ALCOHOL AND THE EPIDEMIC

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 56, 30 November 1918, Page 9

ALCOHOL AND THE EPIDEMIC

Sir,—l noticed in your paper some time a"o that Dr. Metcalfe Sharpe had made a statement concerning the Niagara, and also with regard to the use of alcohol in allaying the ravages, of influenza. A further statement concerning tl'is matter may have escaped the notice of your readers. It. was contained in a cable message published on November 2"> from the London "Times," and save advice concerning alcohol and- • influenza, and issued from the Royal College of Physicians. This cable message stated: "That during this influenza epidemic each person should continue to use alcohol (within the. limits <.f moderation), whatever habit or experience had proved to bo most suitable Io his own health." '

Dr. Sharpe himself maintains that fully eighty per cent, of <he medical profession either take alcohol themselves as a beverage in one form or another, or prescribe it for their patients. Dr. Sharpe further added that "when alcohol is introduced into the body it is' in part oxidised, and transformed 'finally into carbonnles. Alcoliol then is a food," he says, "and instead of promoting combustion of the tissues, retards it by withdrawing a certain quantity of oxygen from (lie'blood* corpuscles. Alcohol, therefore," 1 e concludes, "is a useful food, and an agroeahlo stimulant, and in a crisis such as we nre passing through now, wn cannot afford to ignore it either as medicine or as a prophylactic." Now, Sir, hundreds of people-in the City of Wellington are being daily deprived by the .action of the Minister of Public Health of their continued use of alcohol, which from habit and experience has proyed\ most .suitable to their health, and it seems to uie that if is lime in the interests of the whole community that the embargo should be immediately lifted by tho Hon. Mr. Tinssell to allow the general public—eighty per cent, of them being, like the medical profession, users of alcoholic Leverages— to again resort to their daily stimulant lest some other disease should be induced by compulsory abstinence.

Many hundreds o$ people who ;-re users of alcoholic, liquors have had their homo supplies,, quite adequate to carry them through the epidemic, but these supplies arc running short, and after Dr. Shnrpc's testimony it becomes imperative that the restrictions imposed, not to prevent the use of alcohol, but as a safeguard against contagion through'overcrowding in public bars, should immediately be rescinded. -I am, etc., MODERATE.