THE CASE TO-DAY 61 



RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF MILK CONTROL 



The question may well be raised as to the exact im- 

 portance of milk control in the general sanitary field. 

 Until recently no idea at all definite was to be had of 

 this, but a tentative scale of relative values in public 

 health work has been published by Dr. Charles V. 

 Chapin, 9 Superintendent of Health of Providence, R. I., 

 in which, on a scale of 100, a value of 8 was assigned to 

 milk supervision. Dr. Chapin, hi a revision of the scale, 

 has since, however, reduced his estimation of the milk 

 figure to 2 per cent (sanitation, 1.7; adulteration, 0.3). 10 

 A similar scale has been worked out by Franz Schneider, 

 Jr., 11 of the Department of Surveys and Exhibits of 

 the Russell Sage Foundation, assigning to milk control 

 the value of 2.7 per cent. These figures, though tenta- 

 tive, tend to indicate that the relative sanitary im- 

 portance of milk control is not so great as has perhaps 

 been generally supposed. It must be considered, how- 

 ever, that the economic difficulties and demoralization 

 of the vast dairy industry contribute greatly to the 

 present importance of the milk problem as a whole. 



CONCLUSION: THE STATE OF THE CASE 



The present status of the milk question as outlined 

 in the foregoing pages may be briefly characterized as 

 follows: 



1. The problem is both sanitary and economic. It 

 involves the all-important question of health versus 

 dollars Will the consumer pay for sanitary milk? 

 and the correlative one: How, otherwise, is the dairy- 



