View report page

106
Report that "in the larger dairies and milk stores much improvement
has taken place but it has not been found possible
to obtain much improvement in the shops where milk is sold,
especially in poor neighbourhoods." Registration appears to be
enforced only in respect of shops where milk is the staple article
of trade, so that very many "general" shops where milk is but one
of a hundred things sold, do not get registered at all. It would
involve endless trouble, doubtless, to register, regulate, and inspect
such shops, and yet they might easily become the centres for
the spread of disease by the sale of contaminated milk, as in
case of an outbreak of scarlet fever or typhoid fever on the
premises. The Board have taken the very proper step of calling
the attention of all persons engaged in the milk trade (other than
the hucksters above referred to) to the precautions to be observed
for the prevention of infection.
I have always felt it to be an anomaly, that the carrying out of so
important an Order should have been entrusted, as a rule, to bodies
which have no sanitary machinery. Thus in the Metropolis (City
excepted) the Metropolitan Board of Works, as already stated, is
the "Local Authority," and in the provinces the county magistrates,
by virtue of the provisions of the Contagious Diseases (Animals)
Act, 1878. The Board, in London, have delegated the duty of
inspection of cowsheds and dairies to a very limited number of
officers who have multifarious duties to perform under other Acts;
and in the counties the magistrates, almost universally, have
entrusted the duty, to what little extent it is carried out, to the
police. Arrangements such as these are not calculated to ensure
the results intended by the legislature, and they do not satisfy
sanitarians, to whose representations the 34th section of the Act,
and the Order itself, may be said to be due.
The "Local Authorities" in the provinces, whence most of our
milk comes, have always shown themselves keenly alive to the
necessity of checking the spread of animal infectious diseases,
and one could have wished that they had been equally careful to
make provision for the protection of human health by measures
designed to prevent contamination of milk, as required by the 9th
section of the Order, viz., by prohibiting any person suffering from
an infectious disease, or having been in contact with a person so