THE MYSTERY MICROBE.

Taranaki Daily News, 7 May 1921, Page 12

THE MYSTERY MICROBE.

A NEW DISEASE THAT IS PUZZLING DOCTORS. Medical men, no less than ordinary people, are mystified by the appearance of a new “pestilence that walketh in darkness.” No one knows where it comes from, and it selects its victims from among those of either sex and any age with absolute impartiality. It may not be as deadly as some other infections, but it is an awesome thing which comes like a whiff of poison gas, swiftly and cunningly robbing its victim first of his five sense, and later, it may be, of his his life. To this strange disease people have unfortunately given the name of “sleeping sickness,” just as they applied to every form of nervous ailment engendered by the war the term “shell-shock.” It is certainly not that real and infinitely more deadly scourge, the sleeping sickness of Uganda, in the production of which the terror of East Africa, the tsetse fly, is the active agent. It is an abuse of language to apply the term “sleeping” to one of the prominent symptoms of both of these diseases. Sleeping is an eminently natural, healthy, and recuperative process. Unnatural prolongation of unconsciousness, such as occurs in these diseases, is of the nature of coma, a condition of complete insensibility due to disease or other external causes. VICTIMS SEE DOUBLE. In the present epidemic this insensibility is frequently preceded by pains in the ’head, and fever; the victim sees double (as people do when alcohol has paralysed their eye muscles' ami tyadu-

ally becomes more and more lethargic. In .the early stages the patient may answer questions quite rationally. But later a good deal of shaking is necessary to rouse his attention. It is obvious that this disease chiefly affects the brain. That it is really a new disease, and not an old one in new surroundings, or one that has not been hitherto identified and defined, there can be no doubt. According to some eminent observers *the disease originated in Austria two or three years ago, whence it has since spread to other countries. While it cannot be said to be epidemic, as influenza was some years ago, it is epidemic in the sense that the disease has spread over large areas. It is, howevr, not nearly so infectious as influenza. CAUSED BY WANT AND MISERY. So far as is known at present the infection, probably a germ, gains entrance to the brain through the nose or throat. It has nothing whatever to do with the germ of influenza —on the authenticity of which, by the way. the i eport on the great influenza epidemic of 1918-19, just published by the British. Ministry of Health, throws very great doubt. But it is more than probable that the cause of this new disease, like that of the devastating epidemic of influenza in 1918-19, is attributable to poverty. At the present moment, as a result of the war, there exists in many nations and over wide areas of the world precisely the type of want and misery which makes the most likely forcinghouse of virulent germs adapted for wide dispersal. In similar circumstances, typhus, ship-fever, camp-fever, jail-fever, and famine fever were rampant in bygone days. The new germ is the creature of circumstances. History is repeating itself.