CHAPTER XXXI

LIVING TISSUE THREATENED BY MICROBES

On the first of September, 1909, the board of health of the state of Kansas began to enforce a new law:

The use of the common drinking cup on railroad trains, in railroad stations, in the public and private schools, and in the state educational institutions of the state of Kansas is hereby prohibited, from and after September 1, 1909.

No person or corporation in charge or control of any railroad train or station, or public or private school, or state educational institution. shall furnish any drinking cup for public use, and no such person or corporation shall permit on said railroad train, station, or at said public or private school, or state educational institution the common use of the drinking cup.

When this law went into effect, and when thirsty people arrived at the station and found that they must have their own drinking cups, some of them were displeased. They thought the board of health was growing altogether too particular. But read the following facts and judge the case for yourself. I quote the account from a report that was printed in February, 1909:

Professor Davidson of Lafayette College asked ten boys to apply the upper lip to pieces of flat, clean glass in the same way as they would

touch a cup in drinking. These glass slips were then given a thorough microscopic examination, and they showed an average of about one hundred human cells, or bits of skin, and seventy-five thousand bacteria1 to each slip. This from one application of the lip.

A cup which had been used in a high school for several months without being washed was lined inside with a brownish deposit. Under the microscope this proved to be composed of particles of mud, thousands of bits of dead skin, and millions of bacteria, among which were scores of germs corresponding in all details to those of tuberculosis. Some of this sediment was injected under the skin of a healthy guinea pig, and in forty hours the animal died. A post-mortem examination revealed the fact that death was due to the presence of a sufficient number of pneumonia germs to cause blood poisoning.

A second guinea pig inoculated with the cup sediment developed tuberculosis. Careful inquiry proved that several pupils in the school from which the cup was taken were then sufferers from this dread disease.

Remember these facts when you next take up the schoolhouse drinking cup or any cup used by other people. Think of the microbes which may be on it from other lips than yours and decide whether or not you care to run the risk of putting an invisible foe into the citadel of your body. Teachers the world over are beginning to take dangers of this sort into account. Instead of the cup, therefore, children are sometimes expected to drink from a slender stream of water as it comes from the pipe. Lips thus touch nothing but water, and no harm is done either to the one who drinks or to those who come after him.

1 Different kinds of microbes.

But a drinking cup is not the only schoolhouse danger from microbes. Recall the last half of the fourteenth chapter of Good Health. Think of that eye epidemic in Germany which began in one schoolroom, then spread from room to room, from schoolhouse to schoolhouse, until four thousand children were suffering from it. Think of that more serious eye disease- trachoma, as it is called which travels so fast after it is once started, and which so often threatens blindness to the one who has it. The government of the United States does all it can to keep out of the country all those who have it when they come from foreign lands. Remember that for pink eye, for trachoma, or for any other contagious disease there is but one road by which the microbes travel. They go by the road of touch. No healthy eyes will take the disease unless they are touched by something which has already touched diseased eyes.

My next-door neighbor seems to know this already. He came from school the other day and said, “Pink eye has started in school, but I'm not going to catch it." "How will you be sure to escape?" I asked. "That's simple enough," he answered; "I'll keep my hands away from my eyes; I'll never touch them with anything except my own clean towel at home. I'll have to do this because at school my hands have to touch what other boys have touched, and I never know what microbes may be on them." I commended my neighbor and was

glad to see that he did save himself from pink eye, although his best friends had it. The probability is that they not only touched their eyes with their hands but also used the common school towel. This should be banished from every schoolhouse. It provides too fine a road for such microbes as travel by touch.

And what about pencils both in the schoolroom and out of it? I once saw a healthy-looking boy borrow a pencil from his sickly-looking neighbor and touch it to his lips at once. I was frightened. Later I asked the boy if he thought it wise to pass microbes from mouth to mouth by means of the point of a pencil, and he confessed he had never given the matter a moment's thought. But he was bright enough to see that if a drinking cup can carry microbes, the point of a pencil may carry even more, for it goes directly from the lips of the person who has moistened it to those of the next heedless person who touches his tongue to it and leaves his microbes on it. The same is true for those who moisten a finger to turn the pages of the book they are reading; the habit is unwholesome as well as unattractive.

So much, then, for the direct ways by which microbes may travel from person to person; but what about the indirect road? Think of our numberless small, unwelcome neighbors, the flies and the mosquitoes. Why do intelligent people object to the presence of flies in kitchen, pantry, and dining room? Why do we carry on an

endless fight against them? For the simple reason that flies never either wash or wipe their feet. Yet think for a moment where those tiny feet travel. Where dead things lie, where filth is worst, where disease has been, there do we find flies in greatest numbers. And it is always in just such places that they lay their eggs and multiply.

Study the subject for yourself. Look at the open garbage pail in the summer, or at a pile of decaying waste anywhere. Notice the multitudes of flies there, then notice where flies stand thickest in your home. From the barnyard where they multiply fastest in horse manure, or from a sewage farm with feet covered with typhoid microbes, they may fly to your dining table and leave living microbes on bread, beef, cake, candy, on anything you eat. For in the line of food flies enjoy not our waste alone but also whatever we have prepared with greatest care as food for ourselves. They stand on this dainty food of ours with their soiled feet. and we swallow the food plus the microbes which mark their footsteps. This danger from the fly is very real.

Of every hundred soldiers who died in the SpanishAmerican War twenty were killed by bullets, eighty by microbes. And over and over again the doctors blamed the feet of the flies for having put typhoid microbes on the food the soldiers ate.

But aside from their feet there is mischief done by flies through the refuse which they are willing to eat.