625 
safe milk supply should be regarded as one of the most important 
duties of the health officer. Whether pasteurization is adopted by a 
city for its general milk supply or not, no milk should be accepted 
that does not comply with certain reasonable chemical and bacterio- 
logical standards. This would aid the inspectors in enforcing good 
dairy methods. Pasteurization then must not be used as an excuse to 
bolster up milk unfit for home consumption. To insure this end, the 
health officer should have authority to condemn and destroy bad milk, 
whether or not pasteurization is practiced. 
To obtain a good milk supply involves not only an expensive 
system of inspection and surveillance from the farm to the consumer, 
but intelligence and a high degree of technical skill on the part of 
the producer and all others who handle the milk. 
We can scarcely conceive of an inspection so thorough and constant 
as to prevent milk occasionally becoming contaminated with the 
germs of typhoid, diphtheria, scarlet fever, dysentary, tuberculosis, 
etc. 
If our drinking water is defiled at its source we boil or filter it. 
It would be much better to prevent its contamination. The same is 
true of milk. We prefer pure milk, but so long as we can not obtain 
it we must purif} 7 what we get. The situation may well be illustrated 
by the attitude of an eminent sanitarian in New York, who in lps 
writing and public addresses discourages pasteurization, because 
theoretically it does not reach the source of the evil and is not as 
good in the end as purification of the milk supply through efficient 
inspection. However, when this same sanitarian is consulted by a 
large wholesale dealer of New York, who handles many thousands of 
quarts of more or less old dirty milk a day, he is confronted by a con- 
dition, not a theory, and advises pasteurization. 
There is a prevalent impression that the pasteurization of milk 
improves that important article of diet. Heating does not render 
milk better in any way as a food. All it does is to destroy certain 
bacteria and some of their toxic products. It checks certain proc- 
esses of fermentation and putrefaction, thus rendering the milk 
safer. On the other hand the evidence seems clear that the pasteuri- 
zation of milk at 60° C. for twenty minutes does not appreciably 
deteriorate its quality or lessen its food value. 
Pasteurization has been accused of possessing the great disad- 
vantage of inducing scurvy and rickets. It is generally believed that 
highly heated milk is a contributive factor in the etiology of scurvy. 
There is certainly no evidence to show that low temperature pasteuri- 
zation such as is now recommended ever in itself induces scurvy. 
Thousands of children have been raised upon heated milk without the 
production of this disease, which is comparatively rare, especially in 
24907— -Bull. 41—08 40 
