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24
With regard to the object originally intended to be secured by
the introduction of the Intercepting idea or system, as I understand
it, the theory advanced was that, in the absence of these Traps,
there would be some danger of such an infectious disease as Typhoid
Fever being communicated through the house drains from the
common sewer in the event of the dejecta of a patient being discharged
into any part of the drainage system of a town or city. A
secondary idea was, I believe, that, unless house drains were intercepted,
sewer gas would on the same principle pass into the interior
of the dwellings and so cause a low state of health, if not specific
disease.
Briefly, those two ideas combined seem fairly to represent what
one perhaps might term the case for the Interceptor Trap system.
So far as I have been able to discover there is not a scrap of
evidence to justify these theories prior to their introduction, and inquiry
and research only go to show that neither before nor since
have any such conditions been found to exist.
If we take all the official Reports relating to the outbreaks of
Enteric Fever for several years past we cannot find in any single
instance that any one has yet been found to make the suggestion
that the absence of an Interceptor Trap or Traps had any influence
whatever in the causation or spreading of Enteric or any other infectious
or non-infectious disease.
It is remarkable that after all these years, during which many
Official Inquiries have been held in respect to large and small outbreaks
of Typhoid, in addition to the numerous cases met with in
every day practice, that there cannot be found in all these proceedings
any single suggestion that goes to support this theory ; consequently,
in face of a series of Reports covering a number of years,
as these do, one cannot feel quite sure that the earlier ideas and
theories were so well founded.
It can in fact be shown that Typhoid occurs quite impartially
in those districts and houses where the drains are on the Intercepted
principle, as well as in the non-Intercepted, and I am quite unable
to find that these Traps exert the slightest influence in this respect.