HOW TYPHOID FEVER IS SPREAD.

Thames Star, Volume X, Issue 3100, 24 January 1879, Page 4

HOW TYPHOID FEVER IS SPREAD.

The necessity for a periodical and thorough inspection of dairy farms and dairies has just been forcibly illustrated at Croydon. For a considerable time, until quite recently, the town has been free from typhoid fever; bnt in August a number cases occurred, chiefly in the eastern division. of the district. The medical officer of health being instructed to investigate the cause of this outbreak, has just presented to the Local Board a report on the subject, in which he states that early in his inquiry he found that the cases occurred in houses supplied with milk by one or other of two dairies, and further inquiry showed that these two dairies were worked together as one. Taking all the 29 leases of fever which had occurred, he found that 24 had milk from this special, supply, while the other five cases had milk from five other sources. This special incidence in one milk supply the medical officer considered was far too great to be a matter of chance, and pointed conclusively, in his opinion, to milk as the distributor of the disease. As milk by itself has never been shown to be capable of producing enteric fever, but in several well-known instances impure water distributed with the milk has produced severe epidemics of enteric fever, it is reasonable to suppose that in this instance impure water may have been mixed with the milk either by design or accident, and so have caused the outbreak. There is not any actual evidence of the addition of water in the present instance, although in each of the farms on which the cows were grazing at the time a source of extremely impure water was accessible, and if not added actually to the milk may have been used for rinsing the milking pails. There is no longer any danger from this milk; the cowsr are now on one farm, and the source of impure water has been closed by the advice of the medical officer. To prevent any spread of the epidemic the sewers and drains have been daily flushed with disinfectants and up to the present time no fresh cases have been heard of such as would indicate any further extention of the disease. This limited outbreak, which has been so

quickly traced to its origin, is, however, exceedingly instructive, and it is thought * that it serves to explain in some measure a similar outbreak which occurred at Croydon in 1876, but which, until now, has been unaccounted for. The Board of Health, it is said, has power under existing Acts of Parliament to inspect cowsheds, but not dairies. Dr A. Carpenter stated to the Croydon Board of Health that he has known of a case in which fever of the typhoid kind was distributed in consequence of the dairy in which the milk was kept being, in communication with the sewers of the district, and it unfortunately happened that the communication was npjt trapped. The milk was kept in the "dairy and in the basement, and the trap being opened and certain arrangements carried on with carbolic acid, many of the customers of that milkman returned the milk because it smelt of tar. That told him at once the communication between the sewer and the dairy was open, and that the foul air was finding its way into the dairy and becoming absorbed by the milk, than which nothing in nature is so capable of absorbing lewer gasea. That dairy was the means of distributing typhoid germs, and yet the dairyman was innocent of mixing foul water with his milk.