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are so great that it is still a debateable question whether they
have ever been surmounted," and adds "on this account and
for other reasons our failure to discover the typhoid bacillus in
any of the examples examined affords no evidence against the
view that the disease was conveyed by water.
In the Clifton outbreak it was found that a number of
houses drained into a stream which ran through important
dairy farms. The dairy utensils were washed in the water
pumped from this stream, and so the milk became infected
and hence the outbreak of the disease.
In the annual report of the medical officer of the Local
Government Board for 1896-97 is an interesting account, of the
action of the typhoid bacillus in soil, by Dr. Martin and Sir
Richard Thorne, the latter reviewing the facts of an epidemic
of typhoid fever which occurred in Chichester between April
and August, 1896, and drawing attention to the steady
diffusion of the disease which set in immediately after the
appearance of a case in a notoriously insanitary area outside
the city. ''This prevalence of the fever,'' he says, "goes to show
that enteric fever, though mainly distributed in epidemic form
by means of water or of milk, is by no means always a waterborne
disease, and it raises anew the question as to how far
recurring prevalences of enteric fever in one town or spot can
be due to the persistence in more or less active form in certain
soils of the organism of the disease."
"Dr. Martin has ascertained that the behaviour of the
microbe is very different when in the absence of competing
micro-organisms it is implanted in organically polluted soil
and in soil from an altogether uninhabited and uncultivated
area. In soil of the former sort, as for instance in samples of
earth from Chichester, the bacillus rapidly increases and
spreads abroad, whereas in the virgin soil under like conditions
of temperature and moisture it languishes and quickly
dies out.''
Many instances have also occurred during the year of cases
of typhoid fever having resulted from eating oysters taken
from sewage-polluted beds.
Over 20 cases of the disease occurred at Clacton from people
eating such infected oysters.
Interesting cases have also been reported by medical men
where typhoid fever and other diseases have been acquired by
boys playing games, e.g., marbles and peg-tops, on polluted soil,
the germs finally finding their way into the interior of the
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