop enough "new" antibodies in time to prevent the invading bugs from multiplying and doing lots of damage.

Old People Are Vulnerable

Old people are vulnerable!

It also turns out that ANYONE who has been sick often has this same problem.  So, not only elderly people, but people of any age can have their immune system lose the ability to recognize the incoming bugs -- and waste time trying to make a new antibody when that same germ has been fought and vanquished before.  What is the standard medical solution to these infections?  Antibiotics!  How serious are infections in today's modern world?  They account for the majority of death in the young.  Click here to read a report on infections as a cause of death.

So, anyone can be vulnerable who has had lots of sicknesses.  They often get antibiotics to "cure" the sickness.

Super Bugs! -- Resistant To Antibiotics

What else can cause this immune system recognition problem?  Well, taking too many antibiotics, or taking the wrong kind, or taking them too long or too short.  Doctors know this to be true -- that the bugs become resistant to antibiotics.  Then the drug companies develop NEW and better antibiotics.  But, we now have Super  Bugs in our society that don't respond to any antibiotic -- and these Super Bugs were actually created because of poor use of antibiotics!  Now we have new and more deadly antibiotics to handle the new super bugs!  There is a "last resort" antibiotic which has, now, failed -- this was considered the antibiotic that would never fail.  It has.  The bugs are winning.

Just about everyone who gets sick probably has some of this going on -- an immune system which is having trouble recognizing the invading bug.

Who else?

Who Else Is Vulnerable?

The solution is simple -- you have probably heard about how healthy "mother's milk" is for her newborn child?  The reason is simple.  The mother, with all her protective antibodies, passes on HER immunity to her baby by breast feeding.

It's a terrible indictment of health education that many mothers don't know this.  My own mother, more than 67 years ago, was completely ignorant of these facts of life.  She wanted to nurse me, but the first milk she produced looked "wrong" to her -- it was not the color of "good" milk.  She got frightened that her milk was no good and didn't try to nurse.  So, I wound up being at risk with my immune system completely missing for the first several weeks of my life.

One of the most famous medical clinics in the world, the Mayo Clinic, has published a fine article describing the immune system.  There are lots of nice pictures and drawings.  You can click here to read it.  However, the tragedy is that nowhere in this series of articles published by the Mayo  Clinic is there ANY mention of the most natural method of  creating the immune system in the first place -- mother's milk!  I'll bet a couple of nickels that if we could find publications from the Mayo Clinic in the 1940's and 1950's they would have been warning mothers against breastfeeding!

You can actually get into a condition where a runny nose is considered "normal" by the immune system -- because the immune system has "recognized" the antigen that causes the runny nose to be a "good guy" not a bad bug!

But, most mothers now understand that they give immunity to their new baby by breast feeding.

For years this was understood to be true, but the mechanism by which this happened was NOT understood.

When a baby was NOT breast fed, researchers would find practically ZERO antibodies in the baby's system.  When a baby WAS breast fed, researchers found the antibodies inside the newborn baby, they couldn't deny them.  There they were!  The newborn baby has no antibodies -- but within a few days on breast milk, the baby suddenly has a fully functioning immune system!  Miracle!

When they tested a baby who did NOT get breast fed by his or her mother, those antibodies were NOT there.  That baby was at risk.

There is an important technical point here.

When a human takes living cells, or even dead animal cells, into the body through the mouth, the digestive system treats it all like food.  It might be a very valuable living immune system cell, but as far as the baby is concerned it is only more food to digest.

If you take these same living cells (even immune system cells) and INJECT them into a body, the body treats them like invading bugs. There is a rejection mechanism which protects human bodies from injected living things.  The body even rejects ANY protein substance injected into the blood stream.  If you ground up hamburger and made it very "fine" and injected it?  -- terrible harm.  The immune system would attack the hamburger as an invading bug.

So, don't think that you can get a boost in your immunity by absorbing the antibodies in the milk -- it doesn't work that way!

So, antibodies are living cells and the new baby could not possibly get them through mother's milk that went into the body through the mouth and stomach.  That milk DOES have antibodies in it, but they are nothing more than food to the infant.  No living cell can possibly pass through the digestive process and get into the body through the mouth and stomach.

So, the antibodies in a baby could not have gotten there through mother's milk, even though mother's milk has those antibodies in it!

