Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE SANITARY FACTORS With a view to indicating the present status of the sanitary control of milk supplies, we may now consider briefly each of the means of control. These are directed toward attainment of the general ideal set down at the close of Chapter I. The subjects will be treated in the following pages in the order, roughly, of chronological development. There will be seen a gradual evolution in regard to the point of attack. The earliest regulation was directed at preventing adulteration; in the next stage the conditions under which it was produced and handled received most attention; recent developments have centered about the sanitary quality of the product as determined by laboratory methods and about the specific treatment known as pasteurization. The development has not been, however, clearly defined, and the regulations of the present day are a mixture of the ideas of all the stages. The present-day task of sanitation is to assign to each of these ideas its proper weight. Early Developments We shall not here go into the history of milk regulation except as it has a direct bearing upon still surviving traditions. This, however, is by no means a negligible consideration, for in control of milk supplies, as inother branches of sanitary endeavor, the inertia of traditional ideas and routine has been great. To-day there may be seen the most advanced and promising ideas in operation side by side with the archaic—the latter still largely prevailing. To find the beginnings of milk supply control in the United States in anything resembling the modern sense, we must go back some twenty-five or thirty years. The following passage from a paper by Mr. H. W. Parker epitomizes those beginnings:— Most people think that the milk question is new in Amer...