ABSTRACT
Between 1 March and 1 August 1943, 439 cases of typhoid fever (200 in the first two weeks), resulting in twenty-three deaths, were notified in the City of Moorabbin.17 Justified by the imperative of wartime, the State Department of Health appointed Merrillees to control the situation. Within twenty-four hours, Merrillees had gathered the evidence showing that the epidemic was milk-borne and was caused by a single faecal carrier on a single farm. In his Report, he pointed out that Moorabbin (with the exception of one milk bar) was supplied by a single ‘dairy’ (milk depot), which pooled the milk supplied to it from a number of different farms. The effects of one instance of contamination were thus magnified into an explosive outbreak. The dairy sold no pasteurised milk to the public, a situation that was not unusual in 1943 but which left consumers unwillingly vulnerable to infected milk.
