Abstract
EARLY in the month the Local Government Board issued an Order to Port Sanitary Authorities conferring upon them special powers with a view of preventing the importation of cholera into this country. But cholera is a disease having many degrees of severity, and although “choleraic-diarrhœa” is to be regarded by the Port Authorities as synonymous with the fully developed affection, yet it is at times so mild that it may at any moment escape detection, and those suffering from it may make their way into our towns and villages. To meet such emergencies, and by way of aiding inland authorities and private individuals to rid their districts and their homes of the conditions favourable to the propagation of the cholera infection, a Memorandum on the Precautions against the Infection of Cholera has just been issued by Dr. Buchanan, F.R.S., the chief medical officer of the Local Government Board. The document, whilst expressing no opinion as to the channels of infection and the means of favouring the spread of the disease in other climates, declares with confidence that in England cholera is not infectious in the same degree and manner as are small-pox and scarlet fever, but that the matters which the patient discharges from his stomach and bowels contain the poison, and that their peculiar infectiveness is favoured by special local conditions which give the disease facilities for spreading by “indirect infection.” To get rid of these conditions should be our special aim at such a moment.
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Precautions Against Cholera . Nature 28, 291–292 (1883). https://doi.org/10.1038/028291a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/028291a0