The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND FRIDAY, MAT 10, 1929 THE MENACE ON THE HILL

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 659, 10 May 1929, Page 8

The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND FRIDAY, MAT 10, 1929 THE MENACE ON THE HILL

INFECTIOUS disease, like unemployment, is acute at different seasons and more or less mildly chronic all the time. There is a great deal too much of both in this province. The first of these evils is dealt with by the physician, and the second by the politician, but neither of the remedial influences succeeds in acquiring outstanding fame for prevention and cure, though it is fair to add that both try hard and give of their best services and do good work. This is one of the bad seasons for infections disease. The latest official statistics show that the Auckland Province, in April, experienced one of its worst months for a long time as regards the prevalence of “catching complaints.’ Altogether, there were 493 eases of infectious diseases notified to the Health Department last month, this relatively high total representing an increase of 217 over the March aggregate. However disagreeable these facts may seem, the community has been given the consoling assurance that the extent of dysentery, diphtheria, and scarlet fever has in no sense been epidemical. So there is no cause whatever for alarm which, of course, is very different from anxiety. There is some reason for the less serious emotion in the fact* that scarlet fever still is perniciously prevalent throughout the whole Dominion, and tends toward an increase. But, here again, conditions are not comparable with the epidemic of this disease in 1916 and even the milder one ten years later. Reasonable care and intelligent attention to the health of children, without any silly mollycoddling, should easily hold the present outbreak in check. In enumerating the spread of infectious diseases throughout this province last month the Auckland medical officer of health does not discuss or make any reference at all to the vital question of hospital treatment. The public would have been grateful to learn officially whether the lack of an adequate hospital for the treatment and perfect isolation of infectious diseases in a province containing about a third of the Dominion’s population has hindered the prevention of the present outbreaks of dysentery, diphtheria and scarlet fever. This question is of the first importance to an apathetic and sometimes too careless community and should be answered. And there is also the more serious question whether or no such inadequate hospital accommodation as exists among lire huddle of buildings on “Hospital Hill” has contributed to the spread of these diseases. A few months ago as well as exactly a year back the hospital administrators themselves admitted complainingly that the makeshift and overcrowded accommodation had been responsible for the occurrence of cross-infection among patients. It is a lamentable fact that, in the greatest and most expensive hospital in this country a youngster suffering from scarlet fever may contract under skilled treatment the more dangerous disease, diphtheria. What is the Hospital Board going to do about it? Is it still to be the policy of the reinforced board to go on with the construction of an infectious diseases hospital block on a site within the public hospital grounds? The members of the administration at their last meeting before the municipal elections which provided it with a transfusion of medical blood demonstrated, in their rash persistence to proceed with the new building in the heart of the city, that they had grave doubts about the wisdom of their obstinate policy. The chairman explained that it would be necessary to provide special accommodation for nurses and then naively exposed the folly of the whole business by asserting that “it was through nurses going out from infectious diseases wards that infection was spread.” Every physician in Auckland knows the danger associated with the present system, yet only one member of the medical profession— Dr. Gunson—has denounced in the open the atrocious folly of the hoard in attempting to increase the menace. Now that Dr. Gunson has become a member of the board it is to be hoped that he will be able to pei’suade his colleagues to abandon their project, and build in essential isolation an adequate, but not ornate hospital for the proper and safe treatment of infectious diseases.