116 CONFERENCE ON MILK PROBLEMS 



York thirty inspectors over the State, among the thousands of 

 milk producers, to see whether there is any typhoid or in- 

 fluenza or mastitis among the cows, or any scarlet fever on 

 the farm, or on the route? Perhaps there is a larger number 

 than thirty, but not many more. How can they go over 

 hundreds of miles of territory? Depend upon the local medi- 

 cal health officer to advise as to who has the typhoid? By 

 the time that you decide that a person has typhoid, he has had 

 it two weeks, and he was infected two weeks before that. What 

 are you going to do during all that interval? You see, you 

 have been getting typhoid bacilli in your milk for several 

 weeks, without knowing it. For every case of typhoid that 

 the health officer reports, there are a great many others that 

 have existed. I know of one case in which the health officer 

 reported that there were only two hundred seventy-eight cases 

 in the City. Then someone had the curiosity to go out and 

 find how many there really were. Three hundred ninety-eight 

 were found in four hospitals alone. That is, only two hun- 

 dred seventy-eight had been reported, and yet there were three 

 hundred ninety-eight in the hospitals. The hospitals did not 

 even report them. It takes time to make the diagnosis and 

 by that time the novelty of the thing has worn off and they 

 do not report it. They are more likely to report the other 

 diseases, like diphtheria and scarlet fever and so on, but there 

 are very many that are not reported at all. I know of one 

 dairy that had three inspectors going around, and that dairy 

 stopped two milk supplies where there were typhoid fever cases 

 on the farms, one of them ten days and the other fourteen days 

 old before the City authorities knew anything about it. They 

 stopped those, but how many had escaped them and their in- 

 spectors ? 



That is the situation that you cannot cope with by inspec- 

 tion. You cannot handle them that way, and you cannot in- 

 spect them thoroughly. Those of us who have had anything 

 to do with certified-milk inspectors, know how difficult it is to 

 get them to report on certified milk places, where they are 

 trying to do the best they can. It takes them some time to 

 make up their minds that their men are sick, and all during 

 that time there is a possibility of infection. 



That is the case with a greater portion of the milk that is 



