By Ronald L. Doering

While this year celebrates the 80th anniversary of the founding of this magazine, 2018 also marks a milestone in Canadian public health: it was 80 years ago this month that Ontario passed legislation to require the mandatory pasteurization of milk.

In the early 20th century an estimated 25 per cent of the burden of food borne illness was attributed to the consumption of contaminated milk and because milk consumption was identified as the source of multiple infectious disease epidemics, many municipalities in Canada and the US required that milk be pasteurized, but Ontario was the first large jurisdiction in the world to make pasteurization of milk mandatory.