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38
Typhoid Fever. There were 34 cases of Typhoid Fever
notified during the year, 18 being in East Greenwich, 5 in West
Greenwich, 7 in St. Nicholas, 2 in Charlton, and 2 in Kidbrooke.
The ages of the patients were : 6 between one and five years. 14
between five and fifteen years, 3 between fifteen and twenty-five
years, and 11 between twenty-five and sixty-five years. Of the
total number of cases, 28 were removed to the hospital for treatment.
Eighteen such cases occurred in 1907, 41 in 1906; the
average number for the years 1901 to 1907 inclusive, being 45.
There were 9 fatalities from this disease during the year,
7 belonging to East Greenwich, 1 to West Greenwich, and 1 to
St. Nicholas.
Twenty specimens were forwarded for bacteriological examination
from cases suspected to be Typhoid Fever in character,
and of this number 11 gave a negative result, and 9 were positive
in character.
During the course of our investigations as to the origin of
some of these cases of Typhoid Fever and other suspicious illnesses
of a like character, we found that some of the patients had
been eating mussels which they themselves had collected from
certain old ships which were brought to one of the shipbreaking
yards in the Borough for breaking-up purposes, and as there
seemed to be presumptive evidence that this was the origin of
certain of the cases, samples of the mussels were taken and submitted
to bacteriological examination, when although the definite
typhoid bacillus was not recognised by the ordinary methods of
culture and isolation, there were found to be between (1) 100,000
and 1,000,000 colon bacilli per average mussel; (2) between
1,000 and 10,000 of Bacillus Enteritidis sporogenes per average