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15
With regard to the leaflet of instructions, the writer
proposes to adopt one which was drawn up by Dr. Niven, the
Medical Officer of Health for Manchester, and which for
several years has been distributed in that important city. It
is as follows: —
PRECAUTIONS AGAINST THE COMMUNICATION OF
CONSUMPTION.
1. Consumption is an infectious disease, liable to be communicated
more particularly in damp, badly ventilated, and badly lighted
houses and workshops.
2. It is usually communicated by the matters coughed up by
consumptive people, which get dried and dispersed as dust, thus
reaching the lungs of those susceptible to the disease.
3. Such matters should, therefore, never be allowed to get dry.
For that reason they should not be spat on the floors of a house,
but either into pieces of rag or paper, which should be at once
burned, or into a hand-vessel containing water. This vessel should
be emptied into the drains outside the house once a day, and then
scalded and re-charged with water.
4. Everyone affected with a chronic cough should take the same
precautions as a consumptive person.
5. The same precautions should be observed in a workshop as
at home.
6. Consumptive people should not spit into a pocket-handkerchief,
as both the handkerchief and their clothes are thus made
infectious.
7. No one should spit on the ground inside any building or
in a public conveyance.
8. The bowel discharges of consumptive people should be
disinfected by being passed into a 15 per cent, solution of carbolic
acid, or simply into water, and the vessel, when emptied, should
be at once scalded. Soiled clothing should be at once removed,
disinfected, and afterwards boiled.
9. When it is settled that anyone is consumptive, the house
should be thoroughly disinfected, and the patient should be thenceforward
confined to certain parts of the house. On a request made in
writing to the Sanitary Department, disinfection will be carried out
by the Department free of charge.