EPIDEMICS.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4800, 19 January 1925, Page 2

EPIDEMICS.

HOW THEY ARE SPREAD. PRECAUTIONARY MEASURES. "I am sometimes ashamed of the cowardice of my fellow countrymen in times of epiemias,” said a pro'minent New Zealand medical man to a “Dominion” reporter recently. “In England, where every class of disease from nearly every country is handled at the numerous ports,” continued the doctor, “they have no quarantine stations,and yet the situation is satisfacty handled. Here in New Zealand, on the other hand, you have a number of quarantine station that are hardly ever used, and if a stray traveller gets into the country suffering from tuberculosis, or any other trouble, there is a hue and cry throughout the land. We appear to thing that we are more or less immune from disease, whereas other people are far less healthy than ne are, which, of course, is quite incorrect.

“We are certainly particularly free from disease, being a lowly populated country, but as our population increases we will certainly be more subject to epidemics. It is personal contact, or contact with things touened by others, that causes the spread of disease, and that is why we get off very lightly when disease is about. Take a city like London or New York for example. Here one finds a thicklyly populated slum area, and once an epidemic sets in it grows in virulence until many thousands of lives have been lost. The people cannot get aiiay from the infected area, and are consecuquently meeting carriers at every turn.

“The same thing was found during the war. Immediately a disease assumed alarming proportions the orders were to separate me troops. When men are’segregated in an overcrowded condition disease had its chance, and it was invariably found that when the men weie scattered the trouble immediately began to die down. One of the principal reasons was found in the fact that the older germs are the more virulent they become, and not only is infection more rapid, but. more deadly.

“In nearly all epidemics it is personal contact that spreads the trouble, and it follows that the surest way .if defeating disease is to remove the possibility of contact to the greatest possible extent. “With regard to the present wave of infantile paralysis, there is certainly* no need for alarm in a country such as this. I have known the disease to affect some 9000 children iu a city like New York, where conditions assisted ite growth, but in the largest cities of New Zealand the greatest number of cases reported in any particularly violent period has been in the neighbourhood of 200. If parents would recognise the vital importance of keeping children away from crowded areas the trouble would be dissipated in a remarkably short space of time."