The public health movement.

  • American Academy of Political and Social Science.
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The public health movement. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    is the side of the problem most intimately related to the public health. Next to polluted water, there is probably no more prolific source of infectious disease than contaminated milk. The danger from infected water has been widely recognized and methods of protection by filtration and by other means have been so thor- oughly studied and so well developed that many communities have practically eliminated water-borne epidemics. In such com- munities, as well as in those where typhoid is still distributed through the water pipes, polluted milk continues, without ef- fective check, to play its part in causing periodic epidemics of typhoid, scarlet fever, diphtheria, diarrhea and other infectious diseases. In a recent bulletin (No. 56), the Public Health and Marine- Hospital Service of the United States gives a tabular summary of 500 epidemics in which there is conclusive evidence that milk was the carrier of typhoid, scarlet fever, diphtheria and septic sore throat. In each case the circumstances of the outbreak are described, together with the evidence that milk was the source of the disease, the manner in which tlie milk was infected, the number of persons affected, the number of deaths, and the number of persons supplied with milk from the dairy to which the disease was traced. The facts presented in this summary show that a typical milk epidemic is explosive in its outbreak, the infection being carried to all users of a given supply at practically the same time, thus causing a relatively large number of them to develop the disease simultaneously. The disease in such cases follows a milk route so closely that a map of the route may frequently be out- lined by merely charting the cases of the disease as they are reported. It is found that the homes of the well-to-do are often attacked in greater proportion than others, owing to the fact that families with larger incomes commonly drink more milk than those with smaller resources; the latter using milk mainly in tea or coffee and in food preparations that are cooked. Sim- ilarly, it is thought that women and children, being larger con- sumers of milk than men, are more frequently affected by milk- borne epidemics. The 500 milk epidemics described in these tables are only a few of those concerning which definite records (440)