s,
thereby transmitting the disease germs from their clothes to the water
afterwards used in a creamery, is given. The diagram, Fig. 37, shows
that the creamery secured its water for the purpose of washing cans from
a small pond by means of a gravity pipe line. The foreman of the
creamery, who boarded at the residence marked _A_, first contracted
typhoid fever. A week later an employee at the creamery also contracted
the fever, the residence of the latter being marked _B_ on the diagram.
About six weeks later the railroad station agent, living at the point
marked _C_, contracted the fever, and two weeks later his wife was
attacked with the same disease. The residences at _B_ and _C_ are only
about three hundred feet apart, both families taking their
water-supplies from a spring between the two, but nearer _B_. During the
summer previous to this outbreak a gang of Italian laborers, engaged in
double-tracking the Central New England Railroad, were housed in box
cars standing on one track of the railroad. One of the members of the
gang was reported to have been taken ill with a fever and was at once
removed, it was supposed, to a hospital in New York. It was the practice
of the Italian laborers to bathe and wash their clothes in the upper of
the two ponds from which water is supplied to the creamery by the pipe
line. All the persons who contracted the fever were supplied with milk
from the creamery. The foreman, who was the first to contract the fever,
used water from the creamery and from the well at the house where he
boarded. The other families, as already mentioned, used water from the
spring. The conclusions, therefore, are that the creamery in some way
became infected with typhoid fever, probably through the water-supply
from the pond, and that the first two cases were due directly to this
cause; that the station agent and his wife contracted the fever because
of the infection of the spring, either from some small stream which is
the outlet of the ponds or from some infection due to the illness of the
owner of the house _B_ near by. The report concludes as follows: "The
use of water for creamery purposes from a pond exposed to such
unwarranted and unchecked pollution as is shown here, or the permitted
abuse of a water-supply for a creamery, appears little less than
criminal negligence on the part of those responsible for the management
of the creamery."

[Illustration: FIG. 37.--Contamination of a creamery from the