INFLUENZA.

Taranaki Daily News, 6 March 1920, Page 5

INFLUENZA.

A large question is prompted by on article in the Lancet discussing a recent address to the Congress of American Physicians and Surgeons. Can medical science trace the more deadly epidemic? which periodically sweep the globe to their source, and tackle them before they wreak evil on a large scale? A prominent American physician. Dr. Flexncr, suggests that this should be accomplished, in part at least. He takes the case of the eradication of disease in yellow fever. Medical science scotched yellow fever in its endemic home before it became epidemic. Naturally the question arises out of a discussion on these lines whether a disease like influenza could not be similarly dealt with at birth, so to speak. And it is hopeful that on this point the doctors disagree. The problem is to locate a definite endemic home at all for influenza. Dr. Flexner is pretty dogmatic in insisting that this disease took its origin in a region near the Russian border of Turkestan; and spread along the trade routes. He is emphatic that the "endemic focus" of influenza is somewhere on the. eastern border r.f Russia, and holds strongly the view that medical science now possesses the resources to clear up a region which "by its inaccessibility and its neglect has every twenty-five or thirty years originated waves of disease spreading ', the world aver,"