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will be no difficulty in understanding that even a
single case of Cholera, perhaps of the slightest
degree, and perhaps quite unsuspected in its neighbourhood,
may, if local circumstances co-operate, exert
a terribly infective power on considerable masses
of population.
6. The dangers which have to be guarded
against as favouring the spread of Cholera-infection
are particularly two. First, and above all, there is
the danger of water-supplies which are in any
(even the slightest) degree tainted by house refuse
or other like kinds of filth; as where there is outflow,
leakage, or filtration, from sewers, house
drains, privies, cesspools, foul ditches or the like,
into springs, streams, wells or reservoirs, from
which the supply of water is drawn, or into the soil
in which the wells are situate; a danger which may
exist on a small scale (but perhaps often repeated
in the same district) at the pump or dip-well of a
private house, or, on a large and even vast scale,
in the source of public water-works. And secondly,
there is the danger of breathing air which is foul
with effluvia from the same sorts of impurity.
7. Information as to the high degree in which
those two dangers affect the public health in ordinary
times, and as to the special importance which
attaches to them at times when any diarrhœal