HEALTH AND HOT WINDS.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume X, Issue 89, 14 April 1875, Page 4

HEALTH AND HOT WINDS.

(From the Melbourne Leader.) We have on several occasions lately referred to lhe excessive mortality in Melbourne and suburbs during January. The mortality tables just published, give the full returns, aod show how seriously the colony suffered during the hottest weather ever known in the country. The number of births for January was 724, and the deaths 992. The deaths of children under five years of age were 659, as many as 345 being under one year old. The deaths from measles were 271 ; next, the greatest mortality was due to diarrhcea and dysentery, to wbich 151 succumbed. A question has been raised at Ballarat as to whether the epidemic which has so widely prevailed as to have even reached Fiji, where it has carried off large numbers of natives, is really measles at all. The symptoms in many instances, it is averred, have deviated from the normal type known as measles, and there can be no doubt about the abnormal fatality of the epidemic. An explanation has been given to the effect that, the exceptionally hot wepther wbich favors a derangement of the liver and induces diarrhoea, makes the specific poison of measles more malignant in character, and consequently more dangerous to life., This explanation muy account for the grealer mortality in the caee of those nfflicted with measles during that particular period than at previous periods, but it does not explain why the epidemic was so general as to appear in nearly every household in the country, aud further, to be carried hence to distant ploces in the Pacific. If we were told that the Australian constitution is less able than the European to withstand thepoisonous attacks, and more prone to disease from infection or contagion, we could understand such a ratio?iale, but medical men do not veuture to advance it. To the reproach of tbe Allopatbists, the only gleam of light we have about the treatment of the disease comes from the Homeopathiste, who are able to say that no deaths occurred in the Horn o pathic wards of the hospital at Geelong from measles in January last.