File 2908/1907 Pt 3 ‘Persian Gulf:- Quarantine; German complaint’ [‎101r] (201/250)

113
s ^ a ^ a g 1 ai j 1 ^ rec t the attention of the Tangier International Board
ot Health to the necessity of carrying out the provisions of the
banitary Conventions.
IV .—Miscellaneous Provisions.
Art. 1/7. Each Government shall decide as to the means it
shall employ to secure disinfection and the destruction of rats.*
Art. 178. The sums realised by sanitary charges and tines may
not, in any instance whatever, be used for any purposes other than
those under the control of the Boards of Health.
Art. 179. The High Contracting Parties undertake that their
Public Health Departments shall frame a set of instructions
intended to enable ship captains, particularly w 7 hen there is no
doctor on board, to carry out the provisions of this Convention
regarding plague and cholera, and also to carry out the regulations
regarding yellow fever.
* The following methods of disinfection are given by way of guide :—
Wearing-apparel, old rags, infected dressings, papers and other articles
of no value should be burnt.
Personal effects, bedding, mattresses infected with plague can be
efficiently disinfected either by means of a high-pressure steam disinfecting
chamber or a current-steam disinfecting chamber at a temperature of
100° Centigrade, or by exposure to formol vapours.
Articles, such as coverlets and bed-linen, that can be steeped in
antiseptic solutions without damage, can be disinfected by 1 per 1,000
solutions of perchloride of mercury, 3 per 100 solutions of carbolic acid,
3 per 100 solutions of lysol or commercial cresyl, 1 per 100 solutions of
formol (one part of the commercial solution of formaldehyde at 40 per 100),
or 1 per 100 solutions of the alkaline hypochlorites (sodium or potassium),
that is to say, 1 part of the ordinary solution of commercial hypochlorite.
The period of contact must obviously be long enough to allow dried
germs to be well penetrated by the antiseptic solution : four to six hours
will suffice.
To secure destruction of rats, three processes are now made use of:—
(1.) Sulphurous acid mixed with a small quantity of sulphuric anhydride,
driven under pressure into holds and mixed with the air. This destroys
rats and insects and will, it is stated, destroy the plague-bacillus also if
the proportion of sulphuro-sulphuric anhydride be sufficiently great.
(2.) An incombustible mixture of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide,
passed into holds.
(3.) Carbonic acid so employed as to constitute 30 per cent, of the air
in the ship.
The last two methods kill rodents, but it is not claimed that they
destroy insects or the plague-bacillus.
The Technical Commission of the Paris (1903) Sanitary Conference
specified the three following processes—a mixture of sulphuro-sulphuric
anhydrides, a mixture of carbonic oxide and carbonic acid, and carbonic
acid,—as being among those to which Governments might resort, and
expressed the opinion that the sanitary authority should, in every instance
where it did not itself do the work, superintend its performance and make
sure that the rats had been killed.
H 2