442 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



Second. The coiisidoraiioii of the rekitions of the agriculturist as 

 a food lii'oducer to <he public at large and the duties growing out 

 of these relations. 



Each of these lines of thought is capable of subdivision in several 

 directions which it is believed may be followed with profit. Let 

 us hope u ith interest as well. 



During the few moments for which I shall claim yonr attention, 

 allow me to take up one or two problems which belong to the first- 

 class, and to begin with, that of ''How to Banish Typhoid Fever from 

 the Farm House." There is a prevalent impression that people who 

 live 141 the country are always healthy. This is simply confounding 

 what ought to be with what is. People who live in the pure country 

 air, drink water which comes sparkling from the living spring and 

 eat vegetables fresh from the garden and meats raised on the place, 

 ought to be more free from disease than the denizens of the crowded 

 cit}', shut up between brick walls, breathing an atmosphere filled 

 with filthy dust and redolent of the sewer, drinking water in which 

 a dozeti towns have washed themselves and eating, heaven only 

 knows what. lUit in poiut of fact one does not find it so; and it not 

 infrecpiently happens that the resident of the cit}-, seeking health and 

 recreation during the summer in a farm house of a country village 

 returns to his home to sicken of typhoid fever, the germs of which he 

 has imbibed from some polluted well. For what is true in a general 

 way is eminently true of this widely prevalent disease. Tjphoid is 

 conspicuously a disease of the farm house and the country village, 

 as compared with the city. 



The reason that we read of it oftener as occuring in the city, first, 

 because there, careful statistics of mortality and of communicable 

 diseases are kept, and secondly, because the actual number of cases 

 occurring in an immense population is of course large and attract at- 

 tention. 



The State Veteriiiarian in his able report for ISDO states: 



"Tlie value of the work of the State Live Stock Sanitary Board has been 

 somewhat restricted in some instances from the fact that it has not always 

 been able to obtain early information of outbreaks of infectious diseases. The 

 fact that no one was especially responsible for the rendering of a report, has 

 son'ctimes led to failure to report outbreaks of which many were cognizant. 

 This is merely an illustration of the truth expressed by the words "everybody's 

 buf-ines? is nobody's business." There has not been, in any instance with which 

 I am familiar, a direct attempt to conceal the existence of infectious diseases, 

 and many failures to report outbreaks may, no doubt, be accounted for by the 

 si;))posltion that people that knew of them expected them to be reported by 

 some other person who in turn thought that another would do it." 



If this is line wiih regard to outbreaks of contagious diseases 

 among domestic animals, it is true to an even greater extent with 

 regard to contagious diseases in human beings. 



