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87
The milk supply was carefully enquired into. Seven
different milk vendors had supplied milk to these nine cases;
and it is clear that no suspicion attached to the milk supply.
The drainage was tested in each case, by means of the
water test, with negative results, except in one instance, a
w.c. at the top of the house being found defective; and a rain
water pipe was found to connect direct with the house drain.
The evidence as regards infection from eating contaminated
food was vague and inconclusive. It is here, however,
that, notwithstanding, there is most reason for suspicion, most
of the cases occurring in Battersea being probably traceable to
this cause. It is usually very difficult to get reliable intormation
on this point, as the patient, as a rule, has been removed
to hospital before the Inspector arrives at the house to pursue
his enquiries. Furthermore, owing to the long incubation, and
the insidious onset of the disease, the patient or his friends
fail to recollect in many instances what suspicious food he may
have partaken of during the previous month. The food theory,
and, in fact, most of the other sources of origin are somewhat
discounted in this outbreak, owing to the fact that only one
case had occurred in each house and street.
A review of the whole circumstances surrounding this little
outbreak would seem to indicate that some common source of
origin was present in 8 of these 9 cases, though what that may
have been I have been unable to trace.
Two other small outbreaks occurred in two houses in
different parts of the Borough. In the first of these,
two families occupied a house at 52 Harroway Road.
James B., aged 35, was notified to be suffering from
enteric fever on the 5th February. The patient worked
at Chiswick, and had had his food away from home,
and it was thought that fried fish which he had frequently
partaken of, and which had been procured near the works where
he was employed, might have been the source of infection. On
the 1st April the wife and child of the patient, and a child,