INFANTILE PARALYSIS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVII, Issue 2859, 17 March 1925, Page 3

INFANTILE PARALYSIS.

CLIMATIC THEORY. During flic week-end three further Palmerston cases have been admitted to the hospital. All the cases are making favourable progress. In regard to the climatic theory, Dr. T. 11. A. Valintine, DirectorGeneral of Health, in New Zealand, makes some interesting comments in a special report. “Though infantile paralysis is now universally recognised to be an infectious disease," lie says, “and though the consensus of opinion, which every year is further substantiated, ascribes its spread to contact direct or indirect, it lias been thought by some that peculiar climatic conditions may predispose to the disease, and determine an epidemic, the germ itself being widespread in non-epidemic times.

“The data collected for 1 many epidemics, including a number of winter ones, do not support this idea. Epidemics have occurred under very variable weather conditions as regards humidity temperature, dustiness, rains and snowfall, and wind. Again, in the late summer and early autumn epidemics, which are admitted the commonest, it has aften been noted that the radical spread of the disease does not correspond to any constant climatic factor. The outbreak will be subsiding in one locality at the same time that it is advancing in another and still later spread to another even when all three places are experiencing weather conditions which are practically identical. The disease appears to follow lines of transport rather than to correspond to any definite climatic factor.”