Health and Temperance

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 21, 1889

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 15, No. 40.

Health and Temperance.

HOW PEOPLE GET CONSUMPTION.

BOSTON has just followed the example of Chicago, and now requires an examination of all cattle slaughtered for food, for the discovery of tuberculosis, or consumption in some of its forms. No meat affected is permitted to be sold. Both cities are acting upon the policy adopted in France. The French Congress, held last year for the study of tuberculosis, decided that the evidence that diseased cattle used for food could transmit consumption to man was clear enough to make it dangerous to permit the sale of such meat. The French Government, acting with its usual precision and promptitude, adopted regulations requiring all tuberculous cattle to be isolated and killed, and prohibiting the use of the meat of any such cattle for food. The sale of milk from tuberculous cows was also stopped, although it can be boiled and fed to animals.

The public is tolerably familiar by this time with the discovery of Koch, of Berlin, that a bacillus or micro-organism always accompanies tuberculosis or consumption in the lungs or any other organ affected, and is probably the cause of the disease. It will be new to most that the same bacillus is to be found in cattle, and that both the meat—although apparently undiseased—and the milk from such cattle fed to animals have been followed by consumption. This was true not only of the diseased organ, as the lung, but of parts of the carcass apparently unaffected, and which, to the naked eye, were as sound as any meat exposed for sale. Consumption is as prevalent among cattle as among human beings, and among men and women it causes one-fourth of the deaths in cities—11,502 out of 50,825 deaths in Paris in 1888—and from one-fourth to one-third of the deaths in a general community. There is to-day every reasonable probability that a large part of these deaths are due to the same disease in cattle. How prevalent it is, and what chance there is that the reader of these lines has dined or will dine to-day on consumptive meat, no one can tell.

In London a metropolitan meat inspector testifies that 80 per cent. of the meat sent to market had tubercular disease. In Hanover, with a population of 120,000, in a recent month 8,000 pounds of meat were condemned for this cause. The same proportion in this city would give a consumption of 960,000 pounds of diseased meat in a year. In New York State an examination of cattle near the Willard Asylum showed that in neighboring herds 21 per cent. of the milch cows were affected, and in some herds 50 per cent. Dr. M. D. Blaine, who made the examination, found tuberculous cattle in every herd he visited supplying milk to Brooklyn.

Dr. Huidekoper, a leading authority in veterinary medicine, says that half the consumption in the country is due to tuberculous cattle. If any proof were needed that a large part of these deaths come from this cause, it would be given by the comparative immunity from consumption of the Jewish race, which has for centuries avoided diseased meat. To this immunity is chiefly due the fact that in Germany the vital statistics of the race show an advantage over the rest of the population from 50 per cent. at birth up to 20 and 40 per cent. in advancing years. The inevitable moral from all this overwhelming and cumulative evidence is the inexorable necessity of a rigid inspection which will exclude this meat from consumption. Taking the consumption of meat in Great Britain as a basis, this country consumes 3,000,000 tons of dressed meat a year, or nearly half as much as all Europe, whose consumption is 8,112,000 tons annually. The yearly meat meal of the United States may easily be greater than this.—Philadelphia Press.