Human Infection Carriers: Their Significance, Recognition and Management (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Human Infection Carriers: Their Significance, Recognition and Management

Analogous studies were then undertaken in connection with other infectious diseases, and it was soon found that cholera was not the only malady during the convalescence from which the corresponding organisms could persist in the body of the individual, and that perfectly healthy persons could become the carriers of various forms of pathogenic organisms without ever having shown symptoms of the corresponding disease.

It was thus ascertained that convalescents from diphtheria may harbor the offending organisms much longer than the duration of the clinical illness, and represent a very serious menace to the community not only in themselves, but also through the large number of healthy carriers to which they may give rise. The same was then demonstrated for typhoid fever, and with the recognition of the role of the typhoid carrier came the realization that in the dissemination of enteric fever the infected human being is the only essential factor, in the absence of which the disease cannot continue to exist. Then followed the discovery that in the dissemi nation oi meningococcus meningitis also the human carrier plays a most important role; that here also the organism tends to persist after clinical recovery, and that normal human beings may harbor the organism in the upper respira tory tract and cause the infection of others without falling victims themselves to its pathogenic properties. Still more recently it has been shown that poliomyelitis and certain forms of streptococcus infection, as well as certain types of pneumococcus pneumonia, are disseminated in the same manner, and future investigations will no doubt show that still other infectious diseases are transmitted through the activity of carriers of the type that we are here considering.

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