Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/652

632 —grow in the milk and there give rise to certain poisonous products, and these, when taken into the stomach, produce the diarrhœal diseases referred to.

The question of more importance is, however, as to the extent of the danger from such causes. This question is much like the famous one of how large is a piece of chalk. There is danger in everything, even in drinking water and breathing air. Is the danger from milk so great as to suggest that we should give up our habit of drinking milk as they have largely done in Europe, or is this danger so slight that we can well afford to neglect it? We can not avoid all sources of disease even if we would. To do this we should need to shut ourselves up in a box, breathe nothing but sterilized air, drink nothing but sterilized water, and come in contact with no other person, to say nothing of wearing sterilized clothes. Such a method will produce physical weakness rather than vigor. We have learned in the last few years that the proper way of avoiding disease is rather by preparing ourselves to resist it rather than try to avoid all contact with possible disease germs. The question is significant, then, whether the danger from milk is so great that we should use every means of avoiding it; or is it one of the slight dangers which we may best class with the everyday incidents against which our proper guard should be simply vigorous health?

It is impossible to say how great is the liability of contracting disease from milk. Sometimes the subject looms up before us in gigantic proportions. When our papers are describing the occurrence of hundreds of cases of typhoid fever in a city, all traced to a milk supply, the seriousness of the problem is very apparent, and very likely we stop drinking milk for a season. But when, on the other hand, we remember the millions of people that are drinking milk daily without injury, and remember that our forefathers have done the same, we grow graver and begin again our old custom. No one can, indeed, pretend to say how great the danger is. That it is greater than that from drinking water is pretty clear. That it is less than that of riding in the cars is probably equally true. That it is greater in a small community than a large one seems probable, and that there is a greater likelihood of its being serious where the milk comes from a single source than where it passes through the hands of a milk-supply company appears to the author to be quite sure.

In his relation to this problem each person must decide for himself. We do not cease to ride in the cars because there is danger here, nor do the innumerable accidents from bicycling deter us from this pleasure. Ought we to give up milk because of an occasional instance of disease? It might be possible to give advice to use milk