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9
Sewage Works, but a fresh area of land for sewage treatment, and
alteration in our present system of the main drainage, to enable
the mains to carry off a sufficient quantity of sewage and prevent
surcharging and flooding of the lower levels, as has taken place on
one or two occasions during the year.
COWSHEDS AND DAIRIES.
Last year five farms supplied milk to the district. One farm
during the year moved over the boundary into the Croydon district.
This year our supply comes from four farms within the district,
and from Croydon, Cheam, Kingston, Raynes Park, and Railwayborne
milk from without the district. The care of the sheds is, on
the whole, satisfactory. The cows are all healthy and well fed, but
there is still slackness in detail of cleanliness that one would like to
see removed. The subject of pure milk is so important that one
must refer to it again and again. For my own part, I do not think
that the dairy farmer who supplies milk straight from his cows to
the consumer recognises the advantages of his position. The
contamination of railway-borne milk is well known. When it starts
from a far-off farm, the farmer thinks it necessary to add a little
preservative, to make it keep on the journey. On the railway it is
exposed to every kind of contamination and adulteration, natural
and artificial. When at last it arrives at the retailer's milk shop, he
thinks it necessary to add still a little more preservative, " for fear
it should go wrong." The result is that neither the producer or
retailer knows how much is used, and so the consumer has to
swallow an unknown quantity.
Coming, as I did, seven years ago from a strictly rural district,
I have been struck by the effect the preservative used in milk
has upon the infant, and even on the adult. I feel sure that a
large number of deaths registered under enteritis and other
infantile complaints, is due directly to the use of preservatives;
at any rate, I never remember to have met with similar
cases in the country; and further, some of the infantile rashes
we meet with, so like scarlet fever as even to make the
diagnosis of that disease difficult, are undoubtedly caused by these
substances. If the public, and the dairy farmer selling milk directly
to the consumer, would only recognise that the milk with the least
chance of contamination is that taken straight from the cow to the
consumer, and, therefore, it should be possible for the consumer to
receive a milk pure and unadulterated. The Woking epidemic,
caused by milk from cows suffering from that well-known disease
garget, should make the isolation of all cows suffering from any
inflammatory disease of like character not only a common, but
imperative custom. I should like to see the whole of our milk
supplied by cows kept in our own district. In this the public can
assist, in a great measure, by consuming only milk that is produced
in this way.