A FEW PLAIN WORDS
SIR,—Under the above heading Quoodle aspires to plain talk, but I still find him too nice in his ex- pression to be useful. 'Personal hygiene' does not mean rinsing one's hands after defecation 'whenever possible'; it means scrubbing hands and the finger nails with soap and water and a nail brush every time, whether it is possible or not.
The germs of typhoid fever live in the human intestine, and anyone catching typhoid has quite simply eaten human excreta. The menace to us all is the 'carrier,' the person who harbours the germs but does not suffer from the disease, and probably they are many. If Quoodle will examine the toilet paper used in this country for cleansing after defecation he will find that it offers about as much obstacle to the passage of germs in the faeces to the fingers as a church door would to a mouse. His sense of smell will convince him of this. If the carrier should happen to be a fashionable lady with long varnished finger nails (which I am told are never scrubbed with a nail brush) and if she also happens to do the cooking, then the peril is -32 Fitzroy Square, WI
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