Immunisation Against Dread Diphtheria Germ

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 11, Issue 96, 7 November 1947, Page 7

Immunisation Against Dread Diphtheria Germ

(By the Health Department)

A child catches diphtheria because some little germs only one-eight-thousandth of an inch long gained entrance to his throat. If the child has not been immunised, his blood probably contains no anti-toxin and the diphtheria germs cause an inflammation in his throat.

The poisons they produce seep into the blood stream. If the child’s blood has been equipped in infancy with anti-toxin by artificial immunisation, this anti-toxin would have been on the job when the throat was first invaded by the germs and it would have prevented the poison from doing any damage. In other words, the child would have beaten the serious disease of diphtheria.

The bacillus of this disease is a rod-shaped organism about l/8000th of an inch long; it would take about 75,000 of them laid side by side to make an inch. This bacillus has become so intimately associated with man that it now probably has no permanent existence away from him, so that it is pretty safe to say that every diphtheria infection has been caught from a previous human infection. Sometimes the infection is so slight that a definite illness is unrecognisable and sometimes there is no sign of illness at all. These people may be carriers, capable of passing on the germs to other people without ever having the disease themselves.

Diphtheria bacilli grow outside the human | body on a suitable kind of broth and leave the broth infused with a toxin, or poison. This toxin, injected in small amounts into man or some other mammal, causes a substance to be formed in the blood which neutralises the toxin. These anti-toxins teach the boys to fignt the germs. They are formed naturally in children during an attack of diphtheria, if 'the child survives. By introducing the neutralising anti-toxins before the child is exposed to the danger of infection, immunisation helps the child combat the diphtheria poison readily. Diphtheria immunisation is free in New Zealand—and is best done between the ages of 6 months and one year.