Oyster Culture in Relation to Disease

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UNDER the above title the Medical Officer of the Local Government Board has just issued a supplement to his report for 1894–95, dealing with reports and papers on the cultivation and storage of oysters and certain other edible molluscs in relation to the occurrence of disease in man. An inquiry on this subject was bound to be instituted sooner or later. There has been an uneasy feeling for many years past that the infection of enteric or typhoid fever is at times due to the consumption of uncooked oysters; and in his report on cholera in England in 1893, Dr. Thorne Thorne expressed his conviction that the distribution of shell-fish from Clee-thorpes and Grimsby, as a centre, had been concerned in the diffusion of scattered cases of cholera over a somewhat wide area of England, owing to the fact that oysters and other molluscs at these ports were so deposited and stored as to be almost necessarily bathed each tide with the effluent of sewers at that time receiving cholera discharges. In the early part of 1895, Sir William Broad-bent also publicly announced his conviction that oysters were occasionally capable of transmitting the infection of typhoid fever, and the fact received startling confirmation from a report to the State Board of Health of Connecticut, U.S.A., by Prof. Conn, on an oyster epidemic of typhoid at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, in which some twenty-six cases of that disease were indisputably traced to the consumption of raw oysters, which had the opportunity of becoming specifically contaminated by sewage delivering at the time the discharges of typhoid patients. A similar outbreak of Saint-André de Sangoins, in the Mediterranean Department of Herault, was investigated by Dr. Chantemesse, and traced to oysters received from Cette, on the coast of the same Department, where, according to a Commission subsequently appointed, the oysters had been stored in waters highly contaminated with sewage.