Monday, June 23, 2025

Farmer's Family Suffers after Bringing Cow with TB Home, June 25, 1925

A Brief for Public Health

Moore County News

Not all public health work is graft, as a farmer living near Columbus, Ga., believed. That was 10 years ago. His especial contempt was reserved for tubercular inspection of cows, and when two of the herd of an adjacent dairy farm were branded as suspicious by the milk inspector, he purchased one of them. He didn’t believe there was any such thing as tuberculosis in cows.

That farmer lost his wife from tuberculosis; his son is permanently disabled from bone tuberculosis, and his two daughters are in a tuberculosis hospital.

Here’s his statement:

“In the fall of 1912 a dairy herd near me was tested for tuberculosis and two cows were put out of the dairy. One was killed as a reactor and one was called suspicious, and the suspicious cow was taken to my premises and milked. I felt that the office of milk inspector was a graft, to give some man an easy job, and did not believe that there was any such thing as tuberculosis in cows. This cow was fed just as those in the dairy was fed, and in one month she looked so bad that I was afraid to milk her. She was given ack to the man who formerly owned her. My son developed tuberculosis the next year and has had it until the present time, and my wife, I believe, contracted it form the boy. The boy was kept in the hospital at Decatur, Ga., for four years, and on his back for nine months, where part of the bone of the neck was removed and a part of the leg bone used to replace the neck bone. My two daughters are now in the tuberculosis hospital at Alto, Ga., and I believe that they contracted the disease from their mother, who was buried here today.”

And all this might have been avoided if the farmer had believed what the inspector of the state department of health told him about the dangers of tuberculosis in cattle.

From the front page of The Chatham Record, Pittsboro, N.C., Thursday, June 25, 1925

newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn85042115/1925-06-25/ed-1/seq-1/#words=June+22%2C+1925

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