Untitled

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 37, 24 May 1910, Page 4

HOOKWORM.

The news that the dreaded "hookworm" is attacking the islands and that 51 per cent, of the natives of American Samoa are roftenng from it, is a Very serious matter for the people affected. .Hookworm is common in several States oi America, and although it was introduced ; by negro slaves, the negroes who now hve m the affected States are absolutely immune from it, The areas affected are peopled by "mean white trash," and up to a few years agio all Americans who were not "mean white trash" believed that people were suffering from "sheer cussedness." But a clever medical man, Interested in the condition 01 a people .who had no animal vigor, no ambition, who 'were content to live like pigs, whose brains were as useless as vneir bodies, and who had no interest in life, returned to iNew York, and simply told ■an unbelieving medical fraternity and the people generally that the "mean white trash" was mean because it was eaten up with the fearful disease of hookworm. In many of the schools in the affected area sixty or seventy per cent, of the children have the disease, showing itself in an appetite for dirt, distension of the abdomen, serious wen- ' tal disturbance, anaemia, miserable .physical proportions, and a general disregard for everything and everybody. The hookworm patient is frequently unaoie to tell you where he lives, and he does not care even if he knows. The "mean whites" are proline. Their offspring is not as yet immune, and the condition is so grave that everything possible that can be done in alleviation is being done. The cause is a minute worm, which is literally hooked, and which makes it attack from the ground in which the deposited ova hatch. Once hooked to the human subject, the subject is on the way to become a "mean white." The physician referred to above, and whose najme is for the moment forgotten, i 3 confident that if .patients cannot be cured of the disease, rigorous measures will prevent its spread, f6f of course hookworm is not epidemic, and cannot be handed from parent to child. It is only when the child of a "mean wnrte-' has been attacked, by the wretched creature that lie become* as po« a specimen as his parents. Evidently the notable laziness of the natives in American Samoa has now been traced to its true source. It seems that the method tafken to kill the disease is to insist on the personal cleanliness of the patients and to treat the source of it—that is the earth. The presumption is that hookworm would die in its- preliminary stages if it had no "host," and that an abandoned area would soon become clean it it were free from personal pollution.