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The Board of Agriculture, by virtue of the powers conferred upon them by the Sale of Food and Drugs Act, 1899, have made regulations whereby it may be presumed, until the contrary is proved, that milk containing less than 8·5 per cent. of solids‐not‐fat, or less than 3 per cent of fat, is adulterated within the meaning of the Act. The suggested limit for fat in milk recommended by the special committee appointed by the Board of Agriculture was 3·per cent., and it will therefore be observed that the new regulations have fixed a standard for milk‐fat which is even lower than the low limit recommended by the committee. There are even rumours that a further lowering of this standard is to bo urged upon the authorities. Although from the point of view of Public Analysts and the officials responsible for the enforcement of the Food and Drugs Acts it is satisfactory that an official standard for the composition of milk has at last been set up, it is idle to suppose that the fixing of such a limit will materially improve the character of the milk‐supply as a whole. It should be remembered that milk which contains only 3 per cent of fat, although under the new regulations legally “genuine,” is, as a matter of fact, of the poorest quality, and is only produced by a cow when in bad condition, or by a particular breed of cow which is remarkable more for the quantity than for the quality of the fluid yielded. Producers and vendors of milk of good quality have been placed in a very unfortunate position by the new regulations, as the tendency of the trade will be to lower all milk to the official limits, with the result that those dealers who are still desirous of maintaining a high standard of quality will have to compete in the matter of price with less conscientious traders, who, taking advantage of the protection afforded by the regulations, will be enabled to sell to the public “genuine” milk, from which all “superfluous” fat has been removed. Gradation of quality in an article of food cannot, of course, be provided for by official regulation, and for the purpose of legal classification it is only possible to differentiate between legally “genuine” and adulterated articles. Therefore, in a legal sense, and also in a popular sense, a milk containing 4 per cent. of fat is no more “ genuine ” than one containing 3 per cent., although the former is, of course, a superior article. Competition in the dairy trade, which has of late years become very keen, will, as the result of the fixing of this standard, become more acute than before, and to keep their position it will be necessary for those milk‐vendors who are desirous of maintaining their reputation as vendors of milk of good quality to give to their customers some guarantee that their product is indeed superior to the legalised article. Any statements of the traders themselves upon this point will naturally be received by customers with reserve, as proceeding from an interested source, and the guarantee, to be effective, must therefore be given by an authority whose statements are above suspicion. It is hero that the system of Control will be found to be a necessity both to the milk dealer and milk consumer.

The attention of the Board is drawn from time to time to advertisements in trade papers and circulars of preservative substances sold under proprietary names. These consist for the most part of well‐known preservatives or mixtures of preservatives which are easily detected by the analyst in food substances to which they have been added. A new preservative, sold under the name of “Mystin,” for preserving milk and cream has recently been advertised as possessing the advantage that its presence cannot be detected by analysis. Samples have been sent to farmers and milk vendors accompanied by a trade circular from which the following extracts have been taken:—

The Food and Drugs Bill introduced by the Government affords an excellent illustration of the fact that repressive legislative enactments in regard to adulteration must always be of such a nature that, while they give a certain degree and a certain kind of protection to the public, they can never be expected to supply a sufficiently real and effective insurance against adulteration and against the palming off of inferior goods, nor an adequate and satisfactory protection to the producer and vendor of superior articles. In this country, at any rate, legislation on the adulteration question has always been, and probably will always be of a somewhat weak and patchy character, with the defects inevitably resulting from more or less futile attempts to conciliate a variety of conflicting interests. The Bill as it stands, for instance, fails to deal in any way satisfactorily with the subject of preservatives, and, if passed in its present form, will give the force of law to the standards of Somerset House—standards which must of necessity be low and the general acceptance of which must tend to reduce the quality of foods and drugs to the same dead‐level of extreme inferiority. The ludicrous laissez faire report of the Beer Materials Committee—whose authors see no reason to interfere with the unrestricted sale of the products of the “ free mash tun,” or, more properly speaking, of the free adulteration tun—affords a further instance of what is to be expected at present and for many years to come as the result of governmental travail and official meditations. Public feeling is developing in reference to these matters. There is a growing demand for some system of effective insurance, official or non‐official, based on common‐sense and common honesty ; and it is on account of the plain necessity that the quibbles and futilities attaching to repressive legislation shall by some means be brushed aside that we have come to believe in the power and the value of the system of Control, and that we advocate its general acceptance. The attitude and the policy of the INTERNATIONAL COMMISSION ON ADULTERATION, of the BRITISH FOOD JOURNAL, and of the BRITISH ANALYTICAL CONTROL, are in all respects identical with regard to adulteration questions; and in answer to the observations and suggestions which have been put forward since the introduction of the Control System in England, it may be well once more to state that nothing will meet with the approbation or support of the Control which is not pure, genuine, and good in the strictest sense of these terms. Those applicants and critics whom it may concern may with advantage take notice of the fact that under no circumstances will approval be given to such articles as substitute beers, separated milks, coppered vegetables, dyed sugars, foods treated with chemical preservatives, or, in fact, to any food or drug which cannot be regarded as in every respect free from any adulterant, and free from any suspicion of sophistication or inferiority. The supply of such articles as those referred to, which is left more or less unfettered by the cumbrous machinery of the law, as well as the sale of those adulterated goods with which the law can more easily deal, can only be adequately held in check by the application of a strong system of Control to justify approbation, providing, as this does, the only effective form of insurance which up to the present has been devised.

