14 TRANSACTIONS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 
paratyphoid, for reasons which will be alluded to sub- 
sequently.* 
Enteric is spread by the germs infecting water, milk, 
and other food supplies such as oysters; even ice containing 
typhoid is dangerous. Dust and flies infected with bacilli 
are also responsible for the disease, particularly in war time. 
Investigations in Liverpool show that enteric is more common 
in areas where flies are abundant. Enteric is rapidly diminishing 
£ and will soon become almost extinct, simply because science 
has not only discovered the microbe producing the disease, 
but also how to prevent it from entering the human body. 
‘ The Liverpool death-rate from typhoid has fallen in thirty 
years from 21 to 2 per hundred thousand. 
GERM CARRIERS. 
Individuals, though they have completely recovered from 
certain microbic or parasitic diseases, sometimes harbour 
the germ for months or even years, and excrete it in large 
numbers and so infect others. Such individuals are called 
germ carriers: A classical example of the “germ carrier” 
is that of “typhoid Mary,”’ who was responsible for twenty-six 
cases of typhoid fever in seven families in America in seven _ 
years. She was finally arrested by the police, but I believe 
escaped, and has since spread typhoid among three other 
families in New York :—German families ! 
Punch dedicates several verses to this interesting lady, 
it is one of the few pieces of poetry I know: 
“In U.S.A. across the brook 
There lives, unless the papers err, 
A very curious Irish cook 
In whom the strangest things occur. 
Beneath her outside’s ; healthy 2 gloze, 
Masses of microbes seethe and wallow, 
And wherever Mary goes 
Infernal epidemics follow.” 
* Typhoid must be distinguished from typhus, the latter is a deadly 
War disease and is produced “by an unknown living organism inoculated 
into the blood by the bite of body lice. No protective or curative vaccine 
has yet been discovered. 
