River water and dissemination of disease / by George Wilson.

  • Wilson, George
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: River water and dissemination of disease / by George Wilson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    which Koch also quotes as due to insufficiently filtered river-water, I maintain that these several epidemics afford indisputable evidence of the dissemination of Typhoid Fever by river-water, which, though not accorded by the Royal Commission to the Tees Valley outbreak, is, I venture to say, sufficiently conclusive. But the Commission were evidently of opinion that the London water-supplies from the Thames and Lea were also sufficiently safeguarded against possible Cholera dissemination, and with regard to this view Koch’s mono- graph is still more instructive. After detailing the circumstances attending the severe outbreak of Cholera at the large Lunatic Asylum at Nietleben, which he attributed to the insufficiently filtered water of the “ Wild Saale,” he enters minutely into the causes of the out- break of Cholera in which cases of the disease spread over the whole towm of Altona in January and February of last year. At that time Hamburg was free from the disease, but in December it was ascer- tained that there was a small after-epidemic of twenty-seven cases, which, no doubt, specifically polluted the Altona water supply, even though every possible precaution wras taken as regards filtration and supervision in respect to bacteriological examination. Early in that month it was seen that a quickly-passing increase of bacteria had taken place in the filtered water, which gradually kept accumulating till the middle of January, and this was found to be due to the fref zing of the sand layer of one of the filters. During the month of February, daily bacteriological examinations of samples of water from each of the ten filters were carried on, which showed that the water from all of them contained, on an average, a four to a ten fold increase in the number of bacteria after each cleansing. Further, and when the sand was renewed in any filter, as in March, the number jumped up to as many as 130-1 and 1880 in a single cubic centimetre, while the number continued to be considerably above the standard of 100 microbes to the cubic centimetre, which is the maximum standard for safety laid down by Koch. I have referred to these experiments because the Royal Commis- sion, in their Report, appear to attach the greatest importance to the vital action of subsidence reservoirs and filter-beds on the purification of water, and come to the conclusion that if sufficient storage and filtering areas are provided, the river-water supply of
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