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Danielle,
I can't answer all of your questions, but I can shed a little light into my experiences. In my experience, the stomach pH tends to run between 3.5 and 5. If you can pass a stomach tube into the duodenum, the pH increases to nearly 7. This can be a GREAT marker for where the tip of your tube is sitting in the absence of radiographs/xrays.
The stomach is acidic, but in the presence of food the pH generally increases - an ameliorating situation for the microbes? Also, fluids and pastes that dissolve easily pass through, relatively quickly, as compared to solids. It may be that the microbes are moving through very quickly. If even a few get through to a hospitable environment, they could then proliferate and repopulate the gut.
When you referred to the equine stomach taking 24 hours to empty - was it perhaps referring to passage through the complete gut vs just the stomach (gastrum)?
For what it is worth.....
Linda Flemmer
A comparative vertebrate zoologist whose real job is FAR removed from that field!
-----Original Message-----
From: guest@endurance.net [mailto:guest@endurance.net]
Danielle McNeil
Thanks for the replies Dr. Smith and Susan, but a few things still
"bug" me (no pun intended :-)). Could you clarify, pleeeaaasee???
<SNIP> Anyway, the
the book states that the stomach pH is about 1.3 to 5 (I know, wide range)
but it needs to be acidic enough to split the enzyme precursor pepsinogen
into pepsin. From Susan's webpage, it seems that just a small drop in cecal
pH kills certain species of microflora. They can survive the stomach's pH? <SNIP>
Also, the book mentions that although the stomach of carnivores will empty in
a couple of hours, the stomach of a horse and pig requires 24 hours to empty
if the animal has eaten a large meal (the stomach is full).
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