It was only after considerable pressure had been brought to bear by the various health authorities of the country that the Government, in July, 1899, appointed a Departmental Committee to consider the subject of the use of preservatives and colouring matters in food, and it is now some months ago that the full report of the Committee was published, containing certain recommendations of the utmost importance for the consideration of the authorities. Up to the present time nothing further has been heard of the matter, and in answer to a question recently put to the President of the Local Government Board by the Mayor of Kensington, Sir SEYMOUR KING, as to whether the Board intends to take steps by the introduction of a Bill, or otherwise, for giving effect at an early date to the recommendations contained in the report of the Committee, the President stated that the report was “still under consideration,” and that he could make no statement at present as to the course which the Government would take.

The following report was brought up by Dr. P. Brouardel, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine of Paris, President of the Commission, and was submitted for the approval of the Congress:

The Food Bill has emerged from the Grand Committee on Trade, and will shortly be submitted, as amended, to the House of Commons. Whatever further amendments may be introduced, the Bill, when passed into law, will but afford one more example of the impotence of repressive legislation in regard to the production and distribution of adulterated and inferior products. We do not say that the making of such laws and their enforcement are not of the highest importance in the interests of the community; their administration—feeble and inadequate as it must necessarily be—produces a valuable deterrent effect, and tends to educate public opinion and to improve commercial morality. But we say that by the very nature of those laws their working can result only in the exposure of a small portion of that which is bad without affording any indications as to that which is good, and that it is by the Control System alone that the problem can be solved. This fact has been recognised abroad, and is rapidly being recognised here. The system of Permanent Analytical Control was under discussion at the International Congress of Applied Chemistry, held at Brussels in 1894, and at the International Congress of Hygiene at Budapest in 1895, and the facts and explanations put forward have resulted in the introduction of the system into various countries. The establishment of this system in any country must be regarded as the most practical and effective method of ensuring the supply of good and genuine articles, and affords the only means through which public confidence can be ensured.

With the beginning of the twentieth century, preventive medicine is entering upon a new era. We are now confronted by a set of problems which are different in many respects from the problems so successfully attacked by the great masters of preventive medicine of the last century, and which call for the application of different preventive measures. The objects which Edwin Chadwick, John Simon, and our other great forerunners of the last century, sought to attain, and which to a large extent they did attain, may, I think, not unfairly be described by the phrase “ civic cleanliness.” They sought to provide pure water supplies ; to remove refuse and filth from the vicinity of human beings by establishing improved systems of drainage and sewerage, and better methods of dust collection ; to provide open spaces and wider streets; to pave streets, yards, etc.; to raise the sanitary standard of building construction; to provide proper burial grounds ; to regulate offensive trades ; and to abate the smoke nuisance and the pollution of rivers. Of course we all know that they did very much more than this. Their work was too great and its effect too far‐reaching to be described by any single phrase. Still, I think it not unfair to say that, broadly speaking, we may regard the attainment of civic cleanliness as the great object of cur public health administration in the nineteenth century. It cannot be said that this object has been wholly attained. In a country whose capital is still supplied with something like filtered sewage as drinking water, it is obvious that there is much yet to be done to secure civic cleanliness. But the point is that any further progress in this direction must, or should, take place on the lines already laid down by our predecessors. Their methods of civic sanitation have stood the test of experience, and all that is wanted is a further development on existing lines. It is otherwise with the new problems that now press for solution. These are problems of a different nature, and demand new methods of treatment, although the principles underlying the methods will be found, probably, to be the same. Preventive medicine in the nineteenth century was chiefly occupied with problems of civic cleanliness ; in the twentieth century we are confronted with the problems of personal hygiene, and the three problems of this kind which appear to me to call most urgently for solution at the present time are: (1) The problem of infantile mortality; (2) The problem of school hygiene; (3) The problem of the milk supply.

According to a report just issued by Dr. ARTHUR NEWSHOLME, the Principal Medical Officer of the Local Government Board, it appears that a majority of the staff of the Medical Department of the Board have been engaged in assisting to establish as favourable sanitary conditions as possible at the training centres for the new troops so that the risks associated with the concentration and feeding of large numbers of men under temporary conditions should be reduced to a minimum.

The war against tuberculosis, which has been commenced under the auspices of HIS MAJESTY THE KING, if energetically prosecuted, must in the end result in placing that dread disease under a control similar to that which, among the more enlightened nations, is being gradually but surely established over many of the preventible diseases which have been the scourges of the human race. The establishment of Sanatoria, and the great extension of the more rational and scientific methods of treatment which the existence of such institutions will of necessity bring about, should lead to the saving of the lives of great numbers of sufferers who, under the old conditions, would have drifted inevitably to death. Cure is good, but prevention is better than cure, and it must not be thought that the war can be successfully carried on upon curative lines alone. It is now well known that there is a special predilection or idiosyncrasy in those who are attacked by tuberculosis; and, while relaxing no efforts to find and apply curative measures, attention to such enormously important factors as the nature and quality of the food supply and general hygienic conditions, must be fully maintained. A far more effective control than that which at present exists must be established over the milk and meat supplies of the people, so that the ingestion of the poison by those who are specially susceptible may as far as possible be prevented. Particularly will it be necessary to ensure that the supplies of milk and other food to the Sanatoria which are to be established shall be uninfected, and that they shall also be pure and of good quality. At the present time those terms are certainly not generally applicable to the supplies of most of our hospitals and large institutions, and it should be one of the first duties of those who will be concerned in the management of the new Sanatoria to see that no exception can be taken to the food supplied to the inmates.

Assuming that the relations between the Local Authority and their Public Analyst are, as regards fixity of tenure, established on a satisfactory basis, there remain some very important points to be discussed, namely, the duties of that officer, the conditions under which he works, and his relations to his colleagues on the staff. These are matters which, so far as we know, have never previously been dealt with in print, are only partially regulated by law, and are not settled by any uniformity of practice on the part of Local Authorities.