In the case of diseases, such as typhoid, which attack the stomach,
disease germs are removed along with the excreta; and if, as is often the
case, the drainage of an infected town flows into a river, and that river
is used in some after portion of its course as a water supply, there is
great danger of such diseases being communicated. For, however well the
water may be purified and filtered, we have no guarantee that it will not
contain some of these disease germs, which are so small that they pass
through the finest filters. It is in this way that almost all the great
cholera and typhoid epidemics have spread.--_Chambers's Journal_.
_Well Water Often Dangerous_.--A densely crowded population soon
impregnates the soil to some depth with filth, which drains into the water
course below, especially if such water is near the surface. This surface
water easily penetrates a loosely walled well. Every well, therefore,
should not only be widely separated from barnyards, cesspools, pens,
sinks, and similar places, but should be made water-tight with cement, so
that nothing can reach its interior except water that has been filtered
through dense beds of unpolluted ground below. If these precautions are
neglected, the best and deepest well may become continually contaminated
by infiltration from the surrounding surface. This impure water, even when
not used for family drinking, is sometimes supplied to cows, or used for
washing dairy pans, or employed in diluting milk for the market, and there
are many known cases in which disease has thus been disseminated. Thus, an
epidemic of typhoid fever in Cambridge, Mass., was definitely traced to a
dairy which supplied the victims with milk. Upon investigation it was
found that a short time before there had been a typhoid patient in the
farmhouse, and that the well from which water was taken to wash the milk
pans had become contaminated with the specific poison brought into it from
the surrounding drainage.
All suspected water should be thoroughly boiled before using it to drink.
Some physicians insist that the boiling should continue for one or two
hours in order entirely to destroy the bacterial germs. The heaviness and
insipidity incident to boiled water may be somewhat relieved by afterward
filtering it. Filtering, of itself, however, will do little toward ridding
the water of microbes, which are much too minute to be arrested by the
ordinary apparatus.--When journeying, where one must often take a hasty
meal at a railway station, drink hot water in preference to cold. A
convenient portable filter may be arranged with a bottle of powdered
charcoal, and a piece of filtering paper. A traveler by briskly stirring a
tablespoonful of the charcoal into a pint of water, allowing it to stand
five or ten minutes, and then filtering it through the paper, may venture
to relieve his thirst in almost any part of the country.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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