FORTY-THIRD ANNUAL CONVENTION 09 



can partially full. It will not cost any more baggage to fill the 

 partially filled milk can with water, and you get more for it at 

 the other end. 



People say the ideal way to handle the matter of Milk Con- 

 trol is to have the State Food Department look after it. The 

 State Food Department consists at the present time of nine 

 chemists and eighteen inspectors, and we have six millions of 

 people in the State of Illinois, and practically every one of them 

 drinking milk. For this small group of men to control the milk 

 supply of six millions of people is practically out of the question, 

 so that every municipality ought to do something to help this 

 work along. Some people say : ''We can't afford to do it in the 

 municipality, our taxes are already too high." Have they looked 

 at it in the light that money expended in a Health Department 

 is health insurance? People insure all other things and don't 

 think anything about it. They insure for theft, loss by fire, acci- 

 dent, etc., but when the subject of health insurance is approached 

 they take no interest in it at all. When you stop to consider the 

 money paid for taxes, you will find a very small portion of it 

 goes towards health insurance. 



Some towns have a health board and some have not. In 

 the places where they have one, they are often curtailed in their 

 duties by the fact that they are in some way connected with the 

 politics of the town. The physician probably is given little or 

 no compensation and as a result he gives practically no service. 

 Sometimes working under the City Physician is a Health Officer 

 and sometimes his best qualification is that he is willing to work 

 for $50 or $60 a month. In that case, the Health Officer knows 

 how to tack up signs, and fumigate the houses after a patient 

 has recovered from a contagious disease, but as far as the food 

 supply is concerned, he knows practically nothing. I know that 

 in places these are the conditions, and up to two years ago there 

 was practically none of the Health Boards in the towns who 

 knew anything at all about the subject of pure milk supply. So 

 it was with the purpose in mind of bringing these facts before 

 the public and to see if some action could not be gotten to get 

 cities to help out, that the State Food Department started in 191 5 

 a number of Municipal Milk Surveys. 



I was the chemist who worked on those milk survevs, so I 



