HEALTH AND HOT WINDS.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 4383, 7 April 1875, Page 3

HEALTH AND HOT WINDS.

(Erom the Melbourne Leader,)

We have on several occasions lately referred to the excessive mortality in Melbourne and suburbs during January. The mortality tables just published, give the full returns, and 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 were 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 diarrhoea and dysentery, to which 151 succumbed. A question lias 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 of the disease known as measles, and there can he no doubt about the. abnormal fatality of the epidemic. An explanation has been given to the effect that the exceptionally hot weather which 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. Tliis explanation may account for the greater mortality in the case of those afflicted ■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, and further, to be carried hence to distant places in the Pacific. If we were told that the Australian constitution is less able than the European to withstand the poisonous attacks, and more prone to disease from infection or contagion, we could understand such a rationale , but medical men do not venture to advance it. To the reproach of the Allopathists, the only gleam of light we have about the treatment of the disease comes from the Homeopathists, who are able to-say that no deaths occurred in the Homeopathic wards of the hospital at Geelong from measles in January last.