The sources and modes of infection / by Charles V. Chapin.

  • Charles V. Chapin
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The sources and modes of infection / by Charles V. Chapin. 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.

    41/506 (page 23)
    months, and Rosenau1 kept it alive a long time in cool moist garden earth, and the Indian Plague Commission, 1901, did the same in moist sterile cow dung. Other experiments by Mackie and Winter in Bombay, cited in the Journal of Hy- giene,2 were with grossly infected cow dung from the floor of a native house. No pest bacilli were recovered by culture on inoculation after 96 hours. Further careful experiments have been made by the Indian Commission of 1905. Their con- clusions are as follows: Floors of cow dung grossly contaminated with the bacillus of plague remain infective for 48 hours; floors of a sort of na- tive cement for 24 hours, the infectivity being tested in each case by inoculation. The floors were infective to animals allowed to run on them for only half the above time. Thus there appears to be no bacteriological evidence that the bacillus of plague grows outside of the bodies of living animals, and a great deal of evidence that when separated from the body it tends to die off more or less rapidly and fre- quently very rapidly. The Indian Plague Commission con- siders that reports of soil infections are unworthy of credence unless continuous and careful observations on the presence of rats and fleas have been made. Dysentery Bacillus. — One form of dysentery is caused by a bacillus belonging to the colon group, and it has a number of sub-varieties. It is not quite so resistant as the typhoid bacillus, but it has been known to survive all winter in damp earth.3 It is said that in Japan local outbreaks often persist longer than do outbreaks of cholera, perhaps due to the higher resistance of the germ.4 The bacilli appear to be easily de- 1 Rosenau, U. S. Pub. Health and Mar. Hosp. Serv. Hyg. Lab Bull No. 4, 1901, 9. 2 J- Hyg., Cambridge, 1906, VI, 511. ' Schmidt, Centralbl. f. Bakteriol. [etc.], I, Abt. Orig., Jena, 1902, XXXI, 522. 4 Eldridge, U. S. Pub. Health and Mar. Hosp. Serv. Pub Health Rep., 1901, 1.