With my coming trip to speak at a conference in the remote Indonesian island of Sulawesi, my mind focuses once again on what arsenal of curatives and preventatives is needed to cope with new bugs and viruses that might disturb the traveller's gut equilibrium.
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Up to 70 per cent of us suffer fever, belly cramps and diarrhoea when travelling overseas and encountering bacteria and viruses to which we have not yet developed immunity.
I'm armed, of course, with the mantra "boil it, cook it, peel it" and with the traditional probiotics, laxatives, and reverse-laxatives that have proven their worth over many forays out of Australia. But I've come across a new approach using a bovine colostrum powder that I am keen to test.
Since the early days of my PhD supervised by Barry Boettcher, I have been in love with the science of our immune system. Our bodies make millions of protective antibodies to fight infection, we improve on nature by being vaccinated to make more of these antibodies and our mothers give us their antibodies in breast milk. The first milk is called colostrum and is particularly rich in antibodies.
Australian company Immuron has taken this idea to market and is producing Travelan, a hyper immune bovine colostrum powder targeting toxic bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract and neutralising their ability to cause travellers' diarrhoea and its symptoms. They are injecting donor cows with about 14 different strains of human toxin producing E coli bacteria and thus producing antibodies to a great range of bacteria that we might encounter in our travels. It is much like influenza vaccines are formulated with a range of virus strains to hopefully induce in us protective antibodies.
With Travelan, the cows do all the work and we use their antibodies in our gut to neutralise a toxic bug before it can take hold. A recent study from the US Department of Defense has shown that Travelan may also be effective against Campylobacter, Shigella, and other pathogenic bacteria that may cause travellers' diarrhoea. I hope that for me a stitch in time will save nine.
