VERMONT STATE BOARD OF HEALTH.

Volume VIII. No. 4.

Issued Quarterly at Brattleboro, Vermont.

The Bulletin is published quarterly by the State Board of Health under the authority of Section 5 of Act No. 90, Legislature of 1900. It will be sent to all Boards of Health. A copy will be sent to any person in the state upon request addressed to the Secretary, Henry D. Holton, Brattleboro.

NEWS ITEMS.

The New York legislature has just defined the powers and duties of local boards of health and local health officers in the matter of the protection of the people of the state from tuberulosis. Among these provisions is the following: Tuberculosis is declared to be an infectious and communicable disease, dangerous to the public health. It is made the duty of every physician to report all persons known by him to have tuberculosis.

TUBERCULOSIS FROM BUTTER.

The close connection between the pure food movement and the campaign against tuberculosis, which is engaging the attention of the world at the present time could not be better shown than by the results of the elaborate investigations made by the United States department of agriculture on the dairy industry, relative to its responsibility for the "White Plague." The result of the latest of these investigations has been reduced to the form of a report to the secretary of agriculture dated January 22, 1908, by the chief of the bureau of animal industry, and introduces an able article of twenty pages by Dr. E. C. Schroeder, M. D. V., superintendent, and W. E. Cotton, expert assistant of the experiment station, entitled, “Tubercle Bacilli in Butter: their Occurrence, Vitality and Significance." (Issued April 4, 1908, as circular 127.)

Numerous experiments were made by inoculating guinea pigs with butter infected with tubercle bacilli, and by noting the effects; and these experi ments combined with the investigations by other eminent foreign and American experts upon tuberculosis, which are referred to in the article, together with the opinion of the authors, make up the pamphlet, which is most instructive and which closes with the following summary:

SUMMARY.

(1) The conduct of tubercle bacilli in milk is to move both upward with the cream and downward with the sediment and thus, in both directions, away from the intermediate layer of skim milk. The downward movement is due to their high specific gravity and the upward movement to the tenacity

with which they adhere to the comparatively large cream globules. Hence when cream is separated from infected milk it will contain, volume for volume, more tubercle bacilli than the milk.

(2) The frequency with which tubercle bacilli occur in sediment from milk is a fair measure of the frequency with which they occur in cream. What this means for the infection of commercial cream may be judged from the following paragraph quoted verbatim from the last annual report of the secretary of agriculture:

"The examination of sediment taken from cream separators of public creameries throughout the country has demonstrated the presence of tubercle bacilli in about one fourth of the samples."

(3) When butter is prepared from infected cream, tubercle bacilli are transferred to it in such numbers that they will be present in greater concentration that in the milk from which the cream was derived; hence, measure for measure, infected butter is a greater tuberculous danger than infected milk.

(4) Tubercle bacilli embedded in ordinary salted butter remain alive and virulent a long time; after ninety-nine days they show only a doubtful reduction of pathogenic virulence.

(5) Butter seemingly contains nothing excepting salt that acts against the life and virulence of tubercle bacilli. The germicidal value of salt, especially in the proportion in which it is used in commercial butter, is very low. Besides, the distribution of salt in butter is not homogeneous, and hence tubercle bacilli may be so embedded in butter that they are not exposed to the salt it contains.

(6) Sunlight is the most potent, natural agent for the sterilization of tubercle bacilli; it kills them in less than one hour when they are exposed to the direct rays of the sun in translucent layers of infectious pus, and in less than five hours when they are exposed in thick, opaque masses of such pus. Weinzirl asserts that tubercle bacilli, as well as other nonsporulating pathogenic bacteria, are destroyed in from two to ten minutes by direct sunlight, and Koch, Jousett, Flügge, Heymann, Di Donna, Cadéac, and others earlier called attention to the rapidity with which tubercle bacilli are destroyed by desiccation and exposure to light. Hence, we may conclude that the conditions by which tubercle bacilli are surrounded in butter, the moist opaque character of which shields them against the germicidal action of light and drying, are ideal for their long preservation. As a matter of fact it is difficult to imagine a better environment for the conservation of the life and virulence of tubercle bacilli not actively associated with tuberculous lesions than butter affords.

(7) Unimpeachable evidence proves conclusively that tubercle bacilli of the bovine type, from bovine sources, must be classed as highly infectious for man; hence, tubercle bacilli in butter cannot be ignored, because they are usually derived from the bovine sources.

.(8) Since tubercle bacilli of the bovine type are certainly more virulent