The Manawatu Herald. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 1906. INFLUENZA.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXVIII, Issue 3723, 27 November 1906, Page 2

The Manawatu Herald. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 1906. INFLUENZA.

An influenza wave of almost unexampled virulence has lately swept the colony. It has, as is its wont, attacked rich and poor alike, physician and patient. Influenza doesn’t care whether it kills a Minister of the Crown or a bottle-o-man. Everybody knows the symptons. The man who hasn’t previously been struck with the epidemic scorns the person who has. It is so weak to get influenza. When the strong person gets it he know it is no matter for scorning. In fact there is no disease in the colony, with the single exception of the dread consumption, that sends so many people to the grave or to the asylum. Neglect it and it may develop into pneumonia. It frequently does. Pneumonia

is the best friend of the man with the scythe. • * * * Infuenza frequently brings on heart-weakness. Without any complications whatever it may kill its victim by sapping his vitality. It strikes the weakest people of a whole country-side at the same time. It mows down the aged, the middle-aged and the young. It fills the earth with a great sneeze and forces the handkerchief trade to work overtime. The phsician who comes to see you, gives you phenaticin and goes away home to have influenza for a week. You are recovering and go to see your friends to tell them so. You present your friends with the legacy. When you had measles once you flatter yourself that you are immune. You can’t flatter yourself about influenza. It attacks you time after time always with the intention of killing you if possible. Having taken toll of one country it visits the next, leaving behind it weak hearts, weak lungs, weak eyes, weak hearing and smell, and fuller asylums.

It is a comparatively new broom and it sweeps clean. It is as virulent and unchecked in a country that has a great Health Department as it is in the country of its birth that has no Health Department —Russia. Medical men may pretend to understand it but they don’t seem to. If they understood it they would suffer less from it themselves. They tell you learnedly enough that the micro-or-ganism from which the disease is propagated attacks the mucous membrane of the air passages,' but they don’t define the organism and they don’t appear to have seen him or to have found out an -antidote organism. The Health Department can discourse learnedly of enteritis and order drains to be fixed up or the water supply cleansed. They can order the bubonic rat to be chased, but the only thing the Health Department can tell the people of New Zealand about the worse scourge is "the epidemic is dying away.’’ * * * Aw, epidemics die away, but the function of a highly paid Health Department is to hurry them up. Our Health Department does not hurry the influenza out of the country because it doesn’t know how. It is a moot point whether any other medical people understand any better. Still one would think that the panjandrums of the Department would have something to say about a disease that has absolutely revelled in death for the past month or two.

Everybody has a cure for in-' fluenza, but everybody gets it. Alb friends tell you just what to do, from snuffing salt up the nose to drinking hot whiskey. One victim assured us he sits wrapped in several blankets and his awful thoughts over a kettle of boiling water set on a spirit lamp. Another sticks to the old fashioned salts. Most people take quinine in some form or other and quite a number fill themselves up with bromide, which may have a worse effect than the disease. The simple fact remains that in the majority of cases influenza runs its course. If it doesn’t kill, you are stronger than the microbe. If' it kills, the microbe scores a trick. It is a disease that physicians study, too little. They seem to accept it as inevitable, but it is as worthy of their esteemed study as cancer, consumption or insanity, because it may set up at least two out of the three scourges.

We want to hear from the Health Department about influenza. We want to hear that the Department has marshalled its dread forces to fight a foe that is worthy of even better steel than the metal in the said Department. They may theorise, but they don’t fight. Influenza does not theorise, but it fights better than any epidemic itsown weight. If Dr. Mason could discover the microbe and its enemy he would be a benefactor to the world at large. But at present the doctors in general are content to say that the epidemic is passing away for a little time. Let them find weapons in the meantime to meet him when he shows himself again.