El Paso herald. (El Paso, Tex.) 1901-1931, 1913-09-13
Tons of Dirt In Milk of Big City
Often Big GsCusade
for Handling Difficult.

~ASHINGTON, D. c., Sept. 1 s.
w The leading milk authority of
w Chicago has declared that the
people of that city annually receive IS
tons of dirt in their milk. When one
comes to calculate how much this is
to the quart and compare it with the
amount of dirt that will be found by
straining the average quart of market
milk through a piece of absorbent cot
ton. he will find that the statement
was very conservative. The cotton
strainer is a test of milk as simple as
could be, and yet not one household in
a thousand has applied even this test to
its milk supply.
Straining Makes 1t Worse.
It is true, however, that enough of
them have discovered dirt in their milk
to lead enterprising dairymen to try to
overcome the difficulty. And they have
been provided with a machine that will
take out this dirt. 1t is announced that
this machine takes out all hairs, par
ticles of dirt, pus, and the like, leaving
the milk clean and wholesome. 1t does
leave it clean so far as the eye can de-
tect But, in point of fact, the SAM
tarians say, IT is dirtier than before. 1t
has broken up every little colony of
germs. and has scattered them all
through the milk, each, in turn. to form
new colony. Such machines are wide
" sold and used and yet milk authOri-
ties assert that they make the last
state of the milk worse than the first.
Bacteria 25 Cents n Glass.
People who patrOniZe first class no
tells and restaurants frequently get as
unwholesoae grade. of milk as is sold
in the tenement districts. When the
New y ork milk committee looked into
this phase of the matter it found that
in some places milk sold at % cents a
oil fr111 of pri1 no
milk sold in the Yiddish shops on the
East Side. In some of the big hotels
it was found that a practice was in
dulged in of serving a customers milk
order in a bottle, leading him to think
that the milk was bottled at the source
and kept free from all contamination,
whereas. the fact was that the milk
was very inferior in grade and poured
into the bottle by a careless sculltOn
in the kitchen. When these conditions
were brought to the attention of the
proprietOrs, they usually hastened TO
remedy them.
In many communities there is a prac-
tice among milk wagon drivers to
change milk from pint to quart
bottles, or vice versa, as they
drive along in order to meet the de-
mands of their days trade. One inves-
tgator tells of a driver whom he saw
pouring pintS into unWaShed quart bot
ties and then licking off the mouth of
the bottle to hide the evidences of the
change. The caps he put into the quart
bottles were drawn from his vest
pocket.
More Germs Than in Sewage.
How dirty milk sometimes may be-
come was discovered by Dr.. NJ J. Rose
nau, one of the members of the milk
commission. In 1907 he found that
the general market milk in Washington
contained upward of 100000 germs
to the cubic centimeter This is a
larger number of germs than is to be
found IN the sewage of the average
large city In the sewage of Boston
for period of seven years the average
number was less than 1000, 900, and
in London the number ranged from
2,0000 900 to 1900 600. However not all
bacteria found in milk are bad. Some
of them are good as for instance, the
Tactic acid germ. But on the whole,
milk with large number of germs in
it must be regarded as guilty until it
proves itself innocent.
Not Willing to Pay More.
The great trouble experienced in fur
thering the milk crusade is the unwill-
ingness of the masses of people TO pay
a cent more a quart for pure milk than