Milk containing pus: Fact or Fiction?

So I've been listening to a podcast for the past year or so called The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. It's basically a science podcast that specializes in debunking pseudo scientific claims and practices such as Homeopathy, Creationism, Psychics, Anti-Vaccination bullshits, and the list goes on. One of the most valuable lessons I have learned from this show is to consider sources and do your own research when you are presented with information that seems counter intuitive or just bizarre in any way. They also do a good job of pointing out how bad the media often is at responsibly presenting science-based news.

So recently I've been enjoying the occasional glass of milk. And, like many people I have been told time and time again that milk contains a significant amount of pus. So I decided to do some of my own research on the topic and came to find that this is pretty much total bullshit.

At first glance of all the information that was coming up via Google searches, I was disheartened to see all kinds of articles and reports supporting the notion that milk was full of pus. Then I began to notice that the great majority of these sources were using terms such as "pus cells" and "somatic cells aka 'pus'". So after a little research in the science-minded side of the net I came to find that there is in fact no such thing as "pus cells" and that somatic cells are literally "any cells that make up the body of an organism".

So that's what pus isn't. Turns out that what pus is, is the bacteria gathered by white blood cells to be excreted out of the body in one way or another. The presence of white blood cells in milk is natural and healthy. On a side note, most arguments claiming that milk contains blood are technically true because of this, but any milk that gets contaminated with whole blood (usually in the cases of infection) is marked as a health hazard and disposed of.

I could go on for a little while longer but nobody is going to read this anyway. But just to wrap up my stupid rant, lets consider that blood or pus or some form of bacteria makes it into the pumped milk due to an infection or whatever. In the more severe and obvious cases of contamination it would be thrown out for violation of the FDA's strict dairy guidelines. In other cases of mild contamination, this bacteria would be destroyed during the pasteurization process.


In closing, fuck you guys I'm going to start drinking milk a lot more frequently.