Confidential Chats with Girls

by William Lee Howard

Don’t think because you hear so much about the dangerous germs to be found everywhere, that you are certain to catch some horrible disease. True, there is great danger in ignorantly living around these germs, but the danger is mostly in ignorance and not in the fact that the disease microbes are always with us.

The old idea that such germs as those of scarlet fever, typhoid, smallpox, etc., could be carried from the ill to the well on clothing, books, toys and other similar articles is not strictly true. Equally true is it that these kinds of germs do not stay long upon walls of rooms, floors or ceilings. They will stay and breed diseases in such places if they are allowed to thrive under moist and dark conditions.

Sunlight and fresh air are deadly enemies to all germs except those of venereal origin. If a smallpox patient has been confined to a room and after being taken away the room is fumigated and then closed, the chances are that the smallpox germs—some of them—will remain and increase. Hence, to again occupy this room would be dangerous. But if, instead of fumigating the room, if all the windows were open; if every corner and floor could receive the rays of the sun for many days; the last germ in the room would have to give up the ghost.

Don’t think that fumigating and washing clothes or other articles which have come in contact with a diseased person make for absolute safety. But do remember that SUNLIGHT and fresh air are deadly enemies to most disease germs.

There are certain diseases which are carried around by persons in whom you would never suspect danger. Typhoid germs, for example, may be carried around in the intestines of a person who is in apparent health. Now everywhere this person lives, or uses the toilet, the germs are deposited, and if they happen to get into the drinking water—wells or streams—or are carried by the flies’ legs to the food or milk, you run great risks of getting typhoid fever.

Those germs of two horrible diseases which are to be found upon public toilet articles, public drinking cups, upon the leaves of common books—in fact everywhere man or woman is to be found, are not killed by sunlight or fresh air. This subject should be thoroughly understood by every young woman, but it is of too great importance to be dealt with here in a few paragraphs.

The breath of a consumptive patient will not carry directly the germs of consumption to another person. Oh, I know that is what many of you have been taught, but we are dealing with the facts as they are known up to this very year of 1911. It has long been the general idea that disease germs were carried from one person or thing to another person or thing. Now this is not strictly true. All germs increase and thrive in moist and dark conditions. The throat of a consumptive patient is one of these conditions. The germs are sent out into the air of the room in surrounding moisture. They land somewhere; on the tablecloth, in the carpet, or hide in a dark corner. In these places they dry and become dust—germ-laden dust. Now stir up this dust and then you have the germs free to rush into the healthy lungs around them, and then a person runs great risk of contracting consumption.

Don’t stir up a room by dusting if that room has been occupied by a diseased person. Don’t wash the walls or floor of such a room and then close it, unless you want to go into the business of breeding germs.

Knock out the windows of such a room—open it up for the sun’s rays to penetrate and kill off the enemy. Take all carpets out and put them where nothing but DRY air and sunshine can get at them. Do the same thing with every movable object in the room.

Don’t do anything but just this with rooms where scarlet fever, diphtheria, measles, whooping cough and other contagious diseases have been running their courses.