WHEN MICROBES RUN AMOK

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LI, Issue 213, 29 August 1908, Page 3

WHEN MICROBES RUN AMOK

A telegram from Vienna, received in Loudon the other day, reported that the entire staff of the food investigation department at Czeruowitz had been attacked by glanders, and that two of the chief officials were already dead, (ho catastrophe being dun lo the accidental breaking of a lube containing the bacilli of that dread disease. Curiously enough, a very similar mishap occurred in another Austrian state laboratory a couple of years ago. A test tube of anthrax bacilli was upset, and two nurses and a student lost their lives. At Kronstadt, again, a laboratory culture of plague microbes was carelessly left uncorked, with the result that a resident professor of bacteriology died of the complaint, aud two of his assistants, who were also attacked, were very dangerously ill for some weeks. In the New Orleans isolation hospital, during the last yellow fever epidemic, three medical students started larking with a lube of the bacteria of the disease. It fell, and broke, and in less than forty-eight hours only one of the trio was left alive, and he was suffering from the disease in a virulent form. ■ Nor do the above examples exhaust the list of these disquieting accidents. There have been, in fact, quite a score of similar ones. That there are not even more is owing to the extraordinary care which is unremittingly exercised in .ill laboratories where pathogenetic (that is, " disease-producing'") microbes are cultivated and studied. The secret of the bacteriologist's immunity, such as it is, from infection, may be summed up in one word—sterilisation. Everything in and about his la boratory is sterilised—the experimenter •himself) the clothes ho wears, his instruments, his test tubes, his cottonwool, even tho atmosphere that srrrounds him.