GERM-LADEN AIR BOMBS.

Taranaki Daily News, 26 January 1916, Page 3

GERM-LADEN AIR BOMBS.

STRANGE MORTALITY AMONG ZEPPELIN VICTIMS. The extraordinary high proportion of deaths following injuries caused by Zeppelin bombs has led to a strong suspicion among surgeons who have treated these cases that the bombs have been impregnated with deadly germs (says the medical correspondent of the London Daily Mail of November 19). The evidence in favor of the bombs having been so treated was reviewed yesterday by one of the surgeons of a hospital in the London area to which some forty seriously-injured victims of the last raid were admitted for treatment. "In the first place," the surgeon stated, "the death-rate among these eases has been at least five times as high as one would expect in patients wounded equally severely, either in battle or accidentally in civil life. In practically all the cases a germ causing rapidly fatal gangrene,' very rarely met with in ordinary hospital practice,' has been discovered by the hospital bacteriologists. "Patients who received the best treatment afforded by a modern hospital within ten minutes of being injured suffered a much higher death-rate than soldiers at the front who, after receiving wounds outwardly of the same degree of severity, have had to wait twenty-four hours or more before being treated. "Enquiries are being made to determine whether the Italian bacteriologists have found the same germ in the wounds of those injured in the recent raid on Verona. If this very rave gan-grene-causing germ has been found there also, it will be pretty strong evidence that the bombs have been deliberately impregnated with one of the most deadly varieties of disease germs known."