The 1908 Evans Pasteurization Ordinance was the first law in Chicago to require the testing of dairy cows for tuberculosis. Milwaukee inspired the ordinance when it forbade the selling of milk from tubercular cows within its city limits. Soon, many Wiscinsin farmers were selling their sick cows to the farms in more lenient Illinois. Declaring…
In 1908, chlorine chemistry’s germ-defeating properties were demonstrated in drinking water in two very different settings in the United States. First, chlorination transformed animal feed water, drawn from a highly polluted stream in Chicago’s Union Stockyards, into a product that exceeded the purity of city water. Days later, in Jersey City, chlorinated water was supplied…
The Food and Drug Administration is the oldest comprehensive consumer protection agency in the U. S. federal government. Its origins can be traced back to the appointment of Lewis Caleb Beck in the Patent Office around 1848 to carry out chemical analyses of agricultural products, a function that the newly created Department of Agriculture inherited…
The original Food and Drugs Act is passed by Congress on June 30 and signed by President Theodore Roosevelt. It prohibits interstate commerce in misbranded and adulterated foods, drinks and drugs. The Meat Inspection Act is passed the same day. Shocking disclosures of insanitary conditions in meat-packing plants, the use of poisonous preservatives and dyes in foods, and…
In 1906, the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI) of the USDA, along with state and county authorities in quarantined areas, began a cooperative campaign to eradicate the cattle tick. Experimentation in various forms of tick eradication was commenced with a federal appropriation. The method found to be most efficient was dipping the cattle in a…
In 1904 when Governor Hunt lobbied for funds to establish the first Puerto Rico Anemia Commission, thereby introducing a new administration in rural areas. The campaign appealed to many physicians pre-existing interest in regenerating rural jibaros and by implication, intervening in a variety of economic and political relationships that were compromised by the hurricane and…
Walter Reed proved Finlay’ s theory that yellow fever is transmitted by the Aedes Aegypti mosquito. In 1900 Reed was appointed head of an army board to investigate the causes of yellow fever, which had broken out among American troops in Cuba. In the United States yellow fever was an annual scourge; the disease swept…
The Yellow Fever Commission, founded as a consequence of excessive disease mortality during the Spanish–American War (1898), concluded that the best way to control the disease was to control the mosquito. William Gorgas successfully eradicated yellow fever from Havana by destroying larval breeding sites and this strategy of source reduction was then successfully used to…
The Imhoff tank obtained its name from its inventor, Dr. Karl Imhoff of Germany. The technology was developed in the Emscher District of Germany and patented in 1906 by Dr. Imhoff. The first plant was put into operation two years later. From the information available, it can be discerned that Imhoff Tanks were an acceptable…
Municipalities began using the Ringelmann Chart to measure coal smoke in the early 1900s. The technique, developed by Maximillian Ringelmann of France in the late 1800s, measured the darkness of smoke with four different black grids on a white background, which was placed a distance away from smokestacks for a set time. Smoke control efforts…
In August-September 1899, he was sent to Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone where he organized a sanitation drive, clearing the streets of tyres, bottles and empty cans and leveling roads so that rain water would not gather into puddles. But the Freetown malaria control programme did not yield desired results, probably because Ross had…
December 10, 1899 treaty of Paris ended the SAW. Ashford was assigned as the Commanding Officer for the city of Ponce Military Hospital in the new U.S. territory of Puerto Rico. It was the hurricane of 1899 that was the catalyst for his next contribution. Many displaced persons from the center and south of the island walked for miles to receive…
L. Simond was the first to realize that manipulating a rat that had recently died could be extremely dangerous whereas after a time lapse of several hours the same dead rat presented no risks to man. He was also the first to detect an insect bite as being responsible for the lesions he had observed…
In 1898 Theobald Smith in Boston, USA, showed that the bovine bacillus could be clearly differentiated from the human variety both in its microscopic and cultural characteristics and in the disease it produced in different animals. It was thus apparent that humans could acquire tuberculosis particularly of the gut, by drinking cow’s milk infected with…
On 20 August 1897, in Secunderabad, Ronald Ross made his landmark discovery. While dissecting the stomach tissue of an anopheline mosquito fed four days previously on a malarious patient, he found the malaria parasite and went on to prove the role of Anopheles mosquitoes in the transmission of malaria parasites in humans. For this discovery Sir Ronald…
Arthur Looss was sent by Rudolf Leuckart to Egypt to study the transmission of bilharzia, where he became accidentally infected with hookworm, and in so doing discovered the method by which the larvae penetrate the skin. He spilt some larval culture onto his hand in 1896, while dropping it into the mouths of guinea pigs; observing the irritation this caused to his skin,…
The Louisiana State Board of Health established the first State Board of Health Diagnostic Bacteriological Laboratory in the United States. Louisiana became the first state to create a bacteriological laboratory on April 15, 1894 under the direction of Dr. Paul E. Archinard. The bacteriological laboratory was located in the City Hall Annex building which then stood at…
In 1894, Alexander Yersin and another scientist separately identified Y. pestis during an epidemic in Hong Kong. Years later the bacterium was given his name. Yersin also connected his discovery to the pestilence that swept Europe during the Black Death, an association that has stuck. One problem, however, is that compared to the wildfire-like spread of the Black…
In 1893, the Board of Health accepted two proposals submitted by dr. Herman Biggs which were to make history as important stages in the modernization of public health practices. The first was that the Health Department employ routine bacterial examinations for the diagnosis of diphtheria (and other infectious diseases); the second, that Dr. William H.…
A few years after beginning his work at BAI, Theobald Smith turned his attention to Texas cattle fever, a devastating disease that destroyed 90% of herds in some affected areas. It occurred in northern cattle that came in contact with cattle from Texas during cattle drives to stockyards in Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois. It…