All the many immune system cells in the mother did not, somehow, get passed over to the baby.  But the baby who breast fed got immediate immune system cells and the baby who did not get breast fed did not get those cells.

There were many studies done of this matter and finally the scientists identified a "factor" that was transferred in the mother's milk.  This "factor" was not a cell, it was not a germ, it was something that hadn't really ever been identified before.  The scientists would use "screens" to take out anything as large as a living cell -- and the "factor" still got through.  So, the realized that whatever "it" was, it was smaller than any cell -- and probably was a molecule.

Finally, rather than give it some new fancy name, they just stuck with the word "factor" to explain this "thing!"  You might expect science to be more elegant than this, but sometimes scientists, like the rest of us, are just puzzled and put a name-tag on something -- calling it a "factor."

And, to be more clear, they called it the "transfer factor," -- the "something" in mother's milk which transferred from her to the new baby and created IN the baby an entire immune system, just about overnight.  It was almost as if as soon as this transfer factor got into the new baby's body it started manufacturing exactly the type of antibodies which were called for in the transfer factor.  The baby's body did this even though there was no invading bug.   So, when and if one of those bugs came along, the baby's immune system was READY even though the baby, itself, had never personally been attacked by that bug before.

Now, have you heard of a "wet nurse?"  That's a woman who is "lactating."  She has had a baby and has milk in her breasts.  She can take any other baby, not her own, and feed that baby her breast milk.  For many years wealthy women who had just given birth would hire a "wet nurse" to breast feed their new baby. 

Well, by now you might have guessed.  "Regular Mother's Breast Milk" does NOT transfer the immune system to the baby.

The Usual Source Of False Data:
The FDA!

As usual, the government is a great source of lies on this subject.  Here is a paragraph from an article published by the Food and Drug Administration which contains critical false data:

Breast-fed babies have fewer illnesses because human milk transfers to the infant a mother's antibodies to disease. About 80 percent of the cells in breast milk are macrophages, cells that kill bacteria, fungi and viruses. Breast-fed babies are protected, in varying degrees, from a number of illnesses, including pneumonia, botulism, bronchitis, staphylococcal infections, influenza, ear infections, and German measles. Furthermore, mothers produce antibodies to whatever disease is present in their environment, making their milk custom-designed to fight the diseases their babies are exposed to as well.

Click Here to see the entire article, which includes a link back to the FDA source.

It is NOT the milk that transfers immunity, but only a special form of mother's milk, called the colostrum.  Furthermore, it is NOT true that the antibodies in mother's milk actually do ANY good at all for the immune system of the baby. 

It's a long and exciting story, but eventually the researchers learned that ONLY the first few days' of a mother's milk had the capability of transferring the immune system to the baby.  That milk has its own special name -- colostrum!

This factor was only found in the colostrum -- not in the "regular" mother's milk. 

But, when they examined colostrum they found, again, that even though it contained lots of antibodies -- there was no way the baby could absorb antibodies through its mouth and stomach.  Yet, the antibodies were in the baby's body.

They were back to puzzling about how the mother's (colostrum) milk could transfer this great immunity to the baby without actually transferring the antibodies themselves.

This web site has well over 4,000 pages of scientific studies on colostrum and transfer factor.  You can read these by clicking here.

Lots of this research has been done with human milk, and with human colostrum.   But, you can guess that there was also research to discover if cow milk (colostrum from a cow) could convey the immune system changes to a human!

It worked!

In other words, you'll find dozens of studies showing that human colostrum transferred improved immunity not only to babies, but also to adult!

This was an exciting discovery.  You can guess that the cow is subject to many of the same invading germs as is a human -- so when a human drinks colostrum from a cow they can often get a nice boost to their immune system.  Then the very exciting discovery was made -- when elderly people drank colostrum they had a very wonderful return of the "recognition factor."

Amazing!

Now, if you INJECT cow's colostrum into a human -- the human will get sick or even die.  You can't do that.

So, the scientists started removing "stuff" from the colostrum, just as they had removed stuff from the regular mother's milk -- to see what was actually "transferring" the immunity.

First they removed the easy stuff -- the fat and sugar.  In milk there is some amount of "cream" or fat -- just like the cow's milk can be separated into "skim milk" and "cream" human milk can be separated in the same way.

