As you likely know, Louis Pasteur developed the eponymous method of sterilizing milk in the 19th Century -- he patented it in 1865 to be exact. It was a long time, however, before pasteurization came into common use.
Two of the leading causes of death in 1900, gastrointestinal infections and tuberculosis, were major killers of children, and a major underlying cause of these deaths was cow’s milk. The U.S. population originally was predominantly rural, but by 1900 most people in the northeast lived in cities, and by 1910 the same was true in the west and Midwest. Cow’s milk had to come into cities like New York from farms tens of miles away, at a time when there was no refrigeration. The milk was often contaminated with pathogens that killed the children who drank it.
Even 25 years after Pasteur's patent, milk was not normally pasteurized. Then a German immigrant in New York City, a wealthy merchant named Nathan Strauss, learned about pasteurization. In 1892 he used his own money to establish a pasteurization plant in Manhattan’s East Village, and in 1893 he established “milk depots” in low income neighborhoods to sell pasteurized milk below cost. He also established a second plant to provide pasteurized milk to an orphanage on Randall’s Island, where the mortality rate was something like 15% a year. The death rate immediately dropped substantially.
Strauss’s efforts attracted the attention of scientists and physicians, and incited a campaign to outlaw the sale of unpasteurized milk. This came to the attention of president Theodore Roosevelt, who in 1907 appointed a commission to study the matter. The report came back the following year with the conclusion that pasteurization would save many lives.
As you will perhaps not be surprised, given the public reaction to public health mandates more recently, the campaign to mandate pasteurization provoked a furious backlash, including from most milk producers. Why they thought it was good business to kill their customers I cannot say. Many in the general public also opposed the ban on raw milk, claiming that pasteurization negatively affected nutrition and taste. (It doesn’t.) Nevertheless Chicago did ban the sale of raw milk in 1909. New York got around to it after a typhoid epidemic in 1913. Nearly all major cities followed suit in the next few years, and the infant and child mortality rate plummeted.
That, along with safe drinking water (another story, with a similar outline), and vaccination, are the most important reasons for the enormous increase in life expectancy in the 20th Century. Children used to die routinely, and now they don't. Or at least, they haven't been up until now, but Robert Kennedy Jr. is trying to change that. Not only does he oppose vaccination, he has advocated for unpasteurized milk. Too bad for all those people in Idaho who have gotten sick from it. As the linked story tells us, "Symptoms of infections from bacteria that can be in raw milk include vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, fever and dehydration. Complications can be severe, especially in people at higher risk such as young children, pregnant women, the elderly and people with compromised immune systems."
Every senator who voted to confirm that homicidal maniac is an accessory.
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