Typhoid

The annual survey of deaths from typhoid fever in the U. S., just completed by the Journal of the American Medical Association, shows that during 1923 every city with a population over 500,000 had a mortality rate under 5 per 100,000 for this disease. As typhoid may be taken as an index of the sanitation of a city, the progress of American communities is encouraging. The first five were Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York with rates varying from 1.0 to 2.4. What the progress has been may be estimated from the fact that the average rates for the same five cities during 1906-1910 were 16.0, 15.7, 41.7, 15.8, 13.5. Chicago suffered an outbreak of water-borne typhoid during November, due to pollution of Lake Michigan with sewage.

Norfolk did not have a single typhoid death during 1923 and Hartford had only one. The cities in the lowest rank were Trenton, and four southern cities: Dallas, Nashville, Memphis, Atlanta. Since Trenton is supplied with filtered Delaware River water, the Journal hinted that an investigation is in order to account for the large number of deaths.