When they took the fat out of the colostrum, the immunity was still transferred -- so the fat had nothing to do with it.

When you have skim milk there is still "milk sugar" in that substance -- called "lactose."  There are simple ways of removing the sugar from milk too -- and you then have milk (or colostrum) which contains no sugar and no fat.  This form of colostrum STILL transferred the immunity to the baby -- so the immunity transfer was NOT caused by the milk sugar!

When you have removed both the fat and the sugar from milk you have something called "whey."

But, there are still many large particles within whey -- and they can be removed.  You have, for instance, all the many different types of living cells in the milk. These include the immune system cells of the cow (or human).  It is possible to remove ALL these living cells.

When you do THAT, the immunity still gets transferred.

Now, there are no more living cells in this "milk" but there are all sorts of "large molecules" and even they can be removed with various simple machines and techniques.

With THOSE removed, the immunity was still transferred!  A Miracle!

After they had screened out all living cells, and they even screened out the larger individual molecules -- they found "the" factor that transferred immunity -- it is a very small molecule.]

Recall that older people may well have plenty of different types of anti-germ cells, but their body is slow at recognizing what particular bug is currently invading.

It turns out that when an older person drinks colostrum, even though the cow has not been especially treated, the person's immune system is greatly improved -- and it is the recognition factor which improves.  When this was being studied it became clear that the fat content of the milk was not carrying this factor -- also neither was the "lactose" (milk sugar) part of the "transfer factor."  When you take away the fat and the lactose, you have something called "whey" left. Milk Whey from colostrum was marketed for many years, either fresh or dried, as a source of wonderful nourishment -- and improvement of the immune system.  But, it takes a large quantity of this dried colostrum to give you very much of the transfer factor.

It takes about 50 units of dried colostrum to equal one unit of the molecules that are called "transfer factors."  Thus, if you want to get the same benefit from taking the Transfer Factor offered for sale on this web site, you would have to take at least 50 times as much colostrum.  The Company which has exclusive rights to the patent for producing Transfer Factor has been doing its own research and has developed a brand new product, called "Transfer Factor Plus."  There is more information about that product by clicking here.

The only actual study done on this subject is entitled An In Vitro Screening of 196 Natural Products for toxicity and Efficacy.  Click on that title to read about the study.

In order to tell the difference between TF and simple colostrum, there needs to be some way of measuring the TF.  We are getting there.  You can measure the number of different types of living immune system cells in a body.  I haven't yet found the unit of measure for a "transfer factor."  The transfer factors would NOT be detected by the tests which measure immune system components.

There are companies which offer to measure the components of the immune system for you.  Here is one.

Fresh, raw cow colostrum can be drunk by a human with fine benefit -- although it would take a constant diet of fresh colostrum to equal the value of one capsule of the concentrated transfer factor which has been extracted from the colostrum.

In the early years attempts were made to inject the colostrum into a human body -- but that doesn't work.  Human bodies reject the living organisms in bovine colostrum, when injected.  So, those who wanted to capture the benefits of the transfer factor from colostrum started by simply freeze drying the colostrum and putting it into capsules.  Most people who do this remove the milk fats and the milk sugars first -- leaving what is often called "whey."  The whey contains the transfer factor from that colostrum, but even that material would cause a person to get deathly ill if it were injected because the whey still contains many living organisms from the cow -- and the human body can't use living bovine organisms.

But, if whey (or colostrum) is drunk, there is no body rejection.  The larger cells (whether living or dead) are used as food, but those tiny molecules CAN pass through from the stomach into the body -- carrying the immune system recognition molecules.

The solution for the colostrum promoters was freeze drying usually.  Some experiments were done with freezing the  colostrum.  The freezing kills all the living organisms, but does not harm the tiny molecule which is the transfer factor. This is why you will find many scientific studies of colostrum mentioning "frozen colostrum."  (Click Here to see such a study.)

So, whether you drink fresh raw colostrum or take a dried form, the transfer factors are available.  They are not harmed by simple processing.  This is the form of most "colostrum" being sold in the market today.

But, when you work with colostrum, or whey, you still have millions of different molecules that have nothing to do with the transfer factor.  Even though they can be identified, and can be extracted from the colostrum, that is a very expensive process.

