View report page

214
or drains, or through reckless casting out of slops
and washwater, any taint (however small) of the
infective material gets access to wells or other sources
of drinking-water, it imparts to enormous volumes
of water the power of propagating the disease.
When due regard is had to these possibilities of
indirect infection, there 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 or even vast scale, in the