BIG PUBLIC HEALTH CONGRESS DEALS WITH IMPORTANT QUESTIONS

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6807, 10 January 1929, Page 7

BIG PUBLIC HEALTH CONGRESS DEALS WITH IMPORTANT QUESTIONS

TYPHOID CARRIERS AND WATER SUPPLIES DISCUSSED. Professor W. J. Wilson (Queen’s University, Belfast), speaking at the Public Health Congress in London on recent advances in public health bacteriology • and their bearing on water analysis, said there were many people apparently healthy who could be described as typhoid carriers. In Belfast there seemed to bo many " carriers." It was, remarkable that they did not more frequently cause typhoid fever among their associates. It might be that the majority of the bacilli,were non-virulent, and that for the development of virulence they required to bo exposed to certain conditions. "Carriers" occasionally caused outbreaks of typhoid fever by direct infection of milk, etc., but the surprising tiling was that the great majority were non-infectivc. The important point was that the sewage of a town was always a potential source of typhoid infection, and that sanitary efforts must never be relaxed. Tho danger of typhoid bacilli in sewage being harboured by shellfish and by seagulls was one of which sanitary authorities should take careful eognisance, and for which they' should devise suitable preventive measures.

Pollution of Rivers. "Why is tho Thames no longer a salmon river?" asked Mr. J. H. Ooste, chief chomist to the London County Council. Ho quoted from a pamphlet which showed that what was thought to have been the last Thames salmon ivas caught in 1836. “The successive improvement of the effluent from the London outfalls should in time removo tho main reason why tho Thames cannot yet become again a salmon river. A lessening of the demands on tho dissolved oxygen content of the river should allow a proportion of that gas in timo to reach the rather high standard demanded by the king of fishes.”

The question of water supply would some day' be a pressing one, and the people of this country would, if nothing were done, feel very foolish when they found by letting their rivers become town sewers and works drains they had deprived themselves of one of the first necessities of life. "New industries have in many cases sprung up, and have rather recklessly started polluting hitherto unsullied streams —as, for example, the sugarbeet industry, new to this country. The refuse from boot-sugar works frequently contain more organic matter than sewage, and, its effects have been disastrous to some English rivers." He was told that in Holland and parts of Belgium where sugar beet was grown, the discharges from the sugar factories wero conveyed in long conduits into tho sea owing to tho desire to conserve freshwater fish. "The water supply of Ixmdon was now well looked after. Filteration, storage, and chlorination reduced the possibility of pollution of drinking