244 THE COMMON SENSE OE THE MILK QUESTION 



unhygienic conditions under which our public milk 

 supply is produced and distributed; they have done 

 much of the investigation into the causes of con- 

 tamination, and shown by actual experiment how 

 unnecessary those conditions are; they have forced 

 upon public attention the menace of a polluted milk 

 supply to the public health and the highly impor- 

 tant part milk plays in the spreading of disease. 

 No reasonable man in the other camp will 'attempt to 

 deny that the clean milk agitation has had all these 

 merits.' 



Now, these radicals of milk reform say. that it is 

 possible to secure a practically germless milk supply 

 which is absolutely safe and clean. They say that, 

 however Utopian it may sound to conservative ears, 

 it is possible, in a little while, given the right spirit 

 of civic cooperation, to get a public milk supply 

 which will come well within Professor von Behring's 

 zone of safety, having a bacterial count of less than 

 1000 per cubic centimeter. This, they believe, is by 

 no means an impossible ideal, even for the general 

 milk supply of any city. In support of their con- 

 tention they point to the numerous experiments 

 similar to those outlined in the present volume which 

 prove that it is possible to produce practically sterile 

 milk. Given such milk, they argue, it would not 

 be necessary to resort to pasteurization or any other 

 method of purification, and the. advocates .of pas- 



