INFANTILE PARALYSIS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 1669, 1 February 1917, Page 2

INFANTILE PARALYSIS.

THE epidemic of infantile paralysis in New York last year caused 2,4.00 deaths, while more than 5,000 children remained paralysed. The conclusion at which Dr. Haven Emerson, health commissioner of New York, has arrived is that the city need not fear another serious epidemic within live years or more. This -.assertion was based upon the history of the disease and the belief generally held that the susceptible material of the community had served as hosts for the parasite causing the infection, so that another epidemic probably would not occur until new children to whom it was commuuicable had been born and reared. The great gain in publice education, during the epidemic, could be expected to mitigate future attacks through greater attention to personal hygiene, more respectful attention to official medical advice, prompter reporting of cases and more tractable obedience to authoritative efforts to prevent its spread. Dr. Emerson added that the opening of the schools last autumn had been fully justified, there having been no school epidemic, and physicians having learned that in all communicable diseases schools were, points of control and not points of infection and dissemination. Reviewing the investigation of the disease during the epidemic, Dr. U. H. Lavinder, who was in charge of the research work for the United .States Public Health Service, staled that it is definitely known from laboratory examinations that poliomyelitis is an infectious disease resulting from a living micro-organism. Proof (hat the disease may be spread by carriers has been found in the laboratories. Field studies, through ’ charts, maps and the like, indicate that the disease spreads from one person to another, though there are certain serious objections to that theory. Among (hose objections are the facts that sometimes frank cases fail to produce poliomyelitis in others, while healthy carriers are more dangerous, and that the seasonal incidence is contrary to that of other infectious diseases. There is hope for the development of an artificial immunity through*(he use of u vaccine such as that employed in typhoid and smallpox.