TAINTED MILK | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Aug 26, 1889

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 15, No. 33.

TAINTED MILK.

It is now a well-settled fact that diseases of various kinds may be conveyed to human beings through the agency of that most useful article of diet, milk. The disease may be transmitted by a feverish or tuberculous cow, or through absorption, as in a well-known case of scarlet fever in England. It is in most cases impossible for consumers to discover the danger to which they are exposed, and hence, as the case now stands, they are almost completely at the mercy of the producer. Officers of the law stand ready to dump into the river or otherwise dispose of milk that will not stand the test of the lactometer; but there is far too little investigation of herds remote from cities, where cattle are sometimes as badly housed and sorely diseased as in the close quarters of city milk-stables. Here, for example, is what a western agricultural writer has to say on the subject in the Prairie Farmer:—

"Milch cattle are often afflicted with tumorous excrescences and blood disorders. The milk is so immediately connected with the blood that the quality of the one gauges the other; hence it is a moral crime, if no worse, to sell milk drawn from animals showing any permanent health defects, or temporary maladies. The producer is a transgressor in this way: He has, say, a dairy of twenty cows, and the cream that their milk yields is daily gathered up by the manufacturer's wagon. One or more animals in his herd have gargety teats, or tumorous blood affections. When he reserves a portion for family use he does not take it from the common mess, but is careful to save it from the yield of one of the healthiest cows. The residue, good, bad, and indifferent, is turned over to the mercy of the buttermaker and the charity of the public. We do not intend this for a sweeping accusation, but there are so many of such mercenary transactions going on that they call for condemnation from honest dairymen."—Baptist Examiner.