NEW YORK MILK COMMITTEE 113 



centage, and consider also the number of milk samples that 

 have tubercle bacilli in them, it is not surprising, and it is 

 easy to connect the two circumstances together. Not every 

 one who drinks down tubercle bacilli will necessarily develop 

 tuberculosis. In one of our western cities an epidemic of 

 typhoid fever took place from an infection of the water sup- 

 ply. Six thousand people were taken with diarrhoea within 

 forty-eight hours, having been infected, presumably, by sewage 

 in the water supply. Of those, four hundred and fifty devel- 

 oped typhoid fever afterwards. Now, the probability is that 

 all of those six thousand were infected, and only four hundred 

 and fifty came down with the disease. That sort of thing is 

 happening with us every day. We may be infected very many 

 times but the infection does not take hold of us. We do not 

 actually show the lesions of the disease. We resist it, very 

 often, but there is the danger of placing it in our system. 



What I have spoken of at the present time is bovine tuber- 

 culosis. But cattle are infected by the human tuberculosis, 

 and how many people handling cattle are free from tubercu- 

 losis? Many of them infect the cattle, do they not? If you 

 go about examining and inspecting people that have to do with 

 milk, you will find men who have tuberculosis handling milk. 

 There is a good percentage of the population, ordinarily, with 

 tuberculosis. That is always a possible source of tuberculosis 

 in cattle. The human tubercle bacillus is the organism that is 

 more serious if it gets into the milk. We are more likely to 

 be infected by the human tubercle bacillus than by the bovine 

 bacillus. 



Then there is typhoid fever. There are various sources 

 from which typhoid fever originates, and milk is one of the 

 most fruitful. There is hardly a health officer in any city on 

 the continent who has not come into contact with typhoid, due 

 to milk. We have it here in New York City and we have it in 

 Toronto and we have it in other towns. Cows do not have 

 typhoid fever, but cows can wallow around in material that has 

 typhoid bacilli in it and they can become infected and the 

 bacilli can thus get into the milk. If there is a typhoid per- 

 son on the farm, what care is taken with his excretions ? They 

 are thrown on the lot, and if it happens to be summer time, 

 the flies walk all over it ; and if they happen to fall near a well, 



