Rural Hygiene

by Henry N. Ogden

Animal pollution usually comes from the presence on the watershed of domestic animals, that is, cows, sheep, and horses, or from manure spread on fields draining into the brook, or from barns or barnyards close by the water. It is the presence of this sort of pollution that furnishes the other kind of organic matter not to be distinguished by chemical analysis from the organic matter just referred to, but vastly more objectionable.

Drainage from houses and barns is responsible for the same kind of animal pollution, and while it is difficult to prove by statistics that such pollution is always dangerous to health, it is sufficiently repulsive from an æsthetic standpoint to be done away with whenever possible. Such pollution applies only to surface water, such as brooks or lakes, and the best method of detecting and evaluating this pollution is to make a careful inspection of the watershed.

If it is proposed to use the water from a certain stream for drinking purposes, the first step should be to examine carefully the area draining into the stream, to detect, if possible, all opportunities for animal wastes to find their way directly into the stream and to note whether fields sloping rapidly to the streams are manured; to see whether the stream flows through pasture land in which cows are kept, and especially to note whether houses with their accompanying outbuildings are near enough the brook so that water may at any time wash impurities down into the stream. Whenever a brook flows through woodland free from all animal pollution and not subject to pollution before entering the wood, the water is probably as pure as that in any spring or well.

On the contrary, when the water in a brook flows through a meadow used for pasture or through gullies, the sides of which are manured, or in the vicinity of houses and barns, the water is probably unfit for drinking purposes. This can be realized by standing at the edge of a barnyard and watching the rain falling first on the roof of the barn, then in larger quantities from the eaves on to the manure pile into the yard below, then accumulating in pools of reddish black concentrated liquid, until the volume is sufficient to form small rills which gradually assemble into a fair-sized stream. Similarly, the pig-pen drainage is washed out from under or even through the building, and, after combining with the barnyard drain, is carried into the stream near by. The very idea of drinking such filth is nauseating in the extreme. It is common for small slaughter-houses to be built on the side of a stream, so that the offal, carrion, and refuse of the place may be carried off without effort on the part of the owner, and there are a number of such places where brooks, used as places of deposit for slaughter-house refuse, discharge directly into the reservoirs of water works.

But this sort of animal refuse is not the most serious pollution. The leachings and washings from privies and cesspools, carrying, as they do, germs of contagious diseases, are most to be dreaded, and when a privy (with no vault underneath) is built on the side of a steep ravine and is so located that the natural drainage of the sidehill on which it is built cannot help but run around and through the building, then the pollution of the stream in the gulley is not only direct and inevitable, but of a deadly sort (see Fig. 36). Fortunately, the germs thus carried into the stream suffer the vicissitudes of all life exposed to the attacks of hostile forces.

At the time of freshets the streams carry mud in abundance, which mud is continually settling out of the water as opportunity offers, and with this settlement of mud there occurs also the settlement of the germs. Also the pathogenic or disease-producing germs are usually weaker and more susceptible than the putrefactive and other organisms which are found in the water in great abundance after any rain storm, and which tend to inhibit or destroy the pathogenic germs. But some will survive, and, with favoring conditions, may pass through the water-pipe to the house, causing sickness, if not death.

Fig. 36.—Stream draining a privy.

Any inspection of the watershed, therefore, should look to the elimination of the dangers above described, and to the location of barns and barnyards, pig-pens and poultry yards, privies and cesspools, so that no direct drainage into the stream shall be possible.

It is out of the question for any surface water-supply to be pure, since the mere fact of the passage of water over the soil inevitably results in the collection of organic matter; and it is no exaggeration to say that the time will inevitably come in this country, as it has already in Germany, when no surface supply will be considered satisfactory unless the water is filtered. The only alternative is water gathered from areas that are owned by the individual and on which, therefore, all dwellings may be prohibited, all cultivated land avoided, and where the primeval forest may be restored, making the watershed equal to that from which forest streams emerge.