Hygiene and public health / by Louis C. Parkes and Henry Kenwood.

  • Parkes, Louis Coltman, 1857-1942
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hygiene and public health / by Louis C. Parkes and Henry Kenwood. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    these severe symptoms occur; or when the water, previously fairly pure, becomes temporarily polluted, and especially in the summer months. Instances have been known where people have gone on drinking filthily polluted shallow-well water for years with no apparent bad effects. It seems, indeed, certain that by long habitude the system becomes tolerant of many substances in water which exert a marked effect on those who drink them for the first time. Whether the choleraic diarrhoea is due to the presence of a living germ in the water, to faecal organic matter in solution or suspension, or to alkaloidal poisons, the products of the growth of bacterial organisms, is not yet certain. Vegetable matter, such as peat in water, is generally harmless. Large excess of such matters, especially when decaying, may produce unpleasant symptoms. Infantile diarrhoea, which is so prevalent and fatal in the large towns of this country in the warmer summer months, appears to be due to water pollution in some cases. The same conditions of drinking water which produce diarrhoea in this country often give rise to dysentery in hot climates. Dysentery may certainly be spread by the evacuations of patients suffering from this disease contaminating the water used for drinking. '4J Enteric Fever is often spread by the medium of water. There is considerable evidence of the possibility of the discharges of a single patient infecting large volumes of water (see Chapter IX). r. Asiatic Cholera is a specific disease, spread by a specific virus contained in the evacuations of a person ill of the disease. There is now abundant evidence that cholera is often propagated by means of drinking water to which the specific disease poison has had access. This is not the only mode of spread of the disease, any more than it is of enteric fever; but the evidence which is constantly accumulating points strongly to the conclusion that as for enteric fever, so for cholera—specifically infected drinking water is one of the most frequent methods of its propagation. Urinary calculi were at one time supposed to arise from the use of hard water, but this view is now generally abandoned from want of any definite proof. Rickets has been ascribed to the use of soft water, but the contention is not warranted by facts. 5