a New light Upon Disease.

Te Aroha News, Volume VI, Issue 280, 11 July 1888, Page 6

a New light Upon Disease.

ySKuiCMj men have long been familiar with the fact, that sanitation has been a saving to 'iin community at large, in doctors' bills, in nursing, and even in days of laboui to the industrial clashes. But it had been difficult to p'lt results into figures .so as to impress the public mind. Mr Brudenell Carter attempted this in his> inaugural addiess to the College of State Medicine. Every case of fever, he calculated, cost the community £2 ; the reduction in the annual death rate fever to 483 per million from the 1851-60 rate of 908 per million, represented a total saving of C 300,000, ' but of this no one seemed conscious; while theannual cost of .scarlet lever a( the present time was £400,000 a year. If, therefore, we could trace scarlet fever to a definite cause, as a bovine disease communicable by milk, we could adopt precautions which ' would save the country every year somewhere about half as much money as the recent conversion of stocks, besides much misery.' Here is a new light upon disease. It is? increasingly preventible, and as we reduce its virulence and i*ange we save money. Ratepayers should remember fcuch things when they pay then- sanitary rates, and they ma}' profitably let their thoughts play about Mr Caller's striking figures.