What will pasteurisation do? Can we depend on it to give us a pure milk supply? Ninety-eight per cent. of the milk in London is pasteurised. Repeated tests for tubercule bacilli have been made during the last four years. I took the trouble to make inquiries, and I find that tubercule bacilli have not been found in one case in the commercially pasteurised milk in London during the last four years. There are certain other figures which are useful as regards London. The Parliamentary Secretary did mention them, but I should like to extend them a little. Abdominal tuberculosis in children in 80 per cent. of cases is due to drinking milk. In 1944 London, with its pasteurised milk, has had a very low death rate from abdominal tuberculosis in children under five. In that year figures were carefully analysed, and the death rate was only one-tenth of that of the combined rural districts. In Toronto, where milk has been compulsorily pasteurised since 1915, I am informed that in ten years they have not had a single case of any form of bovine tuberculosis, although 26 per cent. of the milk entering that city contained the germs of tuberculosis.
It is not only tuberculosis in milk that will be eliminated by pasteurisation. There are other diseases carried by milk. There is undulent fever, as the Parliamentary Secretary mentioned, and this accounts for not fewer than 500 patients a year. There are also many epidemics due to the infection of milk by those who handle it. Between 1912 and 1937 there were in Britain 115 epidemics of dysentery, scarlet fever, typhoid and septic sore throat, involving 14,000 people, which were found to be due to milk. The trouble is that people who handle milk, however careful they may be, cannot be sure that they are not infecting it, because these diseases may be carried by people who do not know that they have them. I consider that only by pasteurisation can infection by such diseases through milk be eliminated with certainty
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