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possible, introducing a Bill on the subject. In the meantime we recommended
the Council to call the attention of' the Local Government
Board to the facts as evidence of the necessity for an amendment of the
law. The Council adopted our recommendation, and a letter was
accordingly addressed to the Local Government Board. We have now
received reports from the officers, and after carefully considering them
We are of opinion that the following powers are urgently required, viz.:—
1. Power to require a dairyman to supply to the medical officer
of the district a list of his customers on payment of a small sum
for the service.
2. Power to require a dairyman to furnish to the medical officer
of the district a list of the sources of his supply.
3. Power to the sanitary authority to compensate a milk vendor
whose milk supply is stopped at the request of the authority
on account of suspicion that it is infective, and whose milk is as the
result of further inquiry subsequently determined not to have been
infective.
As to (1) provision should be made for the requirement to apply
(a) to the supply to retail vendors by wholesale vendors, (b) to the supply
to consumers by retail vendors.
As to 2 it would be requisite to provide machinery by which milk
distributed to consumers could, if necessary, be traced to the farm from
which the milk is received. It would probably suffice, in cases in which
the retail vendor receives milk through a middleman, for the middleman
to keep a register of the sources from which he supplies the retail vendor.
In the same way, one vendor selling to another should be required to
keep a record of such transactions and the source from which the supply
is derived.
As already pointed out, there is no power to exclude an infective milk
supply from London as a whole, inasmuch as the Council has no power
in the matter, and each of the 29 sanitary authorities can only exclude
the milk from its own district, and that after adopting a procedure
involving considerable loss of time. Such power should be given
to the County Council, and along with it the necessary powers of
inspection of dairies and cattle outside as well as inside London. The
Council should also be enabled to exercise the powers numbered 1, 2
and 3, should it find it necessary to do so for the purpose of dealing
with some widespread prevalence of disease involving more than one
district.
The necessity for the sanitary authority to obtain a magistrate's order
before making an inspection of a dairy and of cows ought to be obviated;
at any rate it might be provided that this should be unnecessary unless
demanded by the dairyman. The loss of time in obtaining an order may
mean loss of life among the consumers.