On Fri, 11 Jan 2013 02:07:03 -0500, Wes Groleau wrote:

Well, that's the hypothesis. I don't KNOW that it's in the milk. In
fact, it probably isn't. But something derived from it may be.

It depends a LOT on what's in the milk, and, what your body does to it.
The entire process is complicated, and I don't profess to fully
understand it.

But, it starts with urushiol & T cells.

The actual urushiol is a benzene ring with two hydroxides (i.e., a
catechol), with a specific alkyl group which is slightly different
depending on species (e.g., poison ivy = 15 carbon chain, poison oak = 17
carbon chain). This molecule is harmless, and it, in and of itself, does
not provoke the immune response.

The immune response is complicated in so much as the longer carbon chains
in poison oak sap appear to have a greater immune response than the
shorter ones of ivy ... and ... the more unsaturated the chain (i.e.,
double bonds), the more our immune systems react to it (at least it says
so in Wikipedia).

Once on the skin, the oil penetrates to the lower antigen-presenting
immune cells whose job is to capture foreign invaders and transport them
to the lymph notes to be presented as evidence to the specific white
blood cells which had matured in the thymus in front of your heart, and
which play a role in the cell mediated immune response.

Since T cells, which originate in the bone marrow, randomly mutate in the
thymus, some of those mutations select for "self" proteins. But that's
bad news for the body, so the thymus has a system for weeding out these
miscreants.

Unfortunately, what the thymus lets out are T cells who have receptors
that key for the quinole that the urushiol oxidizes to. Hence the rash.

Point is, this is a complicated mechanism, which, we have only two basic
approaches to combat:

1. Build up an immunity (i.e., don't create Tcells coded for the quinone)
or
2. Remove the quinone from the body as soon as you can

I'm working on the second approach ... you've resolved the first.