OCR Text |
Show II FILTHY FINGERS ARE ; fi SOURCE OF ILL -The United States Public Health ' ; service is issuing a number of bulle- ' tins regarding ways to prevent illness. l i One has been received' at the office of I George Shorten, city health officer, on tho part fingers play in the health of j j an individual. It follows: I i Did you ever make a diary of your ' fingers? Did you over set down in l cold black and white the things your I I fingers touch every day and did you ! ever consider the number of times I I daily that your unwashed fingers Yu seek your mouth. I When surgeons discovered that It II i was their own infected fingers which II ; carried germs into wounds they set U 1 about trying to discover a means H i whereby their hands could bo rendered I surgically ' clean, i. e.. free from V (j germs. The whole realm of chemis- I ? ft try was ransacked for agents which I j would disinfect hands, and Ihe scrub- I 'i bings and immersions to which they I subjected their hands are even yet a L tender memory to the surgeons of that I period. But all of these efforts proved I useless and at last in despair surgeons took to wearing rubber gloves which I could be boiled, thus bringing to each I patient, as it were, a fresh pair of I sterile hands. In other words, Ivy as you will yoa can't by any known P. method make your hands absoluteb' Ij clean. I The great agent in the spread of I those diseases whose caustive organ- I ism is present in the secretions of the I mouth and nose, Is tho human hand; I and If saliva was bright green wo I 1 would bo amazed at the .color of our I fingers. As a matter of fact most of I us carry out fingers to our mouth or nose many times dally, thcro to Implant Im-plant the germs of disease which other careless peoplo have spread about, there to collect a fresh cargo of Infectious In-fectious material to scatter for somebody some-body else. It is true that most gorms of disease dis-ease die quickly onco they leave the human body, but what does the death of a few billion germs matter so long as the supply is copious and never ending. What an enormous number of Infected In-fected things we touch during the day and how infrequent and cursory are the hand washings we perform. The answer is to keep your fingers out of your mouth and nose. Thus we limit the spread of disease from these orifices at least, thus wo eliminate elim-inate the danger of contracting disease dis-ease from someone else who was not quite so careful. no |