The Daily News. TUESDAY, JUNE 7. THE SCOURGE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 49, 7 June 1910, Page 4

The Daily News. TUESDAY, JUNE 7. THE SCOURGE.

More people die of consumption than of any other disease. Consumption is the result of stuffiness, unnaturalness, and '•'civilisation.'' Every consumptive person is a. menace to any person predisposed to the disease. No person who is predisposed need become consumptive. Consumption in its early stages may be absolutely checked. The reason why such a small percentage of consumption is checked is because the majority of folk believe in stuffiness as a, cure for

nearly all complaints, particularly the dread disease of consumption. The normal man when lie gets a trilling ailment immediately flies to stuffiness as a cure. He talks in awed whispers about "draughts," piles lots of clothes on him, is frightened of air, light, and nature generally, and pulls through merely be- , ca'bse he is normal and nature insists that he shall get better. The consumptive whose vitality is lowered by his wasting disease, on going to a mail who knows something about complaints, is at once ordered to get bade to nature. He is planted out on the hillside where the air and the sun and' the gale can get to him, and he is robbed of the unreasonable clothes he has been in the habit of wearing to make him better. An expert said to us a while ago: "A child who was born in a paddock and who lived 1 under the sky all his life could no more get consumption than a fencingpost can grow grapes." He further told some ordinary, plain, everyday truths about the .habits of people, mentioning among other things that parents who permitted their children to live healthily in the open air all day took particular care that the night atmosphere should be of quite a. different temperature. "It is an absolute crime for people to shut the air out of bedrooms," he said, "and if the interior atmosphere differs in any degree from the exterior air, you've got a good start for any kind of complaint." Consumption is a disease ages old. It began centuries before our civilisation, and has always been due to stuffiness and infection. Britain loses eighty thousand people a year from tubercular diseases, and the number of losses in New [ Zealand is in the same proportion to the population, although the conditions are presumably not so favorable to these diseases. To quote from figures recently published, there are three hundred thousand people in Britain who are consumptive. The impossibility of getting back to nature is fHie main reason why the majority of 'these folk will die of the disease; the fact that they are not all segregated means that they will pa«s the disease on, and this in itself is a reason for the greatest possible care not only on the part of authorities but on the part of the people. This fact is "overwhelming in its importance: fewer people engaged on the land die from consumption than those employed in any other trade or calling. New Zealand is fisrhtin? consumption with more or less effect, 'ilthough it is exceedingly difficult to obtain admittance in the overcrowded' sanatoria "for the worst cases. The sanatoria generally take cases that are not too far gone, and in which there is a reasonable prospect of arresting the disease. The fact that there is little hope of sanctuary in New Zealand for the worst cases is disturbing, particularly in those cases where the hopeless ones are not trained to observe the habits necessary in a consumptive patient. It would pay the State to make a systematic search for consumptives in order that if it were impossible to treat them, they might be trained to treat themselves and to observe the caution necessary to prevent infection. No consumptive person should be allowed to work indoors, and no patient should be permitted to sleep with the windows of his bedroom shut. One of the most wonderful things about the consumptive patient is his I optimism. He is frequently bright, alert, and full of plans for the years to be. This splendid optimism may have the effect of blinding a consumptive's friends to the scourge and its danger to the patient and the community. There are three million cows in Great Britain, and two hundred thousand of them are suffering from tuberculosis. Everybody knows that New Zealand cows are proportionately as tubercular as their British sisters, but the milkdrlnker and the butter'-consumer is cheered hy the knowledge that only cows with tubercular udders can pass on the disease in their milk. Calves being unnaturally fed is probably the true basis of the tubercle trouble. The cow produces milk to feel her calf and not to feed people. Nature punishes skim-milk calves with tuberculosis, and tuberculosis is not concerned whether its host is a cow or a baby.