Democratic Sentinel, Volume 3, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 May 1879 — Remarkable Preservation of Yellow-Fever Germs. [ARTICLE]

Remarkable Preservation of YellowFever Germs.

The detailed accounts of the Plymouth’s outbreak of yellow fever show a very remarkable fact. After the disease broke out on her last November she was brought to Boston, thoroughly fumigated and afterward frozen out. Everything-movable was removed at the time, and all bedding and other matter of that kind was thoroughly fumigated, disinfected and frozen. In spite of all this care and cold yellow fever broke out on her the 23d of March, when she had reached a warm climate, but before she had touched at or been near anv Southern land and while 200 miles at sea. But the most curious and remarkable fact of all is that the first man attacked, Richard Sanders, machinist, had his hammonk slung in the precise place of the man who first showed symptoms of yellow fever in Santa Cruz in November last. This is worthy of the attention of medical experts, for it seems to show that the infectious matter not only resisted extreme cold, but that it remained in one place. The vessel lay all the winter in Boston, where everything known to sanitary science was used to disinfect her of the yellow fever. She was entirely broken out, all the stores landed and exposed to freezing temperature and the ship thoroughly fumigated several times. A part of the time the ship was in dock, where large quantities of ice remained, and the temperature frequently reached a point below zero. The water in the tanks and buckets in the storerooms was constantly frozen, and when she was removed from the dock and fires lighted under her boilers she was so thoroughly chilled that for several days the water remained frozen in her bilges. When the Plymouth left Boston all men of weak constitution or susceptible to climatic influences were removed from her and she went to sea with a crew entirely healthy.— New York Herald.