ONo, April 21, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announcement That he will suspect his surveillance of laboratories which carry out security and quality tests on the supply of milk from the country. This decision comes as raw milk is ascending in the federal public health policy. The Secretary of Health and Social Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called at the end of what he judges the “Aggressive deletion” Grute dairy products by public health authorities, which means that more deregulation can be on the way.
Evangelists from today's raw milk as Kennedy claim that he has more nutrients, benefits the immune system and that children are healthier when they consume raw milk rather than pasteurized dairy products. Public health authorities have demystified these claims while highlighting Thousands of diseases linked to raw milk. Nevertheless, raw dairy products are increasingly popular With American consumers. He is well in the “tradwife” aesthetics, personified by the influencer of the ballerina farm Hannah Neeleman, who nourishes her children Tiktok For millions of viewers. However, like the rest of the aesthetics, the consumption of raw dairy products is based on consumers forgetting our history – in this case, a story in which children fell ill from raw milk.
The history of children's health in the United States reveals an important truth. The US government has adopted a robust apparatus to regulate and monitor milk supply after an epidemic killed thousands of children at the turn of the 20th century. This story offers a dark warning regarding what a future of milk regulation could contain for American children.
The 19th century Americans recognized the dangers of an unregulated dairy industry. In 1843, the domestic writer Catharine Beecher Informed parents This “sick” milk was “the cause of a mortality extended in young children”. However, even after the French microbiologist Louis Pasteur patented pasteurization technology or heated liquids to kill microorganisms in 1865, the Americans largely continued to consume raw milk for several additional decades.
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They did so despite growing fears concerning the dairy industry, motivated by the way young children consumed an increasingly centered diet on dairy products. While America urbanized at the end of the 19th century, many mothers moved away from families who could have supported them in breastfeeding, while working in golden age jobs like textile factories without protection of work. Pumping and refrigeration technologies, so essential to balance work and breastfeeding today, were not yet widely available. This combination of breastfeeding obstacles has proven insurmountable for many mothers.
Bad advice from their pediatricians has worsened the situation. At the time, pediatrics was a new specialty trying to prove its value, and practitioners wrongly believed to stick to a strict calendar for breastfeeding, which in fact limited supply to maternity. Helded by these erroneous councils, the health authorities and the American public began to believe that women were physically unable to produce enough breast milk.
The result of both inadequate support for new mothers and poor medical advice was that more and more mothers in a bottle The cow's milk from their babies. Young children also drank a lot of milk. Medical authorities like the pediatrician Luther Emmett Holt, including 1894 Children's care and food would become the most popular parental manual of the beginning of the 20th century, advised parents to feed their toddlers with each meal.
But for children at the turn of the century, milk came with disastrous risks. In the midst of frantic capitalism of the golden age, the supply of milk was a nightmare of corruption and contamination. On the farm, bad sanitation allowed cows and dairy to introduce tuberculosis, typhoid and other pathogens in milk. Farmers or intermediaries have also frequently falsified milk, by making it away to stretch supplies – with impure waters likely to introduce other pathogens – or the addition of toxic substances, such as formaldehyde or chalk, intended to hide a deterioration or to make milk white. The milk was then shipped in open and non -refrigerated containers, regardless of the weather, vulnerable to even more contamination and deterioration.
This poisoned milk threatened the most vulnerable consumers in America: young children. Infant mortality soared In the second half of the 19th century, up to 20% nationally and closer to 30% in urban centers. Tens of thousands of babies died each year of gastroenteritis known as “summer complaint”, an epidemic of diarrhea which has worsened during the hottest months. Gastrointestinal infections were the Third cause of death In all ages, but particularly impacting fragile immune systems for small children.
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Parents, many children who died in mourning, pushed the legislators to clean the supply of milk. They joined a movement of Americans calling for government regulation of the food industry. Progressive era reformers have told the lax food and working safety conditions that put Americans in danger. In 1902, a chemist from the Ministry of Agriculture named Harvey Wiley launched a brilliant but dangerous public relations campaign nicknamed “The poison team“Dosing of human test subjects with food additives such as formaldehyde and chronicle of their alarming effects on the body. In his famous 1905 novel The jungleJournalist Upton Sinclair exposed the horrors of the meat factories and the threat they have formed to the Americans.
This activism has pushed the state and federal authorities to implement a burst of public health legislation. In 1906, the congress adopted the Pure Food and Drug Actleading to the creation of the FDA. In 1910, New York State mandated pasteurization of all milk sold for human consumption. As an additional layer of surveillance, the public health authorities began to test cows for diseases such as tuberculosis, to ensure that milk has remained safe for American consumers.
Public health historians attribute the cleaning of the milk supply as one of the main engines of the spectacular decrease In infant mortality during the 20th century. In the two generations of pasteurization mandates, “the summer complaint” had become a memory, so much so that Benjamin Spock, the pediatrician whose parental advice defined childcare in the middle of the 20th century, had to explain his history to the parents of Baby-Boomers. In the 1964 edition of his bestseller Baby and children's careSpock described the terror of doctors and parents from the beginning of the 20th century who watched infants suffer from “serious intestinal infections that have afflicted tens of thousands of babies each year”. Spock said with confidence that pasteurization had made such suffering one thing from the past.
However, as Kennedy's attacks illustrate against dairy regulations, the memory of the infant mortality crisis has retreated too far in the past. Unlike their ancestors from the beginning of the 20th century, most of the 21st century parents will never know the agony of losing a child, because infant mortality rates have dropped below 1%. Many Americans do not know that the government's government regulations have contributed to us to bring us these precious children's health gains, keeping tuberculosis, E.coliAnd yes, bird flu Out of the milk that people drink. If this important regulatory work is canceled, Kennedy calls to “make America healthy” could bring back a infant mortality crisis, the previous generations of the Americans thought they had overcome.
Carla Cevasco is an associate professor of American studies at Rutgers-New Brunswick University. She writes a book on the story of nourishing children in the United States
Made by history takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History both here. The opinions expressed does not necessarily reflect the views of time publishers.
