[Report 1897] / Medical Officer of Health, Gloucestershire County Council.

  • Gloucestershire (England). County Council. n 50061360.
Date:
1897
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1897] / Medical Officer of Health, Gloucestershire County Council. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/40 (page 9)
    Periodical chemical and bacteriological exam- ination of the water supplied should be insisted upon by all Sanitary Authorities. Care should be taken that all spring heads supplying any public reservoir or farm supply should be efficiently guarded by means of barbed wire; that all streams from which supplies are drawn,, where passing roads or places subject to pollution from wayfarers, are piped or covered; and that efficient filtering beds are pro- vided in the case of all waters except those derived from deep springs. This last is the great protection. The organisms which propagate disease are infinitely small, and their number and power of multi- plication is enormous ; yet they have enemies arrayed against them vastly more numerous and powerful than themselves; and fortunately for ns this war between microbes of one class and those of another is always going on. Moreover, sunlight, ordinary daylight, and fresh air are deadly foes to those germs whose baleful influence we fear, but the greatest protection against them is slow careful filtra- tion through sand, copying by an artificial method the natural one of earth filtration which gives protection to the waters of deep wells and springs. We now know that these beds are the field of the most active warfare between the beneficent and the baneful microbes contained in surface water, and the result is to deprive the water almost completely of microbes of every sort. Professor Franklyn’s researches in relation to the Thames water supply in London show that through the action of the filter beds over 98 per cent, of microbe life is entirely removed.