Disputes about Typhoid fever in Victoria in the 1870s

'Low', 'Colonial', 'remittent', 'bilious', 'gastric' enteric fever had come with the first Europeans. Aborigines appear to have had no words for it. The fever remained sporadic and generally mild until the 1830s, when illnesses we now define as typhoid or enteric fevers became endemic. The Victorian goldrush influx of newcomers from typhoidafflicted homelands made typhoid and probably the paratyphoids epidemic.2 Conceivably, 5 per cent of them were asymptomatic carriers of Salmonella typhi, which can be passed in the urine or faeces irregularly for months or even years. Young men impatient with hygiene swarmed across, and prodigally soiled, a landscape devoid of sanitary infrastructure. The bacterium can be readily transferred on unwashed hands, utensils, clothes, and flies to food, water and milk and thence ingested.3