POVERTY IS DEATH.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 700, 18 December 1909, Page 4

POVERTY IS DEATH.

We are building a great sanitarium in Chicago with which to cure tuberculosis patients. That is a good thing to do. It is one step towards taking advantage of the knowledge which science has furnished in the fight against the great white plague. But it is beginning at the wrong end. Consumption is a wage worker’s disease. It is born of exploitation. This fact has been proven much more conclusively than that it is due to any particular kind of germ, and the germ origin of tuberculosis has now been accepted by all scientists. This germ, however, shows a strange affinity for working-class tissues. We are told that it shuns fresh air and sunshine, but bankers and brokers and officials of companies are supposed to spend almost as many hours inside of four walls as marble and stone-cutters. But the death-rate among the latter from consumption is five times as great as among the fornv i-. Book-keepers work ocneath the same roof with the bankers, but the tuberculosis germ is four times as fond of the employee as -the employer. Clergymen are notoriously sedentary in their occupation, yet the consumption germ, in its hunt for victims, is four times as apt to light upon a cigar-maker as a clergyman. If the economic condition of all the workers was made as good as that of “ bankers, brokers and officials of companies,” the deaths from tuberculosis would be reduced som« 8o or 90 per cent. That is the first lesson of these figures. As a matter of fact the disease would disappear, for the few remaining cases could then be treated in our new sanitarium with such thoroughness that consumption would be eliminated—Chicago Daily Socialist