NOTIFYING CONSUMPTION.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 145, 28 September 1910, Page 4

NOTIFYING CONSUMPTION.

Lfc is very generally conceded that phthisis can be cured by sending persons in the earlier stages of pulmonary disease "back to nature," but it is not yet definitely decided that consumption is transmissible. Quite a controversy W raging at .tlhe present time as to the transmis&i'bility of the disease, and there are those wiho claim that consumption should be made a notifiable disease. It should be made notifiable, not so much from the danger of transmission as for the cure of the patient, who may be undergoing the coddling and stuffiness that are the finest friend's of any disease. A correspondent of the New Zealand Times quotes a statement made by the Right Hon. R. Farqmrson, M.D., Edinburgh. This gentleman states that consumption has been rapidly diminishing in England during the. teat forty yeans. Deaths were 247 per lioo,ooo in 1360,70, and only 115 in 1906, or a decrease of 52 per cent. He argues that if the incidence and spreadi of consumption is on 'the downward igradle what is the excuse for all this excitement and worry about it? He states that many honest but ignorant people believe that mere contact with a consumptive is dangerous; that .the air they breathe is impregnated with infection, and if he ventures to spit they must flee in terror to some safer place. He gravely doubts as to the really dangerous infection of consumption, and calls as witnesses many capable men who agree with hiim on tiiiis point. The first on the list is Dr. E|. W. 'Supways, of Mentone, the late ' president of the Royal Society of Physicians of London, who, in an able and suggestive letter in the British Medical Journal, quotes Sir Douglas Powell as saying: "My own personal experience and observation convince me that, apart 'from artificial conditions, such as those brought about by experiments, and in the ordinary circumstances of life, phthisis iiis not an infectious malady." He then gives the opinion of the world-re-nowmed authority, Koch, stated in his paper translated for the Sydenham Society by Mr. Stanley Boyd:—"Many practical men have' no doubt kept in mind the possibility of infection, but with the medical profession generally phthisis Ss regarded as the result of constitutional peculiarities rather than of direct contagion." Dr. Stanley West, a leading authority, says, "If phthisis were a. contagious malady, we should expect (to find! the clearest proof of it among those who are placed relative with the sick, e.ig., among' married couples, among nurses and doctors, and among the inmates of the same house or 'institution." And Dr. Theodore Williams, as the result of great experience at the Brompton Hospital, where in former days the ventilation was bad and the sguta were not disinfected, says:"We consequently ought to have seen an extension of the disease to non-consumptive cases as well as to the nurses; but nothing of the sort occurred, only the usual results of hospitalism—i.e., erysipelas and sore throat," The evidence of large institutions for, the treatment of consumption, siuch as the Brompton Hospital, directly negatives any idea of consumption being 1 a directly infective disease, like zymotic fever. And finally, the evidence of the late Professor iStramas, of Paris, is given that "the air expired by a phthisical patient does not contain tubercle 'bacilli or amy other bacilli. 'What we are to believe is that if there were no igporant people there would ibe no consumption, that the fight of all authorities is towards the teaching that nature's medicines are the only ones that will arrest lung decay, that the habits of life of people should be purified, that overcrowding, insaniitation and overwork should cease, and that everyone should be fed 1 on good food, good 'water, fresh air and sunshine. Groat men promise that consumption can ..'be wiped out in a decade, but their promise avails nothing if people do not understand the simple essentials of the cure.of one of the.moat dreadiul maladies the nations suffer. In, the meantime consumption will' not be killed by regarding 'the unfortunate patient with the same aversion that a leper received.