AIR

In the light of present knowledge, we may be tempted to laugh at the old beliefs concerning the dangers lurking in air. Hippocrates tells us that the Athenians, believing that the plague derived from impure air, fought it by lighting huge bonfires. And Defoe, in his Journal of the Plague Year, tells us that the English, two thousand years later, still were using the methods of the Greeks. And to laugh a little at our own times, less than fifty years ago malaria and yellow fever still were attributed to miasmatic conditions a view still stoutly held by certain persons and organizations even today.

Clean air contains no microbes. It has been proved that even air exhaled by persons whose lungs are infected with potent pathogens is nevertheless uncontaminated. A man may be dying of tuberculosis or pneumonia, and yet the air he expires remains noninfectious. The very simple reason for this is that the microbes, which are killing the patient and can be viewed under a compound microscope, are imbedded in the lung tissues or in its excretions. And air is neither of these. But suppose you take the same sick person and collect into a Petri dish nutrient some of the air he expels forcibly by coughing and sneezing, or even by vehement talking. After incubation you will find that the microbes, which infect his lungs, will appear as colonies on the Petri dish culture when examined under a compound microscope. For though the air is itself noninfectious, the droplets of mucus and debris it carries when expired forcibly contain numerous microbes.

Here is a scientific experiment, which was made to determine the manner of droplet infection. Subjects gargled their mouths and throats with the harmless pink pathogen Bacillus prodigiosus. They then talked, orated, sneezed, and coughed, while in different parts of the room bacterial cultures were exposed. The fine spray of moisture droplets issuing into the room during these oral operations could easily be seen against a strong light. After incubation and examination of the bacterial cultures under a compound microscope, it was found that microbes grew on the cultures, the number varying with the vehemence of the forcible expiration as well as the distance of the bacterial culture from the subject. It was found, also, that after coughing, bacterial cultures thirty feet in front and six feet behind the subject had been infected by the droplet spray expelled.

This experiment is the scientific justification, if such were needed, for the custom of covering one’s mouth and nose when coughing or sneezing. Failure to observe that bit of politeness when one has a cold or influenza is simply viciousness. That there lurks a far greater danger in careless spitting is obvious.

WATER

Ancient writings show that long before the present era, the connection between impure water and disease had been suspected. Even in the Dark Ages, many physicians became convinced that drinking water had something to do with the epidemics, which devastated Europe from time to time, and they actually recommended the filtering and boiling of drinking water. This measure was not generally adopted until the latter part of the nineteenth century.

But while suspicions were rife, nothing definite was known about water pollution until some years after Pasteur had given the world the Germ Theory of disease. Then it was that shown that there is a definite relationship between typhoid fever and infected drinking water.

Since olden times, everyone drank the polluted waters which caused the various epidemics, one might wonder how anyone managed to survive, or, at least, escape falling ill. But one important reason a reason having singularly close relation to our times is given by Dr. Wm. J. Mayo in Hygeia of April, 1929: “We pride ourselves on our advancing civilization and intellectual superiority. If we are to continue to advance, the public health service must be made the first function of the state. It is probable that neither prohibition propaganda nor an appeal to the conscience of man has caused the rapid advance of the temperance movement, but that pure water has made this possible. “

It is assumed that the drinking of spirituous and fermented liquors is due to an evil inborn longing to be stamped out only by the exercise of individual self-control. Is this actually a fact?

In France and Italy, the drinking of billions of gallons of wine saved the people from extinction; they could not have lived had they drunk their polluted water. The Teutonic countries turned to beer to secure a sterile drink; England had ale and wine, and the temperance countries, such as Turkey, had tea and coffee. Simultaneously with Vienna’s introduction of a pure water supply from the mountains, her per capital consumption of spirituous and fermented liquor was reduced 40 percent. The introduction of a pure water supply in the various states in our own country has been followed by a temperance movement, and finally by prohibition. The drink habit is one of the many forms of individual protection resorted to by nature to save man from filth diseases which cause death or that which is worse than death, intellectual deterioration. As pure water is introduced into the countries of Europe, a temperance movement is at once manifesting.