[Report 1899] / Medical Officer of Health, Bootle County Borough.

  • Bootle (Lancashire, England). County Borough Council.
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1899] / Medical Officer of Health, Bootle County Borough. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    meseuterica, where the glandular structures of the bowels are affected, young children are mainly affected, and the indications are very strong that the infection is caused by tubercular milk, as it will be noticed that young children are affected at ages when milk forms the chief article of diet, and statistics show that as soon as this ceases the mortality from tabes meseuterica declines to an insignificant quantity. To use the words in the Report of the Royal Commission, “ the milk of cow's with tuberculosis of the udder possesses a virulence which can only be described as extraordinary,” Dr. Robertson remarks that in the case of phthisis the reduction of “ mortality is probably due to the vast strides that have been made iu general sanitation, especially in the betterment of the houses of all classes of the people, the better control of unhealthy occupations, and of workshops and factories, and also to improvement in medical treatment.” With regard to the inheritance of the disease, I may here mention that ” tuberculosis is practically never handed down from parent to child,” but inheritance is undoubtedly a predispneinij cause of the disease, for children of tubercular parents when exposed to infection are more liable than others to contract the di.sease. The other predisposing causes are overcrowding, dark, damp, and ill-veutilated houses and workshops, intemperance, insufficient food, some trades, fevers and other debilitating illnesses. With regard to “Instruction for Consumptives” I believe that copies of the leaflet drawn up by the National Association for the Prevention of Consumption might be distributed to persons known to be suffering from this disease. In this way every case of consumption reported would be visited and the general sanitary surroundings of the home and workplace noted. With respect to the destruction of infant life every summer and autumn by impure milk and putrifying milk-foods, I will here mention the experience, after very careful investigation, of Dr. Hope, Medical Officer of Health for Liverpool. Dr. Hope has found that if 20 infants out of every thousand below three months of age, fed upon the breast alone, die from infantile diarrhoea, no less than 300 die out of every 1,000 fed upon cow’s milk and artificial foods as well as breast milk, but if they get no breast milk at all, nothing in fact but cow’s milk and other artificial foods, it would appear that the deaths of those under three months of age would increase from 20 to 440 per 1,000, a number almost incredible. The virulent nature which milk can assume is proved, not only by these facts, but also by the investigations of the bacteriologist; it v^as found that some samples of ordinary milk purchased in the ordinary way proved so highly virulent as to kill the animal inoculated with it within 48 hours.