Foul as is the air of the unventilated tenements of the poor, it has been demonstrated that the dust which saturates the furniture, carpets, rugs, and hangings of residences of the wealthy contains sixty per cent of street filth.
An authority says, “The most widely distributed pathogenic microörganism (disease-causing bacterium) in the air is the tubercle bacillus, the cause of consumption and a large variety of other ailments, such as hipjoint disease, caries of the spine, etc. Over one hundred thousand persons die annually from consumption alone in the United States, and it is estimated that there are over two million people afflicted with the disease in one form or another. All of these sufferers are expectorating billions of tubercle bacilli daily.”
Considering the second inquiry as to how infection affects the body, we must constantly bear in mind that a bacterium, though a scavenger, is a conservator of nature. Its real function in the orderly processes of animal and vegetable life is How Bacteria
Affect the Body to utilize waste for the preservation and promotion of animal and vegetable life on this planet where the conditions are so favorable to both.
Therefore, wherever we find bacteria in the active processes of growth, that is, multiplication, we may be assured that they have found matter that should be rescued from waste and converted into useful food for plants. It follows that when we find a bacterium actively growing in any part of our bodies, it has found some form of decaying matter that is not only no longer useful to our bodies, but is in fact harmful and should be removed.
It is also important to understand that waste matter is found under a great variety of conditions, and that for its proper conversion into useful food for plants there must be a correspondingly large number of species of bacteria each having its special field of operation. It is due to this variety of bacteria that there are so many infective diseases; for each species of bacteria creates its own individual form of disease.
This statement requires the following explanation, viz., a bacterium in a quiescent state is harmless; everyone has within his body innumerable bacteria, as the tubercle and typhoid bacilli; but they are inert, and hence innocuous. It is only when they find their proper food, decaying matter, that they begin to multiply, and in that act they secret a poison, toxin, which is absorbed, and, entering the circulation, causes in the individual a special class of symptoms peculiar to that toxin, or poison.
These symptoms constitute a disease, the technical name of which is usually fanciful, depending on some feature of the symptoms, but explaining nothing as to its essential nature.
For example, the typhoid bacillus finds its food in certain minute glands of the small bowels. If these glands are in a perfectly healthy state when the bacillus enters the digestive tract, the germ will pass over them and disappear from the body perfectly harmless. But if the bacillus finds its appropriate food—dead or decomposing matter—in the glands, it at once takes up its abode in them and “begins housekeeping;” that is, it begins to multiply according to the method of fission of its cell and rate of multiplication, already described. During this process the multiplying cells excrete a toxin, which, being absorbed, creates a fever, the result of a true blood poisoning. This fever is called typhoid, because its prominent symptom, stupor, resembles that of typhus fever. The name, therefore, signifies nothing as to the nature of the disease.
The poisoning of the body by the excreted toxin of the multiplying cells, which is simply plant food, occurs because it is removed only in part by the digestive organs, the circulation that conveys it to the other eliminating organs being efficient for that The Toxin
Secreted purpose. Could all of this toxin be removed as fast as it is excreted, and not enter the circulation, there would be no fever.
The termination of this process must be either the death of the colony from exhaustion of the food supply in the glands, or the exhaustion of the patient by the excess of toxins that accumulate in the body. As the activity of the bacillus depends upon the food supplied, the severity and length of the fever varies in different individuals. Some are immune, because the glands that furnish the food of the typhoid bacillus are in a state of high health; others have a brief and mild attack, because the food supply is scant owing to a slight impairment of the integrity of the glands; but with a considerable number in every epidemic the food is ample to sustain the creation of an immense colony of bacilli which destroys the victim by an overdose of poison.