Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/23

Rh shaking, by the use of common drinking cups and the like. The careful consumptive, who guards others from his sputum and mouth spray and infected utensils, is no menace to his family and friends.

The essential point is that the discharges of the patient and all objects soiled thereby should be freed from living germs before they infected others. This is no easy task, as you will realize if you seriously try to carry it out. The common cold offers an excellent opportunity for a practical study of the problem. The next time some member of your family has a cold in the head, try to prevent its spreading further, and you will be surprised to note in how many ways discharges may be interchanged. If we seriously wish to prevent the further spread of infection from a case of communicable disease, an elaborate series of precautions must be taken. The dishes and spoons and forks used by the patient should be kept separate until they have been boiled. Handkerchiefs, towels and bed linen must be treated in the same way. A special wash basin should be set aside for the patient and faucets should be handled by him, not with the hand just to be cleaned, but with the interposition of a bit of paper. The hands of those who touch the patient or touch objects he has recently handled should be at once washed with some simple disinfectant like eighty per cent. alcohol. The mouths of the patient and of those in attendance on him should be kept as free as possible from infection by frequent gargling with a mild antiseptic, such as a mixture of one part of hydrogen peroxide, two of listerine and six of water.

The recognition that objects which have been in immediate contact with sick persons or carriers are the important, and the only important, sources of danger, has quite revolutionized our older ideas of disinfection. As Dr. Chapin, the pioneer in this field has pointed out, the disinfection of the general air and the surfaces of a room by formaldehyde is a burning of incense to the false gods of pre-scientific sanitation. He describes the doctor who comes into the sick room, sits chatting on the bed, puts a spoon in the patient's mouth, then handles it by the infected end, leaves it on the table, deposits some of the material he has smeared on his hand on the door handle and the rest on the faucet as he turns it to wash his hands; and attempts to atone for his sanitary sins by placing a bowl of so-called chlorides (which have about the disinfectant action of tap water) under the bed, and at the end of the attack by performing the sacrificial rite of the formaldehyde candle. As a matter of fact, the prevention of contact infection during the illness with immediate disinfection of excreta, soiled linen and the like, is a thousand times more important than any terminal disinfection after death or recovery. At the end of the illness there will be left on woodwork or furniture only an insignificant number of living virulent germs. If any do persist, they may be removed by a cleaning-up with hot water, soap