BUBONIC PLAGUE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 300, 13 May 1911, Page 3

BUBONIC PLAGUE.

I (To the Editor.) Sir, —Tlie word "bubonic" comes from "buboii," the groin, and the disease is from Egypt. "The boil of Egypt" occurs in the Boohs of Moses. There are spring diseases, such as smallpox, measles, erysipelas; and autumn diseases, such as cholera, typhoid, enteric; anil all these arc vegetables suitable for life at a temperature of 08 degrees Fahr., getting oxygen by robbing our blood corpuscles, and by growth forming excrements which act as poisons. Yeast is a gigantic microbe, and produces a ptomaine failed alcohol. Tt is strange the genius of creation (man) should have taken so long to discover wlint Dean Swift called "lilliputians." Well, the strange thing is that the plague in Manchuria was most deadly in mid-winter, at a temperature 20 degrees below zero; but yet man was not a degree below AS degrees, kept heated, it would seem, for the benefit of the "black death" and the white plague (phthisis). [ It seems, then, that the cold-blooded animals are free from hot-blooded animals' diseases. Pasteur inoculated two fowls with chicken cholera, and put one into a bath of cold water. The other was dead in 48 hours. The cold water one recovered. This plague got a footing in Sydney some years ago, but seems unsuited for 1 producing an epidemic in Australia. It also got a footing in Auckland, and similar results appear. I do not for a moment suppose that our health authorities deserve all the credit. Perhaps it is too soon to say it cannot produce an epidemic, for visitations in England have had 50 or 100 years between them. But the germs keep alive, and it seems so absurd to raid the rats and see pictures in our papers of fumigating ships, and rats, like the pestilence, "walkingabroaJ in the noonday." It is thought there are infected centres about Auckland and Onehunga. where year by year the germ : is preserved. We are absurdly stupid not to ascertain how long the moist and dry gerniß of disease will exist. We really know nothing of conditions pro and con, We know that the great diseases liable to j exist anywhere are plague, cholera, ty-' phoid fever, and tuberculosis. But there are many places the first two have never been to; indeed, they are unknown to most places on the earth. Plague has a home in Egypt, and if communication was entirely cut off it would cease. The same may be said of cholera and India. Yellow fever belongs to the West Indies,, and cannot, live outside latitude 40 deg. N. and ,S. Then sleeping sickness is African ague, and exists in certain places. Plants and animals have well-defined homes—the polar bear, the serpents, the /> tcze tcze fly. w We must look on diseases as the ma-11 ehinery for removing lives, and it is not flattering to think such low forms of life get a living off all kinds of animals, man included. •. Perhaps each disease may be ordained to remove one kind of man obnoxious to nature, and so direct the race toward one goal. This we do not knew, and perhaps never will. Modern hygiene rushes blindly at all, and in effect says, "No. you don't"; while governments vie with c;u*h otlrw in destroying the race wholesale. F6urteen-inch guns, torpedoes, submarines are the most interesting to kings and government. V erily, we do live in a curious world, and the designs of nature are pcrplexhi" in the extreme. jjd °