8 THE MILK QUESTION 



used the same day while fresh. Now it comes through 

 many hands and is often about forty-eight hours old when 

 it reaches the household. Finally, in the old days many a 

 milk-borne outbreak occurred, many an infant met an un- 

 timely death through impure milk, but the dangers were 

 not known and therefore not realized. The affliction was 

 attributed to sewer-gas, to miasms from the soil, or some 

 mysterious agency, if not the will of Divine Providence. 

 The milk has not changed so much since the good old 

 times, but our knowledge has. 



The dangers in milk lack dramatic interest 



The milk problem, like many another problem in pre- 

 ventive medicine, lacks dramatic interest. The tragedies 

 that fill the front page of our newspaper, that we read one 

 day and forget the next, are not the real tragedies of life. 

 Tuberculosis in one year claims more victims than the num- 

 ber killed by bullets in the four years of our Civil War. In 

 our fair land 160,000 persons die annually from tuberculosis 

 alone. Of the 90,000,000 persons now living in the United 

 States, about 6,000,000 are doomed to die of the "great 

 white plague." The death toll from typhoid fever in the 

 United States is 25,000 lives annually. Over 250,000 per- 

 sons suffer from this preventable infection each year. I 

 mention only two instances, and select tuberculosis and 

 typhoid fever because they are diseases sometimes spread 

 by infected milk. 



It is much more theatrical to cure a disease than to pre- 

 vent its occurrence. To stamp out an epidemic seems to 

 some flamboyant minds a more notable achievement than 

 to prevent its occurrence. When disease is prevented, 

 nothing happens. There is a lack of action. There is 

 nothing to fill the eye, but the ounce of prevention is still 

 worth much more than the proverbial pound of cure. 



It is so with milk. Good, clean, safe milk gratifies the 

 palate, satisfies thirst and hunger, and produces no un- 



