COST OF CONSUMPTION.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LI, Issue 293, 5 December 1908, Page 6

COST OF CONSUMPTION.

YEARLY LOSS TO AMERICA OF £200,000,000. Xcw York, October 2. Startling statistic* were presented to the International Congress on Tuberculosis in Washington to-day by I'rofcssor Irving Fisher, of Yale University, who 'estimated that 5,000,00(1 people now living in the United States are (loomed to death from consumption unless radical remedial measures are adopted. Tile object of the professor's argument was to illustrate the folly of the eountry. in refusing Ho ;reeog(aise the economic necessity of spending gigantic sums in fighting the disease. Consumption, he said, killed 1:18,(10(1 people in America and cost the nation over £200,(1110,000 yearly. The death roll from tuberculosis was equal to those of typhoid, scarlet fever, diphtheria, appendicitis, meningitis, diabetes, small- J pox and cancer together. I

I Moreover, on an average if look each | patient three years to die, during which the victim was able to earn little or nothing. The disease, too, usually al--1 lacked young men and women at the very time they were beginning to earn money. The minimum cost of such items as doctors' bills, medicines, nursing, and loss of earnings before death was £4BO. which, with the destruction "f potential earning ponyr. brought the total of each case to £IOOO. Half this cost generally fell on the victims themselves, )>ut the cost to others was over C 58.000,000 a year. Therefore, the professor argued, it would lie wise economy for the community to invest a million pounds in fighting the disease instead of the fraction of 1 per cent of that amount ■which is now expended.