OUR BABIES.

Timaru Herald, Volume XIIC, Issue 13833, 19 February 1909, Page 3

OUR BABIES.

WHY MILK. FAILS TO KEEP. Even in the warmest weather milk cannot go bad so long as we exclude the little microscopie specks called germs or microbes. It is hard to make people believe that any liquid food may be freely exposed to perfectly pure air for weeks or months without appreciable change beyond evaporation, yet such is the ease. If the cow is kept as clean as possible and hosed down before milking, and is provided with a clean holland cover for the belly. flanks, and udder, it is possible to get a bottle of pure milk quite free from germs. However, in spite of all precautions, one or more germs will be practically sure to gain entry.to some of the bottles, thourrh with due attention a larger or smaller proportion will be germ free. Such milk will keep nuite indefinitely if we carefully plus the mouth of the bottle with sterilised cotton wool. The cotton wool acts as a filter, preventing the entry of germs, but letting the air pass in and out. Microbes are solid living particles, and, small as they are. they are heavier than the air in which they are suspended. This causes them to be constantly fallino; and settling. There may be only a tew dozens or there may be thousands in the air of a room, but be there few or many, they are settling, settling all the time, so that every solid object becomes covered with them, just as it ■"-nuld become covered with fine dust. Our damp, finely- corrugated, hairv hands form wonderful germ collectors, and we may pick up enougli to spoil a tankful of milk" by merel placing the tips of our fingers on an apparently clean snow-white linen table-cloth which has lain spread on the table from one mealtime to another.

DEALING WITH. GERMS. The simplest means of getting rid of germs is to wash them away/with pure boiled water. Thus we cleanse hands, utensiis, cloths, and every solid collecting The most ett'ective. way to Kill germs present in a fluid is to boil the fluid, but prolonged boiling is needed to kill certain seeds, or rather spores, of the most resistive microbes. On the other hand, living germs that have "hatched-out" are readily killed, few of.them being able to stand heating to loOdeg Fahr. for live or ten minutes. This gives us the key to dealing with milk. • We heat to 155deg Fahr. for five or.ten minutes, and then cool the fluid rapidly by placing the vessel in running water. The object of cooling is to prevent the hatching and multiplying of spores. In warm fluids, on the contrary, germs increase with marvellous rapidity. Thus it is found that clear spring water, kept in the house in a water-bottle for a few days will become crowded with microbes. In this condition the taste and smell are often distinctly unpleasant, and such water is liable to give rise to diarrhoea. CHICKENS AND CALVES.

Water provided for fowls, if left stagnanting for a day in warm summer weather, is liable to carry off crowds of promising chickens by causing chicken cholera or summer diarrhoea. The microbes which have been growing apace in the mixture of warm water and food-particles derived from the bills of fowls grow still more rampantly in the warmer bowels of the chickens. The same thing occurs in the case of hand-fed calves, unless we are extremely careful as to the cleansing of the cans and the freshness and purity of the milk.

Almost every calf that dies, dies from "scouring" or diarrhoea caused . by crowds of living microbes which have been allowed to develop and multiply in the milk. The summer diarrhoea of bottle-fed babies is practically the same disease, and arises from the same cause combined with unsuitable composition of the food and defective hygiene (lack of fresh air, sunshine, exercise, etc.) MILK AND MICROBES.

Milk may be regarded as the universal food for germs —the medium in which all germs revel and grow apace, unless it is properly safeguarded. Lord Lister, the father of modern surgery, writing on "Fermentation," said: "I once met with a microbe, but ouly one, that would not live on milk; for, as extremely numerous as the varieties of germs are, almost all of them seem to thrive in that liquid. If not present in comparatively large numbers in milk and if mostly in the unhatched spor stage, ordinary microbes do little or no harm when swallowed, but, if abundant, they and their products are capable of bringing about diarrhoea, poisoning, and death in a very short time. This cannot lie too strongly insisted on, because one often hears people say: "Oh, well, seeing there are such crowds 6f germs everywhere, and seeing that we must swallow plenty of them, a few thousands more or le"ss cannot make much difference." No argument could be more fallacious. In the course of their growth microbes give off poisonous substances, and the etieet of these, as regards the baby, will depend mainly on the total amount of such poison introduced into or generated in the alimentary canal. A hundredth of a grain of strychnine may act as a tonic and do actual good where a grain would cause almost instantaneous convulsions and speedy death, and so it is with the products of microbes. TOWN MILK SUPPLY.

In summer time the milk as it is delivered at the home is liable to bo crowded with germs, and will certainly be so if what is sold as the morning's supplv happens to be mixed, as it frequently is, .with the previous evening';; milking. Milk as it is delivered in the poorer quarters of New York and

other cities is found to contain sometimes as many as lire million microbes per teaspoonful! i The following illustration shows the. contrast between the microscopic appearance W pure fresh cows milk free from germs and contaminated milk :

The circles are the fat-globules suspended m the clear invisible fluid of the milk —this fluid being a solution of milk-sugar, proteids, and salts. Note, in Hie lower impure .specimen, the crowds of microbes, and also the coalescing of the fat globules, as shown by tlie increased size and .smaller number of the circles. Not only do the microbes give oil' poisonous products, but they feed on the milk, and radically chun"e "its nature and properties. PREVENTION. (I) Get clean pure milk which has bcuu properly safeguarded and rapidly cooled by means of rnnning water immediately alter milking. ('2> li cold water is available in the home, the mother should further chill the milk directly she receives it by placing the jug in cool running water for half an hour, or by_ putting it in changes of cool water several times. (3) Keep the cooled milk loosely covered in a cool airy outside safe, as directed above. (4) If in any doubt as to the weather, or as to proper cooling, don't keep milk (prepared or otherwise) for more than 12 hours without heating or reheating to 155deg. Fahr. for, say, 10 minutes. Then cool rapidly in water. Keep the jug loosely covered, and as cool as possible, outside the house. (5) On the very warmest days it may be advisable to scald or even boil the portion of the baby's milk which remains over in the evening, and then cool rapidly, and keep as cool as possible. This is not needed or desirable when there are proper facilities for cooling and keeping con], heating ro lofi degrees for 10 minutes being then sufficient. Too much emphasis cannot he placed on the urgent need to cool as rapidly

as possible with water after it has been heated. Otherwise stray germs which lind entry will grow and multiply with extreme rapidity. (G) If milk is set for preparing "topmilk " on very warm summer days it is safer not to let the jug stand for more than six hours, unless the milk is very l'resli when received, and can be kept all the time at or below 55 degrees Fahr. Standing for the shorter period results in a lower percentage of fat in the baby's food, but this is 'really an advantage since the need of the .body for fuel is lessened when the weather is very warm. Further, the giving of less fat at such times diminishes the tendency to summer diarrhoea. an———t—— f>Ba*wf i ■■ ' '" -"