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forms of Tuberculosis or Consumption, especially that form attacking the lungs, and
excepting that form attacking the bowel. This last form, which occurs in children
at the milk-drinking age, has shewn a considerable increase of late years, and there
is little doubt that tuberculous milk is the cause of it. Professor Delepine
examined a number of milks entering Liverpool and Manchester for the purpose of
confirming the truth of this mode of infection from the cow. He produced no
tuberculosis from unmixed milks from cows shewing no evidence of tuberculosis,
but produced tuberculosis from 27.24 per cent. of unmixed milk from cows shewing
distinct advanced tuberculosis; 5.55 per cent. from mixed milks from town dairies,
the condition of the cows being unknown; and 17.6 per cent. of milks from
country farms, the condition of the cows being unknown to him. He also
ascertained that in a small herd of cows tested recently by him with tuberculin,
over 43 per cent. were tuberculous or consumptive, and this accords with records
of foreign abattoirs and municipal slaughterhouses. Now, if the germs of
tuberculosis or consumption can be found in milk, and it can be successfully
brought home through the person distributing the milk to the farmer producing
it, that he is spreading a dangerous infectious disease, a very powerful effect will
be produced towards inducing farmers to test their cows with tuberculin, and weed
out the infected animals from their herds. A methed of extending the use of
tuberculin for the purpose of preventing the spread of tuberculosis which appears
to have been overlooked by the recent Royal Commission.
Milk may be unfit for food from the presence of various injurious germs.
1.—Pathegenic germs may be added to milk by means of impure water
used to dilute it, or used to wash the utensils. The germs of typhoid fever
{bacillus typhi abdomtnalis) may gain access in this manner.
2.—Pathegenic germs may be added to milk by the attendants. The germs
of diphtheria (bacillus diptherice) have been found in milk, possibly derived from
the throats of these handling it, and attendants with sores on their hands or
elsewhere may add the germs found in such sores (streptococci and staphylococci).
3.—The common germ of the animal intestines (bacillus coli communis) may
be derived in an exceptional case from the dirty habits of an attendant, but the
most usual source is the dirty skin and udder of the cow, after she has lain in her
own dung, and it has dried upon her surface, and is brushed off in the process of
milking. These organisms multiply in the milk, turn it sour, aud produce
poisonous toxins that are injurious to milk-drinking children.
4.—Purulent organisms may gain access to milk from sores on the surface of
the cow's udder, and may be found in the milk.
5.—There may be a tuberculous or other abscess on the udder of the cow. If
tuberculous, the tubercle bacilli may be found in the milk; if non-tuberculous,
then streptococci and staphylococci [strep, pyogenes, strep bovis, staph, pyogenes aurei)
may be found. In either case such milk would be considered injurious.
6.—Milk may become unfit for consumption by the growth of non-pathegenic
organisms turning it sour (oidium lactis, etc.), or causing other changes.