COLDS.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXIII, Issue 4444, 24 July 1922, Page 3

COLDS.

SHOULD BE NOTIFIABLE.

NEW MEDICAL VIEW. (By G. L. Holden.)

Have you had your first, second, or third winter cold yet ? If so, you will hardly confess it. You will blush and say: “Oh, it’s nothing! It isn’t really a cold.” And you will shuffle away like a pickpocket detected in the act. For no human malady of a minor order is nowadays so bitterly resented by our fellow-creatures as a cold. And now the medical profession appears to be adopting a like attitude. Tnat is, doctors are beginning to write about a cold as if it were a crime, and of the cold-catcher as of a criminal at large.

I have just been reading one a'.’ these indictments. After a lengthy sermon on what the author appears to .consider the premeditated crime of catching a cold he declares that if the cold actually develops the “guilty person’’ should consider it a duty te himself and his neighbours to stay in bed “during the febrile period”—-and afterwards at home ,until he is cured.

The writer of this article is without. doubt right about the sense of duty that we ought to possess ip regard to a c'old in the head, but how many of us who work for our livings are able to indulge in that sense, if we possess it? How many of us are there who would not, from purely selfish motives, prefer staying in a comfortable bed in a. nice warm room, with a novel to read and the flicker o,f p fire to watch, to going through the damp chilly air to a stuffy office, where we have to goad our cold-clog-ged wits into something like their normal state of; activity ? All really sane men and women to-day prefer to be well, as right-minded human being-s in all times must have done, and, though the molly-coddle is taboo, most people take reasonable personal precautions to keep well, so far as their education permits. Even the would-be martyr does not pride himself on having a cold in the head, lie cannot call it “my” cold when his fellow-creatures are coughing and sneezing all .around him, as is, alas, top often the case. There is nothing romantic about it either, and he if usually only too painfully aware of the fact that he is rather an object of ridicule than pity. Surely, then, the man who has caught cold may be acquitted of the criminal intent imputed to him as above suggested. I cannot help feeling that, though lie whom I venture to call the ‘victim” of a cold should do everything ’:e can to avoid giving it to other people, he is an object of pity rather than of blame, if circumstances compel him to go into the society of others. MAKE THEM NOTIFIABLE. It. is true that a cold in the head, like any other form of epidemic, is spread widely when large numbers are herded together in one building, and it is a simple matter to tell people that they ought to stay away from crowded rooms, but how, rnay I ask, is this to be managed by ordinary “daily breaders” ? Money has to he got; many things, including sometimes doctors’ visits, have to be paid for. Employers of labour and owners of large establishments of all kinds, as well as the companies which, run our public conveyances, might, however, do more .than they dp at present to prevent the spread of infectious colds.

Why, then, cannot medical gentlemen make some useful suggestions to this end, instead of inveighing against ihe unfortunate sufferer, as though he ought to be an inmate of a gaol, ,f no* actually deserving, of capital punishment ?

Dr, if they cannot be more sympathetic, let them, at least, be practical. Let tnem insist that colds, like fevers, should be notifiable and the sufferers forcibly isolated. Then we shall be forced to take a holiday whenever we get colds.