CHAPTEK V 



MILK AND THE ACUTE INFECTIOUS DISEASES 



IT is unnecessary to-day to insist upon the fact that milk may 

 be a vehicle for the transmission of infectious disease to man. 

 So many practical demonstrations of this fact have unhappily 

 been furnished in our own country of raw milk drinkers that 

 the fact has to be universally admitted. As long ago as 1857 

 Dr. Taylor of Penrith showed that an outbreak of typhoid fever 

 amongst his patients was due to milk infected from a human 

 case of typhoid fever. It throws a strong light upon the 

 backwardness of epidemiology at this period that an interval 

 of ten years elapsed before any important outbreak of infectious 

 disease was again traced to an infected milk supply, and this 

 second investigation we also owe to Taylor, who showed that 

 an outbreak of scarlet fever was due to milk infected from a 

 case of scarlet fever. Since that date milk has repeatedly 

 been shown to be a vehicle for the spread of infectious 

 disease. 



Apart from tuberculosis, which is considered in Chapter 

 VIL, the infectious diseases which have been shown to have 

 been spread by milk are the following : diphtheria, typhoid 

 fever, scarlet fever, infective sore -throats, Malta fever, and 

 occasionally gastro-enteritis outbreaks, dysentery, and cholera. 



SOUECES OF INFECTION 



To convey infectious disease the milk must have had added 

 to it the specific organism of that disease. While individually 

 very numerous the sources of infection can be grouped under 

 one of the three following heads : 



A. Direct human infection. 



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