CAUSE OF PARALYSIS.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4808, 9 February 1925, Page 2

CAUSE OF PARALYSIS.

V A. ' PLANTS AND ANIMALS. ISi THERE A CONNECTION 1 Some very interesting experiments have been made by Mr Harold Schmidt, chemist, of Auckland, who claims that he has traced a*connection between infantile paralysis and fireblight. Mr Schmidt made a culture from leaves affected -by flreblight and injected some hypodermically into an old. rooster and a young duck. Upon the old rooster no effect was manifest, but the young duck subsequently developed lameness. Mr Schmidt points out that fireblight attacks young children, and he also draws ether analogies.

This novel view jseems to be supported by the statements in an issue of the American magazine called “Physical Culture,” which protested against the isolation of children suffering from infantile para’y.-n. such as Avas insisted upon in New York, a couple of summers ago. In this article it is stated that an American doctor, Dr. William T. Jenkins, holds that infantile paralysis is the result of fungi or fungal products. It is said that he traces the disease to the mould-fungi of cereals. He holds that the majority of diseases of childhood are the result of products of mould-fungi, their bacteria, conidia and toxins, and that they are conveyed by the air, water, and food, the living host; that food is the most serious of all the mediums, and creates the most frequent mode of communicatk.ll, and therefore the most important It-is at the same time the most easily watched and controlled by heat sterilisation, in normal health o>nly a very small percentage of people succumb to the effects of these fungal poisons, and then only when the toxins occur in overwhelming quantities and in insanitary surroundings and dependent upon natural and seasonal 'conditions. “The reason that they attack the infant most frequently and fatally is obvious,” says an article in an American magazine. “Il is the result of certain biological conditions inherent, due to the physiology of the child, which brings us into the field of saccharine and lact,ic fermentation, and the prenatal storage of starch, sugars, and glycogn by the infant. It is of profound interest to the layman, as well as the physician, that tne poisons of . fungi, whether parasitic or putrefactive, produces poisons analagous to .those of plants, such as atrophine, brucine, nicotine, and strychnine, and present striking resemblance to them in physiological action.”