NEW YORK MILK COMMITTEE'S GRAPHIC METHOD OF SHOWING BABIES' PROGRESS
PRODUCING WINTER CONDITIONS IN MIDSUMMER BY PROPER REFRIGERATION FOR MILK IN FREIGHT CARS
When doctors disagree what are we laymen to do? We can take an intelligent interest in the inquiries that are now being made by city, state, and national governments. Because everybody believes that clean milk is safer than unclean milk, that milk at 50 degrees will not breed harmful germs, we can demand milk inspection that will tell our health officers and ourselves which dealers sell only clean milk at 50 degrees and never more than 60 degrees, that never shows over 100,000 colonies to the cubic centimeter. We can get our health departments to publish the results of their scoring of dairies and milk shops in the papers, as has been done in Montclair. We can tell our health officers that the best results in fighting infant mortality are at Rochester, which city, winter and summer, by inspection, correspondence, and punishment, educates farmers and dealers in cleanliness, not only censuring when dirty or careless, but explaining how to make more money by being clean. Finally, mothers can be taught at home how to cleanse the bottles, the nipples, all milk receptacles, and all things in rooms where milk is kept. Absolutely clean milk of proper temperature at the shop may not safely be given to a baby in a dirty bottle. Infant milk depots, pasteurization, the best medical and hospital care, breast feeding itself, cannot prevent high baby mortality if mothers are not clean. The most effective volunteer effort for pure milk is that which first makes the health machinery do its part and then teaches, teaches, teaches mothers and all who have to do with babies.
NEITHER PASTEURIZATION NOR INSPECTION CAN MAKE IT SAFE TO SELL "DIP MILK" UNDER SUCH UNCLEAN CONDITIONS
"Clean air, clean babies, clean milk," has been the slogan of Junior Sea Breeze,—a school for mothers right in the heart of New York's upper East Side. In the summer of 1907 twenty nurses went from house to house telling 102,000 mothers how to keep the baby well. This was the only district that had fewer baby deaths than for 1906. Had other parts of the city shown the same gain, there would have been a saving of 1100 babies. The following winter a similar work was conducted by nurses from the recently founded Caroline Rest, which has an educational fund for instruction of mothers in the care of babies, especially babies not yet born and just born. Heretofore the baby has been expected to cry and to have summer complaint before anybody worried about the treatment it received. If the baby lived through its second summer, it was considered great good fortune. Junior Sea Breeze and Caroline Rest start their educational work before the baby is sick, in fact, before it is born. Their results have been so notable that several well-to-do mothers declare that they wish they too might have a school. Dispensaries and diet kitchens and more particularly maternity wards of hospitals, family physicians, nurses, and midwives, should be required to know how to teach mothers to feed babies regularly, the right quantities, under conditions that insure cleanliness whether the breast or the bottle is used. Perhaps some day no girl will be given a graduating certificate, or a license for work, teaching, or marriage, until she has demonstrated her ability to give some mother's baby "clean air, clean body, clean milk."
FOOTNOTES:
[15] Libraries should obtain all reports on milk, Bureau of Animal Industry, Washington, D.C.