The White Scourge.

Horowhenua Chronicle, 24 March 1910, Page 4

The White Scourge.

IS CONSUMPTION PREVEN-

TABLE?

The spread of tubercular diseases in New Zealand is beginning to attract the serious attention of thoughtful persons, and efforts are being made by the medical profession and those engaged in the framing and administration of the health laws to cope with the ravages of what has not inaptly been called " Tho White Scourge." Til a book entitled " The Greatest Enemy," published by T. Fisher Unwin (London), the author gives some useful information on the question of tuberculosis. He says Tt is quite possible — and the practical possibility must be faced—that tuberculosis may one day wipe out civilised natioiis. Never in tho history of the world has any malady killed so many victims or kept up so continuous an attack on human life; How this has happened is made clear in a very remarkable book just issued; but one peculiar and alarming element in the character of the disease is omitted here, as in most discussions on the subject.

aX EXTRAORDINARY CHAK-

ACTERISTIC. Unlike other diseases, consumption does not diminish, but often rather increases, the charm and beauty of appearance in its victims, ft seems to add in similar fashion to their mental alertness and, one is sometimes inclined to believe, oven to their physical aptitude. We could all give instances of great cricketers who have fallen to the disease. Iveats is but one instance out of a multitude in _ whom an ethereal fineness of insight is associated with a consumptive body. The bloom of a consumptive's complaxion is proverbial, and this unusual and unexpected outwa'rd appearance is much more than a curious correlation for the inquisitive to investigate. It means that the victims of consumption are rather more likely to marry than other people. THE QUESTION OF HEREDITY. The authors of "The Greatest Enemy" have perhaps thought less of this social aspect of consumption because tliey deny—surely with excessive certainty—that tuberculosis is inherited. That consumptive patients have consumptive children is, of course, a universal belief; instances will occur to everyone, yet neither statistics nor investigation quite bear it out. Among investigated cases ol consumptive people not very many more than half spriing from consumptive parents; and a great accumulation of evidence goes to prove that the disease is generally caught by infection not inherent in the body. AVe all believe in heredity; but the stream of nature, the flow of blood, the energy of the growing cells, are such that, in many thousands of cases to one, life can expel death if children are once well planted, so to say, in good ground and well fed and well watered. If this is so, and science begins to prove unmistakably that it is so, tuberculosis. like other diseases, is preventable—indeed is easier to prevent than other diseases. We know that most people are attacked before they reach middle age—this is discoverable through the rolic marks of lessons —and we know that the majority successfully resist. COM PULSORY NOTIFICATION. Our knowledge of the avenues ol infection is so explicit that refusal to act is acknowledment of suicidal lethargy. In the United States, iu the favourite school subject of liyigene, the children learn what I may call the art of bodily defence. Tliev learn what consumption is, anil we certainly need in England, ns a first step a universal education in disease-fighting, a sort of universal service, compulsory as well as voluntary, for the purposes of national protection against disease. Invaluable work would be done if such a book as this, which is thorough and sensible and suggestive, were made a text-book for municipal authorities and recommended to all parents. One of the best histories of consumption concerns a certain London flat in which the inmates were exempt from disease for the first eight years. Then the rooms were taken by a consumptive family. After they left one set of residents after another were wiped out by consumption. The rooms had not been disinfected or re-papered or distempered. There is little doubt that the inmates were directly infected by the bacilli left by the consumptives, and that they succumbed because the place was dark and dirty. The example contains the whole moral. What we have to do, if Britain is to be a nation of healthy people, is. first, to limit the causes of infection ; secondly, to give nature power to resist infection.

A SAFEGUARD. Pure milk is the most obvious safeguard. So prevalent is tuOeiculosis in cows that, as I have said, one in every five half-pints of milk is infected. We cannot all drink the milk of goats, which are mmune from infection, though it would be wise to use this milk in infinitely larger quantities. But. the pasteurisation of milk and ot ohurned cream, or, better still, the heating and half-drying of-milk, provide a perfect safeguard which no nation that values the health of its citizens can afford to neglect. Much infection is conveyed directly by tho air, and the air is poisoned for the most part by disobedience of the most elementary duties both by consumptives and their friends. "How touching it is," said a villager in a country village the other day, "to see the sister laying her head on her brother's shoulder." The sister

was very ill from tuberculosis in the throat, and not a, person in the household would believe that such close contact, such leanings over the patient, were in any degree dangerous. The omnipresence- of these unseen and living poisons about ns and in us may almost excuse despair; but despair gives way when we see science day by day driving into the open the splendid fact that, the air of heaven and the light of day and the vigour of life are more than a match for the hosts of death. In the banishment of these is the suicidal sin of civilisation.