The Abstract

therapeutic Donkey milk is produced by the female donkey and is

represented as a new dietary food that contains several active ingredients that strengthen
immunity and immune defenses and other health benefits. This milk is recognized by the low
content fat and cholesterol, which makes it the best for patients suffering from cardiovascular
diseases. This review discusses various aspects of donkey milk, focusing on therapeutics
effect of donkey’s milk.

Keywords: Donkey milk, immunity, health benefits, Therapeutics effects.

Introduction

Donkeys (Equus asinus or Equus asinus asinus), more commonly known as "donkeys", are a
species of herbivorous, ungulate mammals belonging to the family Equidae.

Donkeys are used as a dairy species because of the nutritional value of their milk as well as
for its beneficial properties for health.

Donkey milk is now presented as an alternative dietary ingredient for sensitive consumers
such as infants with cow's milk protein allergy due to its low casein content and its
composition is similar to that of human milk, as well as adults suffering from inflammatory
and allergic conditions, or the elderly in good health.

Milk according to health experts or dieticians meets all the nutritional needs of human beings
and is used as a key component in some medicines due to its different therapeutic properties
except that the disadvantage that arises is that the donkey produces very little milk compared
to other animals due to the small size of the udder which makes this milk more expensive than
cow's milk.

This article will deal with the different therapeutics effects of donkey milk.

The use of donkey milk in allergic children:

Milk is a kind of mammary secretion used in the feeding of young children to ensure their
development, in the case of human’s milk it cannot be replaced by cow's milk in infants who
suffers from allergy but donkey's milk has presented after several physicochemical analysis
many similarities with human’s milk because the content of proteins and caseins which are
the main allergenic components is less than cow's milk which translates the possibility of the
use of this milk in allergic infants.

Table 1 : comparison of donkey’s milk, human’s milk and cow’s milk (g/100 g)

Composition Human’s milk Donkey’s milk Cow’s milk

Protein 0,9 – 1,7 1,5 – 1,8 3.1 – 3.8
 Caseins 0,32 – 0,42 0,63 – 1,03 2,46 – 2,80

From this table it can be seen that the protein content in cow's milk, which is between 3.1 and
3.80, is higher than in donkey's milk (1.5 - 1.8) and human milk (0.9 - 1.7), as well as the
caseins are very low in donkey's milk and human milk compared to cow's milk. Therefore,
donkey's milk can be used as an alternative food for infants suffering from allergy.

Immunomodulatory effects: