THE VITALITY OF DISEASE.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3171, 27 August 1881, Page 4

THE VITALITY OF DISEASE.

The general impression that the germs of disease die with or soon after the body, and that, as regards the living, inhumation makes all things safe, has received a rude shock from the researches of a commission appointed by the Paris Academy of Medicine to investigate tho statement of M. Pasteur, that the germs cf cattle plague are brought to the surface by earth worms, and that the soil for some distance is capable of communicating the disease after an interval of two years. In their new investigation the committee inoculated five guinea pigs with earth taken from the soil in which animals dead of cattle plague had been buried twelve years previously. All the puinea pigs died, four of blood-poisoning and one .of well-mai'ked anthrax. In a second case the soil was used from the surface below which diseased cattle had been buried three years. And the result was the same. A third series of pigs were inoculated with virgin soil, in which no diseased animals had been buried within the memory of man. All these continued in good health, only small local abscesses being formed at the point of inoculation. Other guinea pigs were inoculated with the blood of those ■which died, and the result was uniformly fatal. The Bacteridia (germs) of anthrax were found in every case. Some worms ■were also taken from the soil in which the infected animals had been buried 3 and 12 years respectively, and guinea pigs died poisoned by the contents of their bodies. The experimenters have also proved that the soil beneath which human bodies were buried during the Commune is liable to produce blood poisoning. Thus the statements of M. Pasteur are triumphantly established, and we can no longer doubt the extraordinary vitality of poison germs and the resurrection of disease.