80 MILK HYGIENE 



of transmission by milk: In a boarding school 12 young girls 

 became ill with signs of intestinal tuberculosis, and 5 of them 

 died. All came from healthy families and no source of infection 

 was found but one cow which supplied milk for the school and was 

 shown to be affected with tuberculosis of the udder. 



3. Demme has reported the following: In the children's hospital 

 Bern, four children died of intestinal and mesenteric glandular tuber- 

 culosis. He was able to exclude all other sources of infection and to 

 prove that the milk came from tuberculous cows. 



4. Hills tells of a 21 months old child that was affected with 

 intestinal tuberculosis three months after making an eight-day visit 

 to an uncle where it had drunk the milk of a cow having advanced 

 tuberculosis. The child died of tuberculosis. Other sources of 

 infection were excluded and another child fed only with sterilized 

 milk remained healthy. 



5. Ernst reports that three children of the same family died 

 of tuberculosis after drinking milk from a cow that later died of 

 general tuberculosis with udder involvement. 



Leonliardt, Sonntag, Hermsdorff, Klebs, Rotch, 

 Lydtin and Stang, Johne and many others have reported 

 quite similar observations. 



Of particular interest are the cases reported by 

 Ravenel, Fibiger and Jensen, and many others, of tuber- 

 culosis of children with prominent lesions in the diges- 

 tive canal, while the tubercle bacilli present were so 

 virulent for cattle that the origin of the cases in ques- 

 tion were referred, with the greatest probability, to 

 infection through the milk. 



If one considers that feeding tuberculosis is by no 

 means infrequent in man, and occurs quite frequently in 

 children, that human tuberculosis is often transmissible 

 to cattle, and that clinical knowledge argues for trans- 

 mission of bovine tuberculosis to man, and if one con- 

 siders that tubercle bacilli from cattle have been proven 

 at least as dangerous and generally more virulent for 

 all animals than tubercle bacilli from man, then milk 

 containing tubercle bacilli must be regarded as most 



