The conditions of the cows, cans, utensils and barnyards at the distant points from which the city draws its milk may be judged by the fact that they pasteurize the milk before bringing it to the city and pasteurize it again before it is sent out from the dairy.
Dairy inspection, it is fair to say, has recently ameliorated the worst of these conditions. Increasingly careful supervision of the retail milk dealers, and constant inspection of the less cleanly stores, which has discouraged many of them out of existence, tend to minimize the danger of contamination of milk at the other end of the line. There is, however, an additional peril in the well-water supply often used to wash cans and bottles.
The milk-inspection force faces a situation outlined in the latest complete figures (not yet in print); those for 1907, which show a total infant mortality of more than a thousand from diseases inferentially due to bad milk. The poorer quarters of the city where prices rule at six or seven cents a quart, exhibit the heaviest figures, and there is the typical rising curve of the mortality line in hot weather. Last summer that curve, while still unpleasantly in evidence, was noticeably modified. Education of mothers of the slums was largely responsible. The Bureau of Health put a corps of six special nurses in the field who went about from house to house, instructing mothers in the hygienic care of their children, and working in conjunction with the Pittsburgh and Allegheny Milk and Ice Association, one of the most efficient charitable enterprises in the city. Probably the infant mortality for the whole year of 1908 would have been low but for the winter epidemic of measles, which killed more victims than scarlet fever, diphtheria, smallpox, chickenpox, and all the other active contagions put together. Now the city, having learned a costly lesson in the seriousness of this too commonly disregarded disease, quarantines for it. It is perhaps, hardly ingenuous to include smallpox in the foregoing comparison, as that disease is now a practically negligible quantity. Since the epidemic of 1903 Pittsburgh has been the best vaccinated of American cities. Wherefrom depends a corollary for the consideration of the anti-vaccinationists, that for two years there has not been a death from this loathsome and unnecessary infection in the city, nor has a single original case developed.
DISEASE-INCUBATORS.
Some Pittsburgh cow-stables which lower the standards set by progressive producers.
We are prone, in this country, to study the public health too much in terms of death rates, and too little in the character of the survivors. Applying this latter test to the children of Pittsburgh's slums, we shall find cause to wonder whether, in a sense, the deaths are not too few rather than too many. Would it not be better for the unfortunate and innocent victims themselves, and certainly for the community at large, that this puny, helpless breed of hunger, filth, and misery which creeps about the city's man-made jungles, should succumb in infancy to the conditions that bred but cannot support them? For there are certain phases of existence in which a high death rate is less to be feared than a high birth rate. Anti-race-suicide has a fine, rotund ring, as it issues from the presidential lips. But President Roosevelt has never, I take it, been in Mulberry Alley, or Our Alley, or a certain unnamed court off Washington street that wafts its stenches into the boulevard below, or any one of a score of other hopeless thoroughfares which might give him pause in the promulgation of his doctrine.
Nor are conditions of life here in the city's choked up center greatly worse than in the "runs" which diversify the landscape of the newer parts of the city; damp, heavy-aired, steaming canyons, into which the poorest classes have been pushed; over the rim, and "off the earth," as it were. There they live, pasty women and weazened children, in the heavy air, polluted, as like as not, by the stenches from the creeks which are little else but open sewers. One such little isolated population I found, in a huddle of houses, under a towering steel bridge, faithfully reproducing, in what was practically open country, the deadliest living conditions of the crowded center of population.
To return to the central slums, there are whole districts which might well (were it of any avail) be placarded, as are certain New York flats:
No Room Here For Children.