NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIV, Issue 1060, 22 June 1912, Page 2

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

We published in last issue, a paragraph stating that Professor Elie Metchnikoff had lectured before the Academy of Sciences in Paris upon a microbe which is said to have the power of giving long life. The Professor is perhaps the greatest living authority on bacteriology. He is a Russian by birth, and was formerly a Protessor of Zoology at Odessa, and subsequently Director of the Bacteriological Institute in that city. In 1890 he went to Paris to study under Pasteur and soon made a world-wide reputation by his brilliant discoveries in regard to phagocytes and the bacterial causation of infectious diseases. In 1908 he received half the Noble prize for medicine. The Christchurch Press Wales that Professor Metchnikoff has been working for the last five or six years on the '■■ubject of prolonging human life. He is the originator of the soured milk treatment, or lactic acid therapy, and was convinced that in this he had discovered a method of starving off old age as well as of curing various diseases, such as chronic rheumatism, neuritis, various forms of indigestion, etc. Briefly put, his theory was that the diseases named, and the arterial degeneration of advancing years which has given rise to the saying that “a man is as old as his arteries,” were due to the action of iuiurious bacteria in the intestines. In Metchnikoff’s treatment the lactic acid bacilU are set free, and go on multiplying in the intestine, where the lactic acid they produce destroys injurious bacteria and checks the putrefactive changes which lead to the injurious effects in the system already referred to. The treatment has been brought into some discredit by the indiscriminate manner in which it was employed by laymen very often in uusuit able cases, but properly used it seems to be capable of good results. Probably the old-fashioned butter-milk cure, however, was just a > efficacious. It is not clear, Irom the cable message, whether Professor Metchnikoff has merely been giving the results of further experiments with the lactic acid bacilli, or whether be has discovered a new microbe, with lifeprolonging qualities. The cable message speaks of it as ‘‘producing sugar, reducing intestinal poisons.” The lactic acid bacilli, as we have shown, reduces intestinal poisons, but it actually lives on the sugar in the food and converts it into acid. Unless the cable message has been mangled in transmission, therefore, it would seem that the great bacteriologist is now working on fresh lines. He himsell is in his sixtyseventh year, and will therefore have an excellent opportunity of showing, by personal demonstration, how far his new elixir is effective in keeping the enemy at bay.