Hygiene: a manual of personal and public health (New Edition)Newsholme, Arthur, Sir
Science
Hygiene: a manual of personal and public health (New Edition)
Newsholme, Arthur, Sir
Hygiene; Public health -- Great Britain; Sanitation
(See page 26 for poisoning by _Bacillus enteritidis sporogenes_.)
III.—=Meat injuries from the food eaten before killing.=—Pheasants fed
on laurel, hares on rhododendron chrysanthemum, and other animals fed
on the lotus, wild cucumber, and wild melon of Australia, have caused
dangerous symptoms.
IV.—=Fish=, especially some kinds, occasionally produce nettlerash and
other disorders, especially in warm weather. Leprosy has been ascribed
to the eating of decomposing fish, but it occurs in countries where a
fish diet is impossible.
Shell-fish and crustaceans (as lobster, crab) are very prone to produce
evil results. Shell-fish (mollusca), such as mussels, cockles, and
oysters, are dangerous foods. They are generally grown in estuaries,
to which the sewage of towns has access; and not infrequently cases
of enteric (typhoid) fever, as well as more acute attacks of diarrhœa
and vomiting, have been traced to them. Mussels and cockles are seldom
sufficiently cooked to render them safe; and oysters are eaten raw.
They should never be eaten, unless from personal direct knowledge it is
certain that they have been derived from an estuary in which there was
no possibility of contamination by sewage.
V.—=Milk= has been a common carrier of disease. Cows eating the rhus
toxicodendron get the “trembles,” and their milk produces serious
gastric irritation in young children. The milk of goats fed on wild
herbs or spurgeworts has produced severe disorders.
The milk of animals suffering from foot-and-mouth disease, although
frequently drunk with impunity, occasionally produces inflammation of
the mouth (aphthous ulceration). The milk derived from cows fed on
grass from sewage farms is, _per se_, as wholesome as any other, and
its butter has no more tendency to become putrid than that derived from
any other source.
The great dangers in respect to milk are of its becoming mixed with
contaminated water; or of its absorbing foul odours. The absorptive
power of milk for any vapour in its neighbourhood, is shewn by exposing
it in an atmosphere containing a trace of carbolic acid vapour: the
milk speedily tastes of the acid.
Milk also tends to undergo rapid fermentative changes, especially in
warm weather, or when tainted by traces of putrefying animal matter.
Diarrhœa in children is frequently due to such a condition, or to
the rapid decomposition of milk in an imperfectly cleaned bottle.
Milk should always be boiled in warm weather; and it should never be
stored in ill-ventilated larders, or where there is a possibility of
the access of drain effluvia; nor ought it to be kept in lead or zinc
vessels.
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