While the discharges from the bowels in persons suffering from tuberculosis of the intestinal tract may contain many living bacilli, the usual mode of disposal of these discharges protects us from any considerable danger from this source.
It is the sputum after its discharge from the body on which our attention must be fixed. While the sputum is moist it can, as a rule, do no harm, unless it should be directly transmitted to those who are well by violent coughing, sneezing, etc., by the use of uncleansed cooking or eating utensils, by soiled hands, or by such intimate personal contact as kissing or fondling. But if in any way the sputum becomes dried, on floors or walls or bedding, on handkerchiefs or towels, or on the person of the patient, it may soon become disseminated in the air as dust, and can thus be breathed into the lungs of exposed persons.
The wide distribution of tubercle bacilli in the air of living-rooms, and in other dusty places where people go, is due partly to the frequency of the disease and the large numbers of living bacilli which are cast off in the sputum (sometimes millions in a day), and partly to the fact that many of the victims of consumption go about among their fellows for purposes of business or pleasure for months or years. So each consumptive, if not intelligently careful, may year after year be to his fellow-men a source of active and serious and continual infection.
This, then, the dried, uncared-for sputum of those suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis, is the great source of danger; this the means so long concealed by which a large part of the human race prematurely perishes. Let but this discharged material be rendered harmless or destroyed before it dries in all cases, and the ravages of this scourge would largely cease. This is not a theoretic matter only, for again and again have the living and virulent germs been found clinging to the walls and furniture and bedding and handkerchiefs of consumptive persons, and in the dust of the rooms in which they dwell. A malady whose victims far outnumber those of all other infectious diseases put together, sparing neither rich nor poor, seizing upon life while it is as yet only a promise, but most inexorable in the fulness of its tide--this malady can be largely prevented by the universal and persistent practice of intelligent cleanliness.