TUBERCULOSIS.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXV, Issue 4753, 19 September 1924, Page 4

TUBERCULOSIS.

ITS PREVALENCE IN ENGLAND. METHODS OF PREVENTION. By S. D. Collingwood, in the “ Overseas Daily Mail.” One hundred and seventeen deaths a day was the levy exacted by tuberculosis from England and Wales in 1922. To meet this assault upon the youth of tlie nation—for it is the young who are the most frequent victims —three methods of defence have been suggested. There is first that general improve ment in the hygiene of life which has been going on’for the better part of a century and has reduced the tuberculosis death-rate from more than 3,000 per million of the population, the figure at which it stood in 1847, to its present level of about 1,100. But show that even if the general standard of life could be raised to that at present enjoyed by the professional classes, a 50 per cent, fall in the tuberculosis deathrate is the utmost that could be expected.

Secondly, there is the method of isolation. There is general agreement that if all the people who are suffering from open tuberculosis, and are thus capable of spreading the infection, were,, confined in suitable hospitals, the disease could be stamped out in a generation. But it would be impossible to provide accommodation for so vast a host of patients, nor would public opinion tolerate so ruthless and permanent a breaking-up of families. There remains the method of preventive inoculation.

In 1882 Koch discovered the tubercle bacillus. And yet Professor Karl Pearson, writing in 1911, was forced to the admission that “the relative number of deaths from phthisis has not been diminished by the campaign against the tubercle bacillus.”

To anyone with inside knowledge

the reason for this is not far to seek. Doctors as a class have not made Use of the. weapon which Koch put in their hands forty years ago. In other fields preventive Inoculation has won important victories — against smail-pox, against typhoid, against the pneumonia which used to decimate the South African miners. But against tuberculosis inoculation has hardly been given a trial. i was talking a few weeks ago to an expert, in the treatment of tuberculosis, the medical director of a childien’s hospital. He tolji me of some 30 or 40 cases of children, born of tuberculous parents, whom he has thoroughly immunised against the disease by repeated inoculations. Only one of these children hats died —and in this case the disease was far advanced before the inoculation was made ; all the other patients, so far as can be ascertained, are strong and well, and the eldest of them is now a boy of twelve. Posc-mortem findings make it probable that all, or nearly all, of us contract tuberculosis at one tim.o or another. The vaist majority, however, enjoy a natural immunity, and the disease dies out of itself before it has done any serious harm. The object of prophylactic inoculation is to bring the weaklings up to the average level of resistance, a precaution ■ which, beyond all question, ought to be adopted in the case of children whose parents are tuberculous or whose environment involves a special risk of infection.

If in this way the general resistance of the population to tuberculosis were brought up. to a reasonably high level, tuberculosis as a serious disease would be. abolished. There would still be tubercle bacilli, but they would have Iqst all their power of doing mischief. For it is only by lodging itself in the bodies of weaklings that the bacillus is able to maintain virulence. When once the weaklings have been raised by inoculation to a proper level of resistance, the day of the tubercle bacillus will be over.