FOOD PERILS.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 489, 21 October 1925, Page 2

FOOD PERILS.

IGNORANCE OF HOUSEWIVES. CRITICISM BY DOCTORS. "The appalling Ignorance of Housewives,” and their want of care in handling food—especially milk—came in for condemnation at .the British Medical Conference at Bath recently. Dr. C. E. Goddard, medical officer of Harrow, declared that The new meat regulations were wholly inadequate, and, while much was being done to. secure a pure milk supply, it made one weep to think how such a valuable food was treated, in, jthe average home. - Few people thought it worth while to sterilise jugs and so protect milk from bacteria. ' “Nothing can excuse .this appalling ignorance and want of care,” Eh*. Goddard added. “There must be something very wrong with the training which produces among housewives so many incompetent and wasteful people who allow so much pollution and such damage to vitamine content” Food . /became polluted chieflythrough lack of ordinary precautions, he went on. From the oven to the home there were at least seven different contaminations possible in bread. Why should greengrocers be allowed to expose their goods to pollution ? And why should the .poorer people especially be allowed to run risks in the little grocers’ s.hops, where goods*' were exposed to the contamination of blue-bottles during the day and cockroaches at night ? Dr. W. G. Savage, medical officer of health for Somerset, said .that in vestigating 20(1 food-poisoning outbreaks he had found that 72 per cent, arose in foods which had-been “made up” and handled. Thirty per cent. occurred in canned meat, canned fish, and canned fruit. ~ •<

It was an unfortunate thing, he said, that while there were plenty of legal enactments dealing with bakehouses, there was none which gave • control rover the premises which prepared made-up. foods, such as meat pies, brawn, potted meat etc.

Sausages were a good example of a multiplying medium for bacteria,, they often contained very numerous living bacilli, which' frequently survived light cooking. The moral was that sausages should be well cooked. Dr. Scurfield, formerly medical officer of Sheffield, declared that he ate putrid game whenever he could get it, and cheese when it was blue, and with no apparent ill-effect. (Laughter.)

Dr. Savage said there was no evidence of ill effects from eating putrid food. He had fed kittens for nine successive days putrid food' without ill effects.