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.

    64/506 (page 46)
    Frosch 1 reports that evidence was presented to the com- mission appointed by the Prussian Government to study this subject as follows: That fourteen carriers had been in- fective four to nine years, six for ten to twenty years, and five for from twenty-one to thirty years. Soper's case has now been infectious for ten years, and a number of other writers report instances of carriers who were presumably excreting bacilli more or less constantly for periods of from four to eight years. Intermittent Excretion. — From what has been said about the carrier state and the existence of nests of typhoid bacilli in the tissue of the gall bladder, the hepatic ducts and in the tissues of the urinary tract, it might be surmised that ex- cretion of bacilli is not in all cases continuous. That there have been reported considerable periods in which the feces and urine of carriers remain free from bacilli is not sur- prising. G. Mayer 2 claims to have been the first to note this intermittent excretion in 1905, but the matter did not receive much consideration until Davies and Hall3 called attention to the marked intermittency of bacillus excretion in their case, reported previously by Davies, and which will be again referred to. This patient had been infectious at times for four years, particularly in the spring, and on one occasion she was herself sick. Davies and Hall laid considerable stress on this presumed seasonal intermittency, but Ledingham, who with Thompson afterwards followed up their case and also six others, con- siders that the evidence is not convincing, though certainly their carriers gave many more positives during the first than during the last half of the year. Semple and Greig report 18 instructive cases which they followed daily for a considerable period. One of their cases gave only negative i Frosch, Klin. Jahrb, Jena, 1908, XIX, 537. ^ Mayer, Centralbl. f. Bakteriol. [etc.], I Abt. Orig., Jena, 1909- 10, LIII, 234. a Davies and Hall, Lancet, Lond., 1908, II, 1585.