Recently published Curtin University of Technology research has found that young children consuming a milk product containing probiotics and prebiotics twice a day can spend significantly less time at home sick and away from daycare.

Professor Colin Binns, lead researcher on the study from Curtin’s School of Public Health, explained the significance of the findings.

“The findings of this study have important implications for working parents as it would mean that the time taken off work to care for their sick children at home would be greatly reduced,” Professor Binns said.

“Australia’s strict childcare guidelines excluding children from attending daycare when they are sick not only causes considerable inconvenience for working parents, but can have a substantial economic impact through the direct health care costs and the time parents have to take off work to look after their sick children.”

The CUPDAY (Curtin University Probiotics in Day Care) Study was designed to evaluate the effect on diarrhoea incidence of a milk product containing probiotics and prebiotics (CUPDAY Milk) in young children in a community setting under rigorously monitored conditions.

The Study found that children consuming the CUPDAY Milk had a 20 per cent reduction in the number of days experiencing four or more stools per day which meant that that they were too ill to attend childcare with diarrhoea. Some reduction in other childhood illnesses was also found.

Existing research has shown that probiotics have an important role in the health of the gastrointestinal tract and they have been used for the safe management of diarrhoeal disease. Probiotics have also been shown to reduce the length of episodes of diarrhoea in children.

With the use of probiotics in milk for children, Professor Binns pointed out the lack of community-based randomised efficacy trials in industrialised countries.

“There have been numerous small studies of probiotics in clinical situations, mainly for the treatment of pre-existing conditions, and a few institutional prevention trials, but none in a community setting in a Western country,” Professor Binns said.

This Study involved a randomised controlled trial with 496 children aged one to three years attending 29 childcare centres in Perth, Western Australia over a period of five months.

The results of this Study has been published in the November 2007 issue of Acta Paediatrica, Europe’s most prestigious child health journal.