Vaccination and Inoculation.—The practice of vaccinating and inoculating healthy persons as a safeguard against disease has been used for more than a century. Vaccination consists in introducing vaccine into the blood of a healthy person, usually by making an abrasion of the skin. The vaccine is obtained from health laboratories, where it is produced from the blood of artificially-infected cattle. Inoculation of the human blood is also widely used nowadays in order to prevent or to mitigate diphtheria, typhoid, pneumonia, and rabies. All members of the American expeditionary forces during the World War were given the anti-typhoid inoculation. It consisted of injecting into the blood a quantity of dead or greatly-weakened typhoid bacilli. They were not sufficient to produce the disease but they were enough to set the resisting-powers of the blood in motion so that the latter would be fully developed to meet a real infection if it should come.
Should vaccination be compulsory?
Vaccination against smallpox is compulsory in several of the states and in many communities, although there is a good deal of objection to it among certain sections of the people. If smallpox were completely wiped off the face of the earth there would be no need for universal vaccination; but so long as numerous cases exist, as they still do in many countries, compulsory vaccination is likely to prove a justifiable measure of public safety.
Importance of the milk supply.
Milk Inspection.—Among all the foods of humanity, milk is probably the most important. It is the chief nutrition of children until they reach school age, and sometimes even longer. It forms a large factor in the diet of invalids. Even in the daily fare of robust adults, it is an item of no small importance. Yet no article of everyday commerce is more easily contaminated, and in the case of no other article are the results of pollution likely to be so serious. For when the germs of disease get into milk, they multiply with appalling rapidity and they go directly into the diet of those who have the least power to withstand infection, the children and invalids of the community.
The danger of pollution.
From its source on the farms milk passes through several hands before reaching the consumer, and at each of these points may be contaminated. Careless milking, the storing of milk in unsanitary places or in unclean utensils, the lack of adequate precautions in transporting or delivering the milk—any of these things may result in pollution. Strict rules and frequent inspection help to safeguard the milk supply at the source and during its journey to the consumer, but the problem of careful inspection is rendered difficult by the fact that the milk supplies of large cities are now drawn from a wide area outside the municipal limits. New York City, for example, obtains its supply of nearly two million quarts per day from about forty-five thousand farms scattered throughout eight different states.
Milk and the infant death rate.
It is easy to appreciate the difficulties involved in the supervision of the milk supply under such conditions. Nevertheless, this supervision is being carried on in all large communities and it has resulted in a marked lowering of the infant death rate. Infant mortality and the milk supply are closely related, in fact it can fairly be said that the rate of the one depends in a large measure upon the purity of the other. The establishment of milk-distribution stations in large cities has been of considerable value in enabling the people of the crowded sections to obtain pure milk at reasonable prices.
The Inspection of Food.—The marketing of impure or adulterated food is everywhere forbidden by the laws and the health regulations, but until comparatively recent years these rules were not always strictly enforced. One reason for this is to be found in the fact that many articles of food are subjects of interstate commerce, produced in one state to be sold in another, and hence are not easily made amenable to local control. |The Food and Drugs Act, 1906.| In 1906, however, Congress passed a comprehensive law known as the Food and Drugs Act, by the terms of which the national government assumed the duty of eliminating impure food from general commerce. This act prohibited the adulteration of food and drugs; it made provision for the inspection of meats at the great packing plants; it required that all packages of food and drugs shall be branded correctly and that when artificial preservatives are used, the label shall state the fact. All impure, adulterated, or wrongly-branded articles are excluded from interstate commerce under the provisions of this law.