In Buffalo, New York, fifty-seven children caught the scarlet fever in one week by using milk cared for by a boy who was getting well from the scarlet fever.
The germs of sickness are so small that a million can hang to the hands or clothing and not be seen. For this reason they are often left clinging to the fingers, desks, books, and pencils, and travel in large numbers on the feet of flies. The surest way the germs have of getting from one person to another is by the common drinking cup.
Fig. 95 —Photograph of clear beef broth jelly in which a fly walked five minutes scattering germs. Two days later each germ brushed off the fly's feet grew into a city of germs appearing as a white spot.
The Common Drinking Cup is an Exchange Station for Germs.—The most careful examinations have shown that there are thousands of children as well as grown persons who have very light attacks of scarlet fever, tuberculosis, or other diseases and go to school or about their work scattering the germs of sickness in their spit. A child seldom drinks from a cup without leaving on it thousands of germs. Some of these may be germs which will cause sickness. On one drinking cup used in a school, the germs were found to be as thick as the leaves on a maple tree in June.
In an Ohio school one warm day, a boy with beginning measles drank from the cup which was afterward used on the same day by the teacher and all the other pupils. In less than two weeks every pupil and the teacher were suffering from measles. Put nothing into your mouth which has been in another's mouth.
Fig. 96 —A schoolhouse in Morgan county, Ohio, where sixteen pupils and the teacher caught the measles in one day by drinking from a cup which had been used by a boy sick with the measles.