Rensselaer Republican, Volume 19, Number 24, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 February 1887 — Poison from Drains. [ARTICLE]

Poison from Drains.

In the present state of knowledge it may be assumed as proved that typhoid fever and poisoning from drains or vaults are inseparably connected, and a man who lives in a town supplied with good sewers is, on an average, less than half as likely to be alluded with this dreadful disease as one who is obliged to dwell among cesspools. Even after the soil of a city has become irreclaimably foul, as it is in nearly all large towns, a change in the system of disposal of refuse, by which the addition of new pollutions to those already existing is avoided, is always, as it seems, followed by an abrupt diminution of the death rato from typhoid fever and kindred diseases. The compilation of health statistics, with their relation to circumstances of drainage and ground water, is as yet hardly begun, but the Revue tScientifiqe gives a few data in relation to the larger European towns which are interesting. According to these, the abolition of the system of depositing house wastes in large fosses or cesspools, to remain there until removed by public authority, which was until within about twenty years almost universal in continental cities, has been already followed by surprising results in diminishing the mortality from all causes, but more particularly from typhoid diseases. In Berlin, where the first attempts to improve upon the old system were made in 1875, the total annual mortality has been reduced by, nearly one-fourth, while that from typhoid fever is now about one-half the average of the years preceding the change. In Brussels, where cesspools were replaced by sewers in 1870, the mortality from typhoid fever fell at once to about one-third of its former proportion, and the improvement continued, perhaps by some gradual amelioration of the condition of the soil, so that the rate now is little more than one-fourth of the old average. At Frankfort nearly similar results Were obtained, and in London, which as a sewered city is usually compared with Paris, where most of the house wastes are still received into cesspools, the annual number of deaths from typhoid fever, out of each 100,000 of the population, is twenty-six, and from diphtheria eighteen; while out of the same number of persons in Paris, seventy die every year from typhoid fevers and seventy-five from diphtheria.—American Architect.