Milk Wars: Sh10m assault launched

Forget the war on terrorism or the assault on corruption. There is a new war being fought in our midst and, depending on who wins it, the outcome threatens to disorient families as they run around in search of what has been universally accepted as being good for their growing children. Apart from determining whether Kenyans who live in remote areas continue to have their hot beverages white or black, it will further determine whether the product's most necessary beneficiaries - children - will have to make do with breast-feeding alone, or if their parents will have to walk longer distances and fork out more to provide them with milk - processed milk. The war is about milk. Processed milk, or, as the current flood of advertisements puts it, milk in a packet.

The milk war, or more specifically the war on unprocessed milk, was kicked off about a month ago by the Kenya Dairy Board (KDB), in collaboration with the Kenya Bureau of Standards (KEBS) and Ministry of Health (MoH), in a Sh10 million 'Safe Milk Campaign'. The media blitz has seen a series of advertisements exhort the public to 'be safe and buy only processed milk'. The advertisements are aimed at encouraging Kenyans to choose only appropriately packaged factory-processed milk. However, the campaign suffered a setback when, in a newspaper article, a Nairobi University post-graduate student, Ms Tezira Lore, punctured holes in its milk-in-a-packet refrain quoting a study, Assessing and Managing Milk-borne Health Risks for the Benefit of Consumers in Kenya, that revealed that milk was safe as long as it was boiled.

The article admitted that raw milk is a microbial hazard because its chemical composition is an ideal growth medium for many spoilage micro-organisms and might harbour pathogens that cause milk-borne diseases such as tuberculosis. However, heat effectively kills pathogenic micro-organisms and 'that is the method of choice in processing of raw milk.' But KDB, KEBS and MoH seem to prefer pasteurisation, a form of heat treatment aimed primarily at destroying pathogens, and which is applied by the firms that sell milk in packets.

The advantage of pasteurisation, experts say, is that since it is a milder form of heat treatment, heat-sensitive essential vitamins are preserved, unlike when milk is boiled. But since most Kenyans boil milk, whether bought raw or in a packet, before drinking, the vitamins are destroyed anyway and must be sourced from other foods.

The KDB, through its senior dairy technologist, Ms Joyce Kiio, in another newspaper article, also 'set the record straight'. Ms Kiio said pasteurisation should not to be equated to boiling because the relatively high temperatures used in boiling might not be adequate to effectively destroy all disease-causing micro-organisms, especially the heat-resistant ones. Furthermore, KDB adds, prolonged boiling destroys the nutritional value, 'usually seen at the bottom of a heating vessel as a brown layer'.

The managing director of the KDB, Mr Paul Machira Gichohi, blames all the confusion in the milk campaigns on the media, which he accused of 'misguiding the people'. He adds that there is no dairy industry in the world that allows milk to be sold in the unhygienic environment that prevails in Kenya. Mr Gichohi admits that milk hawkers cannot be wished away since over the years they have filled in the void left by the collapse of major industry players, especially the Kenya Cooperative Creameries, but insists that in the long run, their operations are unsafe.

There has been talk in the industry that there could be vested interests among some members of the board in the aggressive campaign, which is financed by the country's main milk processors. But Mr Gichohi denies this, saying no milk processor is on the KDB board. Mr Muhoho Kenyatta of Brookside Dairies has resigned from the board and the appointment of Ms Cecilia Chege, the proprietor of Echuka Farm, has never been gazetted, he says. But the milk-in-a-packet proponents have to acknowledge the fact that generations of Kenyans have grown up on unprocessed milk, and have been none the worse for it. It will be an uphill task convincing them to discard it now.

The campaigners also have to acknowledge the fact that a large number of the country's population lives in rural areas, where there is limited or no access to processed milk, apart from the relatively higher cost of milk in a packet. Should the milk processors win the war, then the rural folks' days of crossing over to a neighbour who owns a cow for half a bottle of freshly obtained milk could soon be over. Worse still, mothers who rely on credit at the one-cow farmer for their children's daily milk needs are going to be in a lot of trouble. It could also sound the death knell on mursik, the popular traditional milk that the Kalenjins use to welcome their athlete relatives returning home. All is not lost. The calabash with traditionally cultured milk could be replaced with a packet of processed milk.

Also gone would be the traditional village mala, which many generations of Kenyans grew up on because people would now have to buy factory-processed mala instead. But industry sources contend that of the estimated 2.7 billion litres of milk produced by local dairy farmers annually, up to 88% is consumed without being pasteurised.

According to the findings of a survey carried out by the Smallholder Dairy Project, jointly implemented by the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development, the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute and the International Livestock Research Institute, 96% of Kenyan households boil milk before consumption. As with pasteurisation, all harmful bacteria are killed in the process. The report acknowledges that although there is some degree of adulteration of milk supplied through the informal sector through the addition of water, there was no obvious link between milk quality and the type of market agent, and that there might not be serious harmful effects in the milk that eventually reaches the consumer. 'Adulteration of milk by addition of water may introduce chemical and microbial health hazards as well as reducing nutritional and processing quality, palatability and market value of the milk', says the report quoted by Ms Lore.

The consumer preference for raw milk, says the report, was reflected even in Nairobi, where pasteurised milk is readily available. Up to 29% of Nairobi households purchase an average of six litres of raw milk per household per month. A major health risk that was identified was the large number - 15% - of both pasteurised and raw milk samples that contained antibiotic residues. Overall, only 10% of the milk sampled in the survey was found to be adulterated with water; with most cases occurring during the dry season when there are milk shortages.