God & Plumbing

Like typhoid, the germs of amebic dysentery may be spread through water contaminated by sewage. But when Chicago belatedly reported a full-fledged dysentery epidemic as A Century of Progress was closing wiseacres assumed that the second city in the land had up-to-date sanitation and therefore the germs could have been transmitted only on food infected by dirty-handed hotel employes (TIME, Nov. 20). Last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association a committee of experts on sanitation and tropical diseases, including National Institute of Health Director George W. McCoy, Mayo Clinic's Dr. Thomas B. Magath & Maryland's Board of Health Engineer Abel Wolman, reported its recent investigations in Chicago. The experts laid blame for the epidemic on an Act of God and defective plumbing in the two hotels which were the chief sources of infection. The committee clemently referred to the hotels as C and A. but everyone knew it meant South Michigan Boulevard's big, popular Congress and its smaller neighbor, the Auditorium.

The committee found the hotels' water and sewerage piping systems so old and faulty that when heavily taxed they would let waste from bathtubs and toilets siphon back into drinking water pipes. Water and sewer pipes were cross-connected. Sewers were leaky. Last June 29 a heavy rain overloaded sewers near the Auditorium, flooded its basement. Three days later another cloudburst broke two of the Congress' sewers, filled its ice storage house and covered its food-packed basement three to six inches deep with muck.

Connections between sewage and water pipes have since been cut. But, said the committee: "Unless the antiquated plumbing and conditions of food-handling found in Hotels C and A are remedied, there seems to be no warrant that a recurrence of the outbreak here considered may not develop under similar conditions."

Up to last fortnight 41 deaths and 721 cases of amebic dysentery in 206 cities had been apparently traced to Chicago. The committee cleared Chicago's Health Commissioner Herman Niels Bundesen of laxness or negligence in handling and publicizing the epidemic. Last week Commissioner Bundesen promised rigid plumbing and food inspection, called for an emergency staff of 20 sanitary engineers.

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