'Milk responsible for more deaths than all wars combined' - Quebec's costly resistance to mandatory pasteurization

"Milk is probably responsible for more deaths than all wars in history combined," said Dr. Gordon Bates in a speech in Montreal in May 1965.
 He reasoned that pathogens thrive in raw milk and then kill people through disease such as tuberculosis and typhoid.
 Luckily there's a solution: the pasteurization process  - simply boiling milk  - which has been a known lifesaving process since around 1880.
 Alas boiling milk proved too much of a burden for the Quebec dairy industry and thousands of Quebecers needlessly died for over a century.
 Tuberculosis remained a massive health challenge for decades.
  Across Canada the rate of infection was 180 per 100,000 in Canada, over 10 times the current rate of HIV infection in the state of New York.
   About 10 to 20 percent of those killed by tuberculosis contracted it through unpasteurized milk.
   Tuberculosis killed 947 Montrealers in 1921 - numbers that stayed roughly consistent through that era - and the bovine variety was likely responsible for up to 200 of those deaths in that one year alone and other years were similar.
  And yet authorities refused to save lives by making pasteurization mandatory and compulsory throughout the province.
   Quebec municipalities did their best to deal with the dangerous system and many dairies complied with the process, while by the 1960s big milk distributors refused to deal with unpasteurized milk.
  A typhoid outbreak in 1927 ended up killing 533 in Montreal and left ten times as many gravely ill. The disaster was traced to a contaminated milk supply and the fiasco led to more stringent enforcement of milk pasteurization in Montreal.
  And yet Dr. Charles Vezina, who headed the University de Laval medical department, noted in 1943, that "An American came to town and told a newspaper he was very surprised to be drinking non-pasteurized milk."
   Vezina related the anecdote in his chapter of a document written by himself as well as the heads of the medical faculties of the Universite de Montreal and McGill, urging the province to finally ban all non-pasteurized milk.
   Dr. Albert Le Sage of the Universite de Montreal reflected conventional wisdom from the time in the same document, stating that an adult should drink three glasses of milk per day as it's the cheapest way to get calcium (10 cents per glass per gram, as opposed to 33 cents with bread and $1 with eggs).
   But he noted that up to 15 percent of TB was caused by milk and that 21 percent of kids suffering from TB contracted it through dairy.
    The list of Montrealers who lobbied hard for mandatory pasteurization through the years reads like a who's-who of Quebec history as they range from Montreal Star publisher Hugh Graham to Dr. Alton Goldbloom to other associations and women's groups.
   The problem wasn't restricted to Quebec, as in 1960 only Ontario and Saskatchewan had province-wide laws enforcing pasteurization.
   Tuberculosis caused by dairy still kills many people around the world each year, most notably in Latin America.
   The longstanding killer negligence of Quebec authorities has,.however, largely been forgotten.