US Authoritarianism

The thing to keep in mind when you compare the saga of turn of the century milk production between Europe and the US/Canada is the immigrant population. There just wasn't a market for milk in the urban setting in Europe because everyone knew it was deadly since the Roman times.

Compare that to New York, where they had a large influx of immigrants from small farming communities where children would often drink milk when young and they would buy milk that was sold out of unrefrigerated wagons coming from cows kept in confined spaces within the city. It was murderous, with tens of thousands of children's deaths in New York City alone. Of course this was the age of Cholera so the lives of people in cities came cheap.

The plain truth was adding formalin, which has no safe dose itself, was safer than drinking that shit the way they were selling it. North American cities quickly banned unpasteurized milk once the causal relationship was proven (despite the milkmen complaining).