Volume 17 , Issue 11

1915 - Microbe Carriers - The Newly Discovery

It was in the 11 July 1915, Sunday, in the Richmond Times Dispatch, page 42, that reported on "Microbe Carriers - The newly Discovery" where people who are fountains of germs, scattered disease and death all their lives, and the problem of what to do with them.

Article was written by John B. Huber, A.M., M.D. -- Some ten years ago (1905) a new one was put over on the science of preventive medicine. This was the typhoid carrier, a person who may or may not have had typhoid fever; a person apparently in perfect health, who could harbor the germs of typhoid fever and infect other people with them. For example:

A baker's apprentice, in southwest Germany, died of typhoid fever. Then the doctor wet to figuring out how this patient had got his fever. Here we must understand that typhoid is,like cholera and dysentery, and ingestion infection, the only way you can get typhoid is through having swallowed food and drink that has contained the typhoid germs. Though typhoid is a general disease and affects the whole body, the main parts affected are the digestive organs and apparatus, especially the gall bladder and the intestines, in which the germs multiply and from which the germs called also the typhoid bacilli are emitted.

It was found that this baker's wife had typhoid some years before, since which illness practically every one of that baker's apprentices had come down with some kind of digestive disturbance soon after his apprenticeship began. An examination of the baker's wife, several years after she had had typhoid, by the health authorities resulted in the discovery that she was a typhoid fever carrier. That was enormous colonies of typhoid bacilli were constantly developing in her body. The baker's wife would not take the simple precautions the doctors directed. She declared that the apprentices had been taken ill because she fed them with too rich food.

It is by such perversity that stupid people claim they have the right and title to be a menace to the rest of the community. It had been well said about such people that a rogue is always much easier to deal with than a fool. It was so simple, the advice which this malign woman would not take. Simply to keep her hands clean, and especially before handling food that others would have to eat. Soon after her examination a tenant in her house died, also of typhoid fever, and later another case was attributed to her. Three victims, not counting those apprentices who had suffered from too high living, and all because this woman refused to keep her hands clean.

In another instance four cases of typhoid were traced to a typhoid carrier who had had the disease forty years before. Then there was the manager of an estate who was found to be a typhoid carrier. This man had suffered from typhoid ten years before. And during those ten years there had been sixteen cases of the disease on or near the estate. It was practically certain this manager had been the source of those cases.

Many milk-borne typhoid cases are due to typhoid bacillus carriers engaged in dairying - people working in that chain which was so many hidden links in its course, from the cow, through the dairy, the milk trains, the city handlers, the domestics, to the consumer's lips. As for instance: A number of typhoid cases occurred among employees at a particular diary and among the consumers of that dairy's milk. Fourteen of those people were found to be typhoid carriers. One of them, a woman employee at the dairy, had had typhoid seventeen years before. Here was evidently the origin of the whole trouble. Drs. Bolduan and Noble, of the New York City Health Department, some three years ago discovered a typhoid carrier of forty-six years standing to whom a large outbreak in milk-borne typhoid fever was traced.

It has been estimated that from 4% up of typhoid fever sufferers continue to shed the typhoid bacilli for indeterminate periods. And there are others who shed those germs who don't appear to have had this infection; say they have not had it; certainly have not been shed on that account.

First, the doctors make three classes of typhoid carriers. The acute carriers, who have had the disease and continue to discharge the germs not longer than six weeks after convalescence, after complete recovery.

Second, the chronic carriers, who may or may not have had the disease, but who keep on discharging the germs indefinitely. Those who have not had the disease are called the symptomless cases, and they are called intermediate carriers, or, as the German doctors say the Typhusbazillenzwischentraeger. Third, there are the temporary carriers, who have never had typhoid at all, or who may have, perhaps, been walking cases, but who discharge the germs for a short period, then are free of them for a time and then again shed them. It has been computed that something like one in very thousand of us is a typhoid carrier, whether we have had the disease or not.

It is a difficult proposition to prevent the spread of typhoid fever by the typhoid bacillus carriers. Surgery does not avail, because other parts of the digestive tract than the gall bladder may contain the germs, and one cannot have the whole of his internal organs removed and live. Investigators with bacterial vaccines have had some fair results, but far from good enough for such means to be successfully or universally applied.

It would not be necessary to confine typhoid carriers if they would only understand and observe the simple precautions they should take in order that the health and lives of others shall not be endangered by them. The activities of typhoid carriers must be so restricted that they shall neither infect food nor their surroundings. In essence, all they have to do is to be careful about their cleanliness.
  |  View or Add Comments (0 Comments)   |   Receive updates ( subscribers)  |   Unsubscribe

---