Take care with doorstep milk deliveries as the warm weather arrives

Campylobacter jejuni is a widespread bacteria that causes diarrhoea and severe abdominal pain, vomiting is rare, and illness normally lasts several days.

Campylobacters are found naturally in the guts of domestic and wild animals and birds, including cattle, poultry, seagulls, jackdaws, cats and dogs.

Although eating poorly cooked chicken and handling raw poultry are the main risk factors it has been suggested that doorstep milk bottles, with thin aluminium foil tops , pecked by birds such as magpies and jackdaws can be a source. Therefore it is advisable not to drink or use milk where bottle tops have been pecked by birds.

An unpleasant and sometimes fatal consequence of infection with Campylobacter is the Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) which is an acute, autoimmune, polyradiculoneuropathy affecting the peripheral nervous system - first described in 1916, by Georges Guillain, Jean Alexandre Barré, and Andre Strohl diagnosed two soldiers in the French Vth Army - hence it has been also called French Polio and Landry's ascending paralysis.

In 1921, when he was 39 years of age, Franklin Delano Roosevelt contracted an illness which debilitated him for the rest of his life and this has subsequently (2003) been attributed to GBS and not polio, as usually claimed.

Didn't stop him being President for 12 years.