The Indianapolis journal. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1867-1904, 1898-11-14
MANIFOLD MICROBES.
What Would Happen if They Escaped
from Their "Gardens."
London Mail.


Does London run any risk of the danger
which has overtaken Vienna ?-where, as
Cur correspondent telegraphed yesterday,
bubonic plague which committed such terri
bic raVaSeS in India last year has made it's
appearance, in the hospital where are pre-
served the plague bacilli brought from
Bombay.
A Daily Mail reporter set out yesterday
to endeavor to solve this fearsome question.
He found that there are many collections
of bacilli in London. Every bacteriologist
and each of the great hospitals have their
collections, and practically every collection
contains the bubonic plague bacillus. Is 1t
possible for any of these bacilli to escape
say by the smashing of q bottle or tube
containing them-and to wander at large
up and down Piccadilly, or over London
Bridge to the city?
human as the general domestic who
smashes the crockery in the suburban home
But inquiries show that the escape of a
few bottles Of smallpox, cholera, or bubonic
plague bacilli need not be attended with
consequences worse than the escape of a
gaZelle from the Zoo.
There is a red-brick building, close to
Chelsea bridge, known as the British In
stitute of Preventive Medicine In d room
collection of glass tubes simply reeking of
death, for they contained the living germs
OF Well-nigh every description of disease.
In those tubes, floating and wriggling in
amber jellies, were all the handmaidens of
death. But 1t was explained that the breed
ing of these germs, to be successful, has
Cumstances and with a high degree of skill
First you have to catch your microbe
You cannot do this with a butterfly net
Having caught him, you have 70 transfer
him at certain degree of temperature to
the right sort of jelly that he affects Diff
ferent microbes require different warmth
They are tender things; five degrees too
much or too little will kill them. When the
microbe Is in the jelly he has to be coddled,
or else he dies easily. Then he has to be
transferred to the body under proper con-
ditions and at the right moment.
The moral Is that even If lots of microbes
were so misguided as to escape from the
laboratories in London they would all prob
ably perish miserably before one of them
found a man, woman, or child who offered
il suitable conditions for living and thriving
we all swallow not one microbe of a single
disease, but thousands of several diseases
The air swarms with microbes; so does our
food and our drink.
There is one case on record in which a
young doctor up for his y. z. II. at CAM
bridge recently swallowed a tube full of
typhoid bacilli by accident, and has never
felt a penny the worse for 1t. But these
germs were the result of many artificial
hreedings, and may not have been so Viru-
lent as the natural microbe. No accident
has ever happened with microbes at the
laboratory of the British Institute of Pre-
ventive Medicine.
Put. it may be said the Viennese bacilli
upon their escape found the right man offer
ing the right oppo' tunities for them TO
thrive and multiply. Scientific men yeSter-
day expressed great wonder regarding this
accident, and maintained that the circum-
stances OF this matter have yet 10 be ex-
planned. They think there must be other
reasons for John Barsch the caretaker of
the hacili room. taking the bubonic plague
But they offered no solution of the problem
pronounced by this case. in which the man
who cleaned out the isolated room contain
ing the bubonic plague bacilli has himself
died of bubGnic plauge at Vienna.