CONTAGION THROUGH HAIR BRUSHES.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XIV, Issue VI, 9 February 1895, Page 127

CONTAGION THROUGH HAIR BRUSHES.

A hair brush can communicate diphtheria, measles, chickenpox, scarlet fever, small-pox, yellow fever, and cholera. It can also communicate scald head, tetter, and many tautological troubles, and under conditions of abrasion and contact convey blood poisoning. This is startling but a truth that should be remembered by those careless in allowing tbe use of their brush and comb, and also by frequenters of hair-dressing establishments. Brush and comb matter, even with its component part of oil which would tend to preserve it, is putrescible and fermentable. Everyone is aware of this theory, but they do not seem alive to the other incontrovertible fact that both these toilet articles are deadly disease carriers. One brushing on the head of a diseased person, or one who has been in a contagious atmosphere, will transmit as many as I.OOC germs to the brush from the hair ; some of these in turn, to be conveyed to a second and third person and so on, until the disease is broadcast. The exterior of the human head, as all know, is a fine field for bacterial life, and a person who touches or breathes the air of contagion, would find, if she had her hair chemically analyzed, that it was alive with germs—as much so as her clothes. This is especially dangeroue in women for reason of their very long hair. She disinfects her garments but not her head. How can the woman who goes to have her hair shampooed or built up, know but what the very brush that is used in tbe work may have seen service on the head of a woman who was nursing a sick child or just come from the hospital ? There is no way to prove that the brush has been antiseptized which is probably never tbe case. A physician who has carefully examined brush and eomb matter gives these statistics regarding it. Water Oil 20’1 Nitrogenous matter 40*0 Hydrocarbus (other than oil) 24 5 Tuorganic matter, dust, dirt «. ’’ s*l All this matter is fine food for the little animals, technically termed bacteria and bacilli, and consequently they thrive there. Many physicians, who are given to laboratory work and know the vast amount of contagious matter carried about in brushes wonder why health authorities who are doing such good work in closing the chinks and apertures through which contagion enters, ignore this deadly method of transmission. Take the large shops with their one set of toilet articles where two or three hundred women arrange their hair, as a place equally as dangerous as ‘he hairdressing resorts. These women should be compelled to use an individual brush. It is an unwritten law of etiquette of course, to use only one’s own toilet articles in polite society, but all humanity are not registered in this book, and while contagion from this source is acknowledged by all physicians, a law should be enforced. A woman should constantly look to it that these two articles should be carefully cleansed and washed with a mild solution of carbolic acid. She never knows what germs that were floating through the air (and to believe the medical scientists, no altitude is too high or depth too low for their floating existence) may have alighted on her hair and been whisked off into tbe hairs of her brush. If she is cleanly she has her hair regularly shampooed, but her brush and comb should be equal in importance for cleanliness, in this is her salvation.