CONSUMPTION IN JAPAN

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1751, 27 September 1905, Page 50

CONSUMPTION IN JAPAN

In Japan there are about six cows for every 10,000 inhabitants. If each cowl supplies three or four quarts of milk daily, the daily supply of milk per head is less than a teaspoonful. Therefore, milk is used very little in Japan as an article of food; although it possesses those very qualities, which Behring aims at securing by his system of jennerisation. It is obvious, then, that in Japan cow’s milk is not a source of tuberculous infection, because the cows are not tuberculous, and the children do not drink cow’s milk. If, then, cow’s milk is such a serious source of tuberculous infection in the civilised countries of the West, Japan is free from this danger, and we should expect this difference to express itself in a diminished incidence and death-rate from tuberculosis in Japan. Unfortunately for Japan, even though she possesses cows immune against tuberculosis, and Japanese babies do not take cow’s milk, the death-rate from tuberculosis in the towns of Japan is, if anything, higher than in similar British towns, and at Osaka Professor Sata, fount! that of the cases examined by him for the past three years and a half, 77.6 per cent, were cases of primary tuberculosis of the lungs and air passages, and 10.34 per cent, cases of primary intestinal tuberculosis. Kitasato adds: —"One may assume that the occurrence of primary intestinal tuberculosis in Japan is not rare in adults and children, although with us the feeding of children has almost no connection with cow’s milk.” Thus in Japan primary intestinal tuberculosis, which seems even more common than in Europe, is the result of infection from man to man. There can he no doubt upon this point. In spite of the great virtues of the Japanese cows, Japanese tnen and women suffer as much from pulmonary and intestinal tuberculosis as Europeans, and Japanese babies and children enjoy no immunity from the forms of tuberculosis peculiar to children, although they hardly ever taste cow’s milk.