Pasteur’s fears as to mischief likely to be brought about by pathogenic micro-organisms on sewage farms not borne out by facts.
In connection with this point it may not be without interest to mention here that even the late M. Pasteur at one time of his career considered the wholesale spreading of disease germs on sewage farms might prove highly injurious to the public health of the neighbourhood. As he himself admitted, he based his fears on purely theoretical considerations and opposed, for this reason, the extension of the sewage farms in the neighbourhood of Paris. But when, later on, he was made acquainted with the results observed on the Berlin farms, he tacitly modified his views and ceased to oppose the extension of the Paris farms.
No well-authenticated case is on record where a sewage farm has acted as the focus of a local outbreak of typhoid fever.
Indeed, search as I might, I have not been able to discover one single instance where a sewage farm has acted as the focus of a local outbreak. On the contrary, during one or two small epidemics of typhoid fever in Berlin, no case of this complaint has been observed on the sewage farms of that city.
Experience on the Berlin farms.
Concerning the escape of pathogenic micro-organisms into streams and rivers, no case is on record where such
a thing has actually occurred: indeed, the very painstaking investigations on the Berlin farms have led to negative results.
Observations made at the Freiburg sewage farm.
Another sewage farm, that of Freiburg in Baden, has likewise been made the subject of careful and long-continued investigation by Dr. Korn, who, for the twelve months ending August 1897, made no less than 165 elaborate chemical and bacteriological examinations. Summing up his observations on the presence of bacteria in the effluents from subsoil drains, he remarks:
"Apart from the few exceptional cases of high numbers, generally speaking my experiments show that the number of germs in the subsoil drain effluents is relatively small, and even omitting these experiments, in which a dilution with subsoil water must have taken place, the number of micro-organisms is still so small that the effects of filtration through soil are clearly perceptible. In addition to this—and this is of considerable importance in forming a judgment—it must be borne in mind that the bacteria in sewage are principally derived from the intestines, whereas in the subsoil drain effluents the inhabitants of the intestines are either not present at all or only in very small numbers compared with the number of soil and water bacteria, which are always present. Out of 165 examinations I only succeeded in 18 cases in proving the presence of bacterium coli.”