A Favourable Report on Pasteur's Systom.

Te Aroha News, Volume V, Issue 219, 10 September 1887, Page 3

A Favourable Report on Pasteur's Systom.

The "Medical News" contains a lengthy abstract of the report presented to Parliament by the P.tibish Commission appointed lust year to inquire into 2,1. Pasteur's treatment of hydiophobia. From this abstract; the following paragraphs are taken : "Ib may hence be deemed certain that M. Pastour has discovered a method of protection from rabies comparable with that which vaccination affords against infection from .small-pox. It would bo difficult to overestimate the importance of the discovery, whether for its practicability or for its general application to general pathology, it shows a new method of inoculation, or, as Pasteur sometimes calls it, of vaccination, the like of which it may become possible to employ for the protection of bothnian and domestic animals against the most intense kind of virus. "The duration of immunity conferred by inoculation is not yet determined, bufc dining the two years that have passed since it was first proved there have been no indications of its being limited. The committee thinks it is therefore certain that the inoculations practised by M. Pa.stour have prevented the occurrence of hydrophobia in a large proportion of those who, it they had not been so inoculated, would have died of that disease, and his discovery .shows that- it may become possible to arrest by inoculation, even after infection, other diseases besides hydrophobia. His researches have also added very largely to the knowledge of the pathology of hydrophobia, and supplied a sure means of determining whether an animal which has died under suspicion of rabies was really affected w ibh that disease or not." The "Medical News" says, editorially: The report of the British Hydrophobia Commission constitutes the ablest defence of M. Pasieur'b method which has yet been made, and it is cause for congratulation that men so competent to observe fact 3 and ueigh evidence ha\e been able, after the" investigations, to reach a unanimous conclusion as to the prophylactic value o£ the inoculation system of Pasteur.