Good Health and How We Won It, With an Account of the New HygieneSinclair, Upton
Science
Good Health and How We Won It, With an Account of the New Hygiene
Sinclair, Upton
Hygiene
Federal departments at Washington were, not long ago, almost crippled
by the prevalence of typhoid fever among the employees; and the public
health service under Surgeon-General Walter Wyman traced more than
ten per cent. of the cases to the milk supply. Professor Lafayette B.
Mendel of the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University, told one
of the writers of this book that he went to a certain city that had
suffered an epidemic of typhoid, and made a map showing each house that
had contained a case of typhoid fever. He made a similar map showing
the houses where certain milkmen stopped—and the two maps were almost
completely identical. It has also been established beyond a doubt that
tuberculosis is communicated from the cow to the human being, and in
certain sections of the world it is believed that milk from tubercular
cows is the chief channel of infection. It has been shown that even
if the udder of a cow be healthy, a tubercular cow may give infected
milk, and that the presence of a single tubercular cow in a herd may be
responsible for the infection of the milk of healthy animals. Several
international medical congresses have lately declared that all milk
should be boiled in order to kill the germs.
[Illustration: PROF. LAFAYETTE B. MENDEL, PH.D., YALE UNIVERSITY,
Who has carried on researches in conjunction with Prof. Chittenden.]
The United States Department of Agriculture issued in Circular No.
111 of the Bureau of Animal Industry, and in Circular No. 114, the
recommendations made by a conference of some twenty of the foremost
scientists of the United States, and few more important documents
concerning the public health have ever been issued by a government. In
brief, these recommendations may be thus stated: Raw milk is highly
dangerous. Boiling or pasteurizing kills the disease germs and makes
the milk safe without seriously impairing the taste or digestibility.
Milk produced under the most ideal conditions, such as “certified”
milk, is only relatively safe. Pasteurization, when properly done,
makes the milk absolutely safe.
Butter, of course, is subject to all the arguments that can be advanced
against milk, with the additional one that it is even more subject
to infection with germs than milk itself, since the time that elapses
between its manufacture and its consumption is usually far longer than
the time that elapses between the drawing of milk from the cow and its
use. Only butter that is made from sterilized cream should be used.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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