On a localised outbreak of typhoid fever in Islington, during the months of July and August, 1870, traced to the use of impure milk / by Edward Ballard.

  • Ballard, Edward, 1820-1897.
Date:
1871
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On a localised outbreak of typhoid fever in Islington, during the months of July and August, 1870, traced to the use of impure milk / by Edward Ballard. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    16/38 (page 16)
    fifty-nine houses; all four had cases of typhoid happen in them, &c. And these were, so far as I can ascertain, the only cases in these several localities. 2nd. It is to be observed that there were comparatively few solitary cases in the seventy families. Solitary attacks only happened in twenty-two of them; and these twenty-two include the three individuals who alone, of all the inhabitants of the same house, had the opportunity of getting their disease from the use of this particular milk. Of the sixty-seven invaded families in which several members were exposed to the same risk, there were, then, only seventeen in which solitary cases occurred. The attacks were multiple, then, in 75 per cent. In these families, the number of cases varied from two to eight in a family, the average being a little over three cases per family. All will agree with me that this highly multiple character of the attacks in families is a feature not commonly met with except under circumstances where all the members of a family have been exposed to a common cause. Still, it does not follow that where multiple attacks thus occurred every case in a family was due to the use of the milk, and that alone. Probably, in some instances, the disease, being once introduced into the house, and implanting there the con- tagion through the discharges, spread in the family and house- hold, as it often does under such circumstances. This was very likely the case in some of those instances where an interval of two or three weeks elapsed between the first seizure in a house and the subsequent ones. In favour of this view, I may state that in one instance in which typhoid contracted from this milk was developed in the country, it spread in the family and house to which the patient had migrated. In one instance a servant went to her home in Islington ill, and her father there was attacked. I have not been able to ascertain, although I have inquired, that a similar event happened in an}'- other instance. But if this explanation held good to any great extent, we should have expected that the multiple character would have been as strongly marked in the domestic invasions occur- ring late in the outbreak as in those occurring early in it. On the contrary, however, as the invasions of houses supplied with