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36
The risks to infant life from artificial feeding under the most
careful and skilled supervision are very considerable; under the
conditions practicable to the bulk of our population they are
appalling. Given a conscientious and intelligent mother, scrupulous
in her attention to the quality, quantity, method and
regularity of administering the food selected as most suitable to
infantile digestion, there yet remain the grave risks which are
inseparable from the conditions of the urban milk supply. How
great these are is so little appreciated by the public that it is not
too much to say that a more general knowledge of them would lead
to as drastic legislative and administrative changes in the control
of the milk supply as have occurred in the water supply of this
country during the last 30 or 40 years. The great mortality
among infants is due for the greater part to poisoned milk.
Year after year thousands of infants in England and Wales die
owing to the filthy pollutions which gain admission to the milk
of the town consumer. At the dairy farm, during transit, in the
milk shop, in the home, it runs the gauntlet of a thousand dangers
and it says much for the natural resistance of the hand-fed infant
that it succumbs in no greater degree than is shown in our high
infantile mortality tables.
The greatest specific risk, undoubtedly, is to summer
diarrhoea, but, as is well shown in the table, it does not stop
here. There is, it will be observed, among infants dying from
causes other than diarrhoea a much higher percentage of artificial
feeding than is found among those who survive the year of their
birth, although it is lower than among those dying from zymotic
diarrhœa.
It was found that out of the total of 872 births investigated,
325 were hand-fed, wholly or in part. Of these 325 no fewer than
147 were found to be fed with improper food. With 45 per cent.