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57
go to great distances to secure undoubtedly pure and uncontaminated
water, even to the extent of excluding the flow from
cultivated land, yet it is quite sufficient for the people of
London to supply them with the effluent water of their neighbours'
water closets."
The Quality of Present Sources of Supply.
Mr. Shirley Murphy, Medical Officer to the London County
Council, confines his observations to that portion of the report
of the Royal Commission which relate to the quality of the
present sources of supply. The Royal Commission had before
it evidence, he says, which showed that the rivers from which
the Water Companies draw their supplies receive from the
towns, situated on their banks at varying distances above the
intakes sewage effluents, which, after treatment of the sewage,
either by filtration through land or by chemical processes,
enter smaller rivers. In addition to these numerous pollutions
from smaller populations discharging into cesspools and ditches
reach, untreated, the streams at times of heavy rainfall. Such
sewage must not infrequently contain the excremental matter of
persons suffering from typhoid fever and may not improbably
in the future contain from time to time the excreta of persons
suffering from cholera. The virus of both these diseases has
been found by past experience to have been disseminated by
water and to have produced fatal results in persons drinking
such water.
"Not only are these diseases known to be waterborne, but
experience has shown that a very small amount of the excremental
matter of persons suffering from them is capable under
favourable circumstances of infecting vast volumes of water."
Insufficiency of Natural Purification.
After describing the various circumstances which are shown
by the Commission to contribute to the purification of the
rivers, Mr. Murphy says: "The fact may be accepted that