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From these figures it will be seen that:—
39 or 20.5 per cent. were breast fed.
66 or 34.7 per cent. were fed wholly or partly
on artificial milks.
85 or 44.7 per cent. were fed wholly or partly on
cows' milk.
That is to say that 80 per cent. of the children under one year
of age dying of epidemic diarrhoea in Finsbury were fed on
artificial or cows' milk, or in other words, upon milk which might
be, and in fact is, liable to great contamination. There can be no
doubt in the mind of anyone who knows how the poor live in an
urban district like Finsbury that, quite apart from the lesser
suitability of condensed milk or cows' milk for infant feeding,
these two forms of milk readily become contaminated with dirt
and dust. Such pollution may gain access to the milk at the
farm, or in transit, or at the milk-shop, or in the home. Such
polluted milk readily sets up Diarrhœa, especially in warm
weather. The remedy is to feed infants on human milk, or, if
that be impracticable, then on clean pure cows' milk, suitably
modified for infant consumption. If both of these are impossible,
then recourse must be had to sterilized milk.
Twenty of the 79 infant deaths (or 36 per cent.) in 1903
occurred in children living in one-roomed tenements ; 40 occurred
in children living in two-roomed tenements, and therefore 69, or