MANKIND AND DISEASE

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 312, 24 March 1928, Page 11

MANKIND AND DISEASE

ARE WE BECOMING IMMUNE? The hope that man may look forward to a time when he becomes so used to infectious diseases that they will disappear altogether, in view of the fact that most of the ills that affect us are becoming milder and less dangerous, is held out by Dr. J. Laumonier, writing in “Le Petit Provencal” (MarI seilles, France). I “We always end up by dying, but everyone wishes to delay this event as long as possible,” writes Dr. Laumonier. “In this regard the most recent statistics purvey a certain degree of comfort, since they show that the average length of human life is increasing about 12 months every 10 or 12 years. At this rate, in a few scores of centuries our descendants will be living as long as the Biblical patriarchs. “Perhaps we should derive additional consolation from the fact that we do not die of the same maladies as our ancestors. In fact, certain diseases have been disappearing, while new ones take their places—or, at any rate, seem to do so; for often what we are inclined to consider a new disease is only a very old one which has changed its character, either through the efforts of preventive hygiene and specific therapeutics, or under the infiuenee of some spontaneous transformation whose causes escape us. “Numerous cases illustrate this. Thus, acute articular rheumatism, though it sometimes occurs as an epidemic, has become rarer and does not attack the joints as a regular thing. It now prefers the heart—a fact that by no means renders it less serious. In like manner, we seldom meet plain pneumonia now, but rather bronchopneumonia, whose character is even more grave. As for the grip, a rather mild affection by itself, it is now complicated with infections of all kinds which give it varied scope, very often serious, sometimes violent, as we saw during the epidemic of 1918-19, which had more than 30 millions of victims throughout the world. “On the other hand, besides these maladies that are aggravated or transformed, there are many others that have grown feebler, such as chlorosis, exceptional to-day; gout, whose acute crises are replaced by a chronic development; diabetes, in which the very free glycosuria of yesterday is now rarely seen, and which develops with a slowness formerly unknown; tuberculosis, which tends toward the fibrous type, more easily curable; and finally variola, typhoid, diphtheria and scarlatina, whose ravages are now limited by our curative powers.

“To sum up, a considerable number of diseases are changing; some are incontestably more serious, but most are weakening, tending to threaten a less immediate danger, going through an evolution that is more easily controlled. This progressive attenuation is certainly not without influence on the prolongation of human life. Although in certain cases this is the fruit of progress in medical knowledge, in others it appears to result from the altered nature of the morbid conditions, to which mam is reacting more and more by slow adaptation. There are microbes, such as those of putrefaction, that are no longer able to make us ill, because we have become used to them. Why should we not get accustomed to other disease germs? The attenuation that is manifested by certain infections is per haps only the advance indication of an adaptation that will sooner or later protect man from all their attacks.”