Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1912-08-18

posedy harmless but buzzng nuisance, recognized
the bearer of disease and death-the housefy swat
the housefy!' is proving more magnetic call to the
hosts of sanitation than the white plume OF Henry OF
Navarro to the chivalry of France.
Far be it from the writer anyone else who IS IN
erested in disease prevention to cool the enthusiasm of
the fly fighters but let pause for moment and con-
slider whether some measure OF this militant enthusiasm
cannot be directed against the typhoid man..
The typhoid man. is the who negects the de-
cences that should be fundamental to civilized exist
ence who surrounds himself with his own filth and the
filth of his cattle, who may, by good fortune escape
disease himself but has quams OF conscience about
passing it to his neighbor.
In one of the celebrated murder trials of recent
years the defendant charged with forwarding
through the mails bottle of apparently harmless medl
cine which he had placed poisonous dose OF cyanide
of potash. What horror this crime excited! What
dreadful and scathng denuncation by the learned Dis
trict Attorney!
In 1903 Boston milknan suffering from typhoid
fever passed it by criminal neglect to four hundred
people. Do such incidents excite horror? Does the
learned District Attorney make hdeous and dreadful
faces and corkscrew motions with an athletic index
finger the cup brought to the bar of justice? Ger
tainly not! Typhoid is a national institution. The
customs that give rise to it were pracsed by our tore
fathers and forefathers got along very well ().
Why should fuss about annual typhoid sick list of
three hundred thousand people and a death roll OF
twenty-five thousand lives from "od established
maady even if it is absolutely preventable? Indeed,
why?
So the typhoid man. comes first in the murderous
chain Of causation He preceded the typhoid fly and
is responsible for its existence Without the
typhoid fly" would be deprived of breeding ground,
and there would be fly to swat and disease for the
fly any other organism to carry.
RUT let us not befog the issue. Disease does not
- arise ode novo" from filth If the entire world were
sterized no amount of filth could generate infectious
disease. Where the first bacterum of disease came
from we cannot say. We only assume that these
organisms, like man, must have evolved from the
prmordal germ of fe ofshoots perhaps, OF some Tor
tuous concourse of atoms" in the Laurentan period.
Without tracing the genealogy of disease bacteria it
is enough to know that in diseases like typhoid, cholera
nfantum and Asiatic cholera the mcrobe is transmitted
from sick individual to well person by means of the
excretons of the body especially from the bowels and
kidneys. The neglect to dispose of such excretions
properly the primary of such maladies and due
attention sewage disposal liberal Of fire and
Chord of lime would take the housefy out of the
limelight factor in disease.
Filth therefore, is breeding ground and vehicle for
disease bacteria and for carriers of disease like the
househy; but in itself is not generator of infectious
maadies
These unfortunates carry millions of typhoid bacill
in their bodies long after they have recovered from
the disease is for this that proper sewage dis