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From: JAB <here@is.invalid>
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Subject: Re: coldest inauguration since Reagan
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2025 07:21:57 -0600
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On Thu, 23 Jan 2025 11:28:48 -0500, Michael Trew
<michael.trew@att.net> wrote:

>The Wiki article later mentioned that the White House water supply was 
>likely tainted by sewage.

Draining the swamp

How sanitation fought disease long before vaccines or antibiotics

In an earlier post, I outlined our main weapons against infectious
disease, including vaccines, antibiotics, antiseptics, pest control,
sanitation, and general hygiene. These technologies (in a broad sense,
even hand-washing is a technology) have largely eliminated lethal
diseases such as smallpox, malaria, cholera, tuberculosis, and polio,
at least in the developed world.
....
....
I was surprised to learn that sanitation efforts began as early as the
1700s--and that these efforts were based on data collection and
analysis, long before a full scientific theory of infection had been
worked out. James Riley, in "Insects and the European Mortality
Decline", writes

    In the later decades of the seventeenth and early decades of the
eighteenth century, a number of internationally renowned physicians …
formulated specific measures of intervention. Relying on Hippocratic
tradition, specifically, on its suggestion that endemic and epidemic
diseases are caused by forces in the environment, and influenced by
Renaissance efforts at urban sanitation, these physicians proposed to
discover the meteorological and topographical forces that might be
blamed for the onset of epidemics. Toward this end, they and their
followers embarked on a vast campaign to assemble qualitative and
quantitative data about epidemics, climate and weather, geographical
and topographical signs, and other features of the habitat. Their aim
was to find conjunctures or correlations in the data, occasions when
epidemics occurred after the same complex of environmental forces.
Early signs of such a complex would offer warnings and allow the
adoption of measures of prevention and avoidance. This body of medical
theory failed to produce a coherent list of correlations, but it did
provide a specific body of measures of avoidance and prevention.

In particular, they proposed (each bullet quoted from the article):

    to drain swamps, bogs, moats, and other sites of standing water
    to introduce hydraulic devices that would circulate water in
canals and cisterns
    to flush refuse from areas of human habitation
    to ventilate living quarters and meeting places and to burn sulfur
sticks or apply other insecticidal measures in houses, hospitals,
prisons, meeting halls, and ships
    to inter corpses outside the city
    and by other measures, including refuse burial, to detach
humankind from organic waste

These reforms were implemented starting in the 1740s, some by local
and central governments, others by "humanitarians acting on private
initiative".

https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/draining-the-swamp