It is much more simple to take the colostrum, freeze dry it, and give you the entire batch.

The transfer factor particles, in this huge mass of stuff, would be less than one one-thousandth of the original total.  Another way to put this is that if you could extract JUST the transfer factors from the colostrum you would have to work with 1,000 gallons of colostrum to get just one gallon of transfer factor.

Along came more researchers -- who developed a process and then got it patented.  This is one of the strongest types of patents -- called a "process patent."  It is a patent that gives its inventor the right to control a particular process invented by him -- so no one else can use it without paying him some royalty.

As mentioned above, the ELISA test gives a measure of the existence, or not, and the quantity of immune system factors.  (Click here to review that information about the ELISA test.)

One capsule (200 mg) of Transfer Factor has the potential for recognizing at least 100,000 pathogens.  It would take more than a bottle of colostrum capsules to equal the transfer factor power of one capsule of Transfer Factor.  Thus, if colostrum is sold for 100 capsules for $20 (sounds cheap enough) and 4Life Research Transfer Factor sells for $50 for 90 capsules, you can do the arithmetic.  One TF Capsule costs a little over fifty cents but it is equivalent to 100 capsules of colostrum costing a total of $20.00!  Colostrum in dry form "works" only because it contains the basic transfer factor.  Transfer factor, however, is a very tiny part of the colostrum.  4Life Research has an exclusive license on the patent which allows a company to extract just the transfer factor from the colostrum.  Naturally those firms which do not have access to this patented process can only offer you the colostrum itself.  They will claim, correctly, that their colostrum contains transfer factor.  What they do not admit is that the quantity of transfer factor in colostrum is very small -- while the transfer factor from 4Life Research is very concentrated.

But, humans often have diseases that cows don't have -- and the cow's colostrum wouldn't contain transfer factors for these non-cow diseases.  But wait!

Can you imagine the fun of deliberately infecting that cow with more diseases -- the type which humans might get -- and allowing that cow to develop antibodies for those new diseases?  Then, you'd find that the colostrum from THAT cow would provide even MORE immune system help for the humans drinking that colostrum!

That has been done!

But, there is more.

You can see that this is not whipping out some herb from  South America that seems to cure your cold or flu!  This is deep biochemical research.  There are patents involved, and proprietary technology.  But, this is deep science -- the medicine of the future will be based on biochemistry.

Keep in mind that the entire philosophy of our currently drug-oriented medical model is to give you some substance (drug) which is basically a poison -- a toxin carefully designed to be toxic only to the bad bugs.  But, wouldn't it be far better to let the immune system do its job and help it along, not with toxins, but with well-researched nutrients which enhance the immune system, not attack the bad bugs.

In this way we can carefully say, but with complete accuracy, that transfer factor does NOT cure or prevent any disease.  Transfer factor simply strengthens the immune system so that the immune system cal cure or prevent disease.  Such simplicity.

If you hear someone claiming that transfer factor can cure cancer -- that is a false and dangerous statement.  It is a statement made by an ignorant person, or by a person who is trying to get some product into trouble with the FDA.

If some substance is claimed to cure or prevent a disease, that is the definition of a "drug" by the FDA, and all drugs must be approved the FDA.  So, transfer factor does NOT cure or prevent any disease -- it strengthens the immune system.

Also, don't worry about Mad Cow Disease!  You can see, now, that the transfer factor from a cow with some special disease, whether claimed or not, is actually more useful to you than TF from a cow that didn't have that problem.  Click here to read more on that.

The Patent Gives You Protection

Patents are important in the health world.  As critical as I may be about the drug companies, they are more financially successful than most other industries.  The source of their profitability is their patents.  They spend billions of dollars on research.  They wouldn't spend one penny if they couldn't get a patent for their discoveries.

The patent is the only way they can recover the cost of their research.

So, the drug companies spend, for instance, $100,000,000 in research to create a (patented) substance.  The substance may cost $ .01 per pill to make, but they add on $ .50 per pill to cover their research costs.  You can't really argue the logic and commercial sense of this procedure.

So, you buy a pill for $ .51 each, or $51.00 per bottle of 100.  When the patent expires, you can suddenly buy that same pill for $ .05 each, or $5.00 per bottle.  You might feel cheated but, you shouldn't.  The process makes economic sense and there is no immorality in it.  You may argue that the drug is actually harmful -- that is another story. But, the pricing of drugs is logical and fair.

