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2(e.g., with a square of butter-muslin weighted at the corners with shot
or sand). The provision of a wholesome place for the storage of food,
ventilated to the outside air, should be secured wherever practicable.
It is important to emphasise the point that any domestic uncleanliness,
and the preparation of food for the infant with unwashed hands,
may lead to serious consequences. Any action that is necessary under
the Public Health Act should be taken with reference to insanitary conditions
in and about the house.
Sanitation of Closets, Yards and Streets.
Domestic attempts at cleanliness may be rendered inoperative by
conditions outside the house, and it is most important that these conditions
should receive attention from the Council. Unpaved streets
and yards should, where necessary, be paved, and in particular all
accumulations of refuse in the neighbourhood of dwellings should be
promptly and efficiently removed. These accumulations provide breeding
grounds for flies and are otherwise open to serious objection. It
is therefore essential to the health of a district that there should be
arrangements for the frequent removal of house, stable, and street
refuse, etc. In the best administered districts conservancy closets and
ashpits have given place to fresh water closets and movable ash-bins with
covers, and house refuse is removed in properly covered carts by the
Council's own workmen under the superintendence of the surveyor at
regular intervals and never less frequently than once a week. If the
refuse is not burnt it should be disposed of in places remote from
dwellings and should be properly covered with earth. In many districts
all refuse can be disposed of in a destructor.
Prevention of Flies.
The Board are advised that the exact share borne by flies in
conveying the infection of epidemic diarrhœa cannot yet be stated. It
would be a mistake, with our present knowledge, to assume that the
problem of the prevention of this disease is limited to the destruction of
flies. It is concerned also with the personal cleanliness of the mother
who has to prepare the infant's food, and with the cleanliness of the
house, the backyard, the court, and the street, from which infective
material may obtain access to the infant's food, with or without the
intermediation of flies. But for practical purposes the number of flies
in the summer months may be regarded in town as a valuable index,
under present conditions, of the possibilities of contamination of food
by pathogenic microbes or by decomposing organic matter, especially
in districts in which privies and pail closets persist, and in which accumulations
of house refuse or stable refuse are permitted.