M 64
For many years permission has been freely given for the installation of water closets in private premises whenever it has been shown that an adequate supply of water for flushing can be provided, and there is reason to think that the occupiers will use these apparatus rightly.
In spite however of the increase of automatically acting preventive measures such as the installation of water closets and the provision of a pure water supply there remains and will remain the necessity of paying heed to the canons of domestic hygiene.
Food Poisoning.
Excluding such diseases as Typhoid Fever, Cholera and Dysentery which may be acquired by eating food contaminated with the virus of these diseases there is a group of diseases less well defined to which the term Food-poisoning has been applied.
This group of diseases may be divided into two sub-groups in one of which the disease is brought about by the presence in the food of one or other of several species of bacteria, and in the other of which the cause of disease is a poison produced in the food during some change which the food has undergone and which may have been due to some remote bacterial contamination.
It is only to the latter class of disease that the term Ptomaine poisoning can reasonably be applied, but this term is often loosely used by the general public and even by medical practitioners to include all classes of Food-Poisoning.
True Ptomaine poisoning is a somewhat rare disease and, fortunately the Ptomaines which may be formed during the decomposition of foods which causes them to acquire the unpleasant taste and smell so well known in flesh foods which have been kept too long before being eaten, are not extremely poisonous when merely ingested.
The majority of cases of Food poisoning belong to the first mentioned class e.g. they are due to contamination of the food with some micro-organism capable of causing disease.
It is possible that the infectivity of such food may be due to disease of the animal from which the food has been derived.
Apart from this however there is always the possibility of food, originally good, acquiring contamination by handling.
Thorough cooking sterilises food. If however food after cooking be kept e.g. to be eaten next day it may through having been handled acquire the power of setting up an acute diarrhoea and the train of symptoms accompanying food poisoning.