458 TRANSACTIONS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



amount of enteric fever which can be traced with 

 reasonable certainty to mnssels, or other shell-fish ; but 

 it will hardly be possible to accept all the cases in which 

 this cause is alleged — at least not without more evidence 

 than is often adduced. We must reckon with " typhoid 

 carriers," with infected articles other than food, with 

 food-wrapping materials infected in various ways and 

 transmitting the disease, with fly carriers, generally with 

 dirty and unsanitary surroundings. We must always 

 remember the possibility of other articles of food acting 

 as carriers — vegetables, fruits, milk. We must regard 

 personal contact of convalescents with articles of food 

 used by others as a possible cause of distribution. It is 

 far from being certain that all these causes are excluded 

 in those cases where the infection is " traced" to 

 mussels. Again, one is perhaps not entirely unjustified 

 in suggesting a not unnatural disposition on the part of 

 Medical Officers of Health and Sanitary Inspectors to 

 push the blame of epidemic disease cropping up in their 

 own areas, on to other areas with which they have nothing 

 to do. Mussels are such a convenient scapegoat. One 

 may urge, in the case of a thickly-populated and dirty 

 part of a big town, that the public health officers should 

 set their own house in order. But no doubt they do their 

 best. One may also urge that the zeal which has been 

 directed to excluding mussels from the public markets, 

 under the Food and Drugs Acts, because they were 

 sewage-contaminated, might also be applied to the 

 destruction of moribund mussels exposed for sale in 

 low-class fish shops ; and to seeing that this kind of food 

 is stored in sanitary conditions. 



It cannot be urged by the Medical Officers of Health, 

 unless because of inexcusable ignorance, that the 

 Lancashire and Western Sea Fisheries Committee have 



