PLAGUE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXIX, Issue 3766, 30 May 1907, Page 2

PLAGUE.

Science minimises dangers to health, although in a state of nature man has no use for medical science. The occurrence of some cases of plague in Auckland spurs the authorities to feats of cleanliness —the best method of combating any disease. When the plague broke out in London in . the bad old days during the seventeenth century, people bad to die because everybody believed it was the visitation of God. and that it was useless to combat anything the Creator sent. The fatalistic principles of the hordes of Asia simply spur them to “ let things rip,” with the result that plague carries off millions in the great continent. Among more matter-of-iact people the belief that “God helps those who help themselves happily holds, with the result that a campaign of cleanliness is started, isolation of patients insisted on, and everything possible done to cambat the fell visitation. While the authorities in the large centres have insisted on this campaign of cleanliness, people distant from the centres should, of course, remember that plague will breed in any place that offers it a foo.hold that rats, and fleas, and mice, and other plague carriers do not stop to consider whether a man is a Foxtonian or an Aucklander, and that dirt at Levin or dirt at _Mangonui are the natural habitation of the plague bacillus. It is so easy to be clean in New Zealand. There is plenty of water and air, and sunshine, disinfectants, rat-traps and insect powder. The people are not fatalists, and they are not steeped in dirt as are the Asiatics. The exercise of intelligence without the forcible intervention of the Health authorities is the best method of combatting any disease whatever, and it is to be hoped that the official and private intelligence of the whole community may be sufficiently acute to check the march of the plague.