Prof. Dr. Dominique A. Vuitton

Professor emeritus of Clinical Immunology at the Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté. Medical Specialities: Internal Medicine, Digestive Diseases and General Surgery. PhD in Immunology and MSc in Human Biology. Corresponding member of the French National Academy of Medicine since 2017.

Experience in allergy and clinical immunology, communicable diseases, including HIV infection and zoonoses, environmental health; food safety; international cooperation; management of multidisciplinary networks; institutional/political negotiation; multi-media communication; health education; medical and scientific edition.

Scientific publications: over 300 publications in books and peer-reviewed journals (285 accessible from PubMed under the key-word ‘vuitton d’), in clinical immunology; AIDS and other communicable diseases, zoonoses, and environmental health; allergy; Hepatology; clinical pharmacology.

Prizes and awards:

  • Nominated for the UNESCO/L’Oreal prize “For women in science”;
  • French “Légion d’honneur” and “Palmes académiques”;
  • Chinese Xinjiang “Tian Shan prize” and Chinese National “Friendship prize”.

Lecture title

Raw milk, allergies, asthma and respiratory infections: main results of the «PASTURE » international project.

Lecture summary

Allergic diseases have become a public health problem because of the marked increase in their incidence along the second half of the 20th century, and their relationship with environmental changes observed in that period of time. At the end of the 1990s, cross-sectional studies stressed the relationship between dairy farm specific environments, including consumption of raw milk, with a significant protection against allergy. For the last 15 years, since the last trimester of their mother’s pregnancy until now, in the PASTURE cohort 1000 children have been studied in dairy farming regions of 5 European countries (Austria, Finland, France/Franche-Comté, Germany, and Switzerland); 500 lived on a farm and 500 also lived in rural areas, but did not live on a farm. The results of this multidisciplinary endeavour have confirmed  the role of 1) the diversity of exposure to animals, microbes, and consumed food (including diversity of cheeses) in early childhood; 2) the consumption of raw milk and farm milk products; 3) maternal exposure before delivery, and especially consumption of raw milk and dairy farm-made products, for the immunological and allergic future of her child; 4) an early orientation/differentiation of the immune profile of the children under the influence of the environmental and alimentary factors. In addition, the protection against respiratory infections in the first year of life by raw milk consumption could also be demonstrated by the study. The PASTURE cohort is a remarkable example of European cooperation in order to better understand a public health problem. Its results should encourage public health deciders, when they consider the sanitary risks of raw milk products, to better take the protection they ensure against diseases with significant morbidity and mortality, such as asthma and respiratory infections, into account.

This lecture is supported by