When a nutritional company "discovers" a new use for some common vitamin, for instance, they are in a terrible position as to pricing.  Let's say that some company discovers that if you combine 100 mg of Vitamin C with 100 mg of Garlic powder, it does some miraculous thing -- it seems to "cure cancer" or whatever it may do.

If the company spent $1,000,000 to discover this, as soon as it puts out the product (Vitamin C and Garlic) with some careful claim, anyone in the world can copy that formula.  There is no protection anywhere for any vitamin formula.

So, you will NOT see plain old vitamin formulas being researched very much -- they are NOT the wave of the future simply because no sane businessman will spend research money on a product that he cannot get a patent on.

You can go right out now and buy colostrum from a farmer and get these amazing improvements in your immune system!  You can even get improvement by using the freeze-dried colostrum products.

Millions of dollars were spent on the research and discovery of a method of extracting JUST the exact transfer factor from colostrum -- so that you could get it in a capsule (instead of fresh colostrum from a cow) and so that the body wouldn't reject it, if injected, after a few days.

That process has been patented.  Only because of that patent could this product ever be brought to the market place.

No one can copy this product because they are not allowed to use the process that has been patented.  Our future health system is only safe as long as the patent laws allow protection to those in biochemistry who discover new substances, or new procedures.

The "vitamin industry" tries to achieve protection in many funny little ways.  I'll write about those in another article, but the wave of future medicine depends on research in biochemistry, not toxins.  Research of this type is very expensive.   When that research is successful, you can expect to see patent protection associated with a product, and you can expect to find that the costs are comparable with drugs, not vitamins.

Vitamins are cheap, and therefore there is no future in them.

Biochemical substances, discovered by research, protected by patents, will be the only possible alternative to vitamins.  It will take many years for the general public to understand and accept this.

For now many run-of-the-mill vitamins are so much better for handling your health problems that the usual drugs, that the vitamin industry will have enormous growth for many years.  But, the writing is on the horizon -- biochemistry, coupled with patents, will be the source of future medicine.

Transfer factor is one of those substances -- here well ahead of its time.

Antigen Specific Transfer Factor

I mentioned above that you could deliberately give a cow some disease -- like Herpes or AIDS.  When the cow survived this disease it would have survived because its immune system was able to create a new antibody just for that disease.

The term "antigen" means the "bug" or invading bacteria, or virus, or whatever which "triggers" a response from the immune system.  When the "antigen" is one that has been artificially created in a cow, the colostrum then contains transfer factor which is "specific" to that antigen.

Well, as soon as that cow now gives birth and starts producing colostrum, you have a new and very exciting type of colostrum.  THIS colostrum contains immunity factors which are specific for that one particular disease -- as well as all the "general purpose" transfer factors.

There is exciting research going on on the subject of "antigen specific transfer factors."  Click here to see eighty different scientific studies on this subject.

It also happens that this type of transfer is a drug and cannot legally be sold except with FDA approval and through licensed doctors.  Some unethical companies have tried to sell "antigen specific transfer factor."  Click here to see some references to them, and to see the legal opinion letter that explains why this is illegal.  You will find that some of these companies are already closed down, and any that are still operating probably will be closed down before long.

Use "general purpose" transfer factor -- it is completely legal, very safe, and very different from freeze-dried colostrum.

Karl Loren

Footnotes

Abstract

Samples of precolostrum (colostrum gravidarum), colostrum and mature milk obtained from five women during their antenatal and postnatal periods were measured for IgA, IgG, IgM, alpha-1-antitrypsin, lactoferrin, lysozyme, B1A globulin (C3) and B1E globulin (C4) by single radial immunodiffusion. Protein concentrations in precolostrum were equal to or greater than those found in colostrum obtained during the first 12-48 hours following delivery. Secretion of precolostrum is common, occurs early in the antenatal period and may often be of considerable volume. The anti-microbial proteins contained within this milk can be preserved intact by freezing. This represents an untapped pool of bacteriostatic proteins with specific activity against neonatal pathogens. We suggest that a potential protective effect against serious infection may be obtained by administering precolostrum to "at risk" infants during the first few days of life.  [more data about this study by clicking here]  or  Return To Reference above