70 CONFERENCE ON MILK PROBLEMS 



Commission and the German Commission and others. And 

 here in New York, some three years ago, we started, in another 

 way, to find how much tuberculosis was due to milk. We took 

 every case that came to a number of hospitals, and for three 

 years a group of workers at the laboratories have been study- 

 ing them. In that way, following the best lines and bringing 

 the results together with those of other workers, it is giving 

 us a fair idea. So far as adults go, we have only found one 

 in a number of hundreds, that derived tuberculosis from cat- 

 tle, and that was an insignificant lesion that was found acci- 

 dentally upon an operation. But with the children, as you 

 know, the story is very different. I will read here first the 

 total number of cases in children, and then give you two dif- 

 ferent institutions, to show how the accident of taking cow's 

 milk or mother's milk will affect this percentage. 



Altogether, we have, in children under five years of age, more 

 than sixty cases. Of these, fifty-nine were under five years. 

 Nine died from bovine tuberculosis, and fifty died from the 

 human contagion that is, the human type of bacillus. That 

 is, fifteen per cent of all the deaths of little children (from 

 tuberculosis) that we have come across, taking the cases as 

 they came, without selection, have been due to the bovine in- 

 fection. Now, these cases were largely from two institutions. 

 The one which gave us the most of the cases was the Baby's 

 Hospital, and the Baby's Hospital represents very fairly the 

 average baby in New York. Some eighty per cent of those 

 babies were breast-fed. Most of them were under a year old. 

 Of those babies in the Baby's Hospital, we had, altogether, 

 forty-three fatal cases. Of those forty-three fatal cases, four 

 were due to milk that had the bovine infection, and thirty- 

 nine to the human infection. That is, we had there about nine 

 per cent due to the bovine infection, among average babies. 

 But taking the other institution, with the cases that I spoke 

 of, it brought it up to fifteen per cent. 



The next institution was one in which the children were not 

 breast-fed. They were sent out and cared for by women not 

 their mothers, and they were all on cow's milk. Here, al- 

 though we had very few cases, the condition was remarkable. 

 There were nine fatal cases that we studied, and these babies 

 were all on New York City cow's milk. Of these, five died 



