HOW TO ESCAPE COLDS

Hokitika Guardian, 23 December 1920, Page 4

HOW TO ESCAPE COLDS

The view is generally held by people brought up in the fetish of inid-AGetor-ian fear of fresh air, and in particular of night air, that “colds” in the head are due to exposure to cold, writes aprofessor of medicine in the “Daily Mail.”

For fear of catching a chill mothers over-dothe their children and confine them indoors, and thus weaken them, for in truth it is exercise in the fresh air which makes them strong and hardy. For the same reason mothers shut up the windows of rooms and occasion the very illnesses they hope to avoid, by increasing tile spread of infection from one to another and by putting the membrane of the breathing tubes of their children to a disadvantage in closely humid, stagnant air. The blouses worn hv girls and cut low in the neck to show their charms are called “pneumonia blouses,” hut really the number of cases of pneumonia in the year is not in the least altered whether fashion dictates high or low-cut dresses.

As long as "the girls keep themselves comfortably warm by clothing their bodies, it is not in the least to their disadvantage that they wear transparent silk stockings and low-cut blouses.

Mothers who think that by overclothing, confinement indoors in warm rooms, and stuffing with food they can protect their children from illness are quite in the wrong. Colds are spread by infection from mothers or are set up by the microbes one carries in one’s own breathing passages, and the microbes gain power when thc resistance of thc membrane of the breathing passages is lowered by the conditions of life.

Pneumonia can he caused in animals by blowing some of the culture fluid teeming with the pneu-moeoccus microbe right into the lungs, not by merely .infecting the nose and throat. It is probably then that pneumonia may be sneezed out by people with “colds,”

whose colds are due to a virulent strain of pneu-moeoccus. People with such ‘colds’ may possibly infect themselves by snuffling doplets from their own noses or throats into their lungs. . There are unsettled people—country people,’who come into towns, or children on first going to school—who are infected by the carriers of microbes to which they have not become immunised. The town folk are kept more or less ininiunised by frequent infection witJi small closes. Tbe immunity so set up is very important; equally important is the keeping of the body in a vigorous state by an abstemious life and regular hours of sleep and open-door exercise. There is the seed—the microbe ; the soil—the state of the respiratory membrane, and tlie conditions of the en•vironment which, together, make for the spread of infectious colds; and cold, wet weather may act not by chilling people who go out in it, hut by driving them into the close, stagnant, overheated and humid air of rooms, and so putting their respiratory membrane and blood into a less resistant stale. 'Those who face had weather and keep fit by hard exercise, and are small eaters, are singularly immune from infectious colds, live long, and enjoy life.