DISINFECTION AFTER DISEASE

Greymouth Evening Star, 17 December 1934, Page 10

DISINFECTION AFTER DISEASE

FUMIGATION METHOD OBSOLETE. During the last ten or twenty years there has been in progress a. slow but increasing revolution in the attitude of sanitary authorities all over the world towards the problem ’ of disinfection after the occurrence of disease (writes the Medical Correspondent of the LorI don “Daily Telegraph.”) This has been the inevitable corol-lary-to an immense amount of careful I bacteriological observations as well as of the accumulated experience of inedical officers of health responsible for the communities under their charge. . It. has now become, for instance, generally recognised that most infectious diseases are spread by means oil air-borne pi’ droplet infection directly from person.to person. It has also been found by direct observation and experiment that most pathogenic bac- ; teria. have an extremely short life outside the human body when exposed to the ordinary conditions uf sunlight and air, with their concomitant drying and dessication. It is by persons and not by things that these infectious diseases, including pulmonary tuberculosis and the catarrhal complaints, are spread. For this reason the routine disinfection of articles of furniture, of walls and floors, has already been entirely discontinued in man}' places.

Experience has shown that if specially planted colonies of pathogenic bacteria are lodged on walls and floors, the usual methods of sprays and fumigation are not, in fact, capable of destroying them—or, at any rate, in a shorter period than that in whicn death or impotence would normall} have occurred. For this reason domestic disinfection has already begun in this country to lapse to a great extent as a useless and. unnecessary expense.

SCRUBBING WITH WATER. In the out-patient departments of most large hospitals a routine scrubbing with water and soap—in other words, ordinary domestic cleansing —has been found to be equally effective, and is now usually regarded as sufficient; and this is increasingly true even in the more modern fever hospitals' The commoner micro-organisms by which, in towns at any rate, we are usually surrounded, can be obtained, of course, at times, from most articles of furniture. But the, vast bulk of these are uou-pathogenic; aud in the ordinary run of life it has been found practically impossible to obtain and culture, at any rate in any but negligible numbers, disease-producing bacteria from the non-human contents even of an invalid’s actual bedroom.

The old idea that such micro-organ-isms could be deposited on counterpanes, books and toys and thence spring on or be conveyed to somebody else, has, in fact, already become largely obsolete except in the popular imagination.