Typhoid Fever and Water Supply in Chicago.

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The severity of the recent epidemic of typhoid fever in Chicago has given rise to some discussion concern- ing the relation of the city drinking water to the out- break, and considerable interest has been aroused in the future possibilities, as well as the present conditions, of drainage disposal and water supply.The matter is of far more than local concern.The character of the Chicago water supply affects not merely the large body of persons continuously dependent on this supply, but also all those living in the territory immediately surrounding the city and commercially connected with it.In fact, all the communities of the middle west whose citizens visit Chicago at frequent or at occasional intervals are vitally interested in the quality of the Chicago water supply.Not only is the health of individual visitors endangered by a polluted water, but cases of typhoid fever contracted in Chicago may be imported into other towns and serve as new foci for the spread of the disease, thus enlarging the circle of vicious influence to wide limits.A few years ago it was shown on investigation of the origin of an exces- sive number of deaths from typhoid fever in a small city over a hundred miles from Chicago that more than half of the cases were clearly contracted in Chicago,