SANITARY ECCENTRICITIES.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 180, 9 November 1910, Page 7

SANITARY ECCENTRICITIES.

To the Editor. Sir,—An instance of the devotion exhibited by the sanitary authorities to the cause of national hygiene might be exemplified in the ease of a house in the suburb of Fitzroy, which, having been inhabited a long time by a patient inflicted with a most infectious and dangerous form of consumption, the sanitary inspector, though the house had been empty for three weeks and advertised to let, yet allows the tenement to be taken and lived in for some days without the proper fumigation being instituted. Then, suddenly becoming stricken with horror at the frightful risk the unwitting tenants must be running, rushes frantically to the fated spot, ordering all furniture and effects to be thrown at once out of the windows, papers to be torn down from the walls and the tenants to find lodgings elsewhere for a night or two until some i measures for their safety are carried out, though even now, at the best, the inspector would not occupy the building for a pound a week, nor anyone in the vicinity; and as I myself used the dormitory of the unfortunate perishing consumptive victims, I may possibly have borne the brunt of the risk and, by absorbing the worst of the infection, have conceivably contributed to . saving the lives of the other members of the household. It ought scarcely be too much to expect of the sanitary executive that they should strictly see that every empty house is fit for habitation previous to its being let—l am, etc., C.W.W. I | ! '