THE SCARLET SCOURGE.

Taranaki Daily News, 15 September 1922, Page 6

THE SCARLET SCOURGE.

SERIOUSNESS OF INFECTION. By Telegraph.-—Press Association. Wellington, Sept. 13. Dr. Frank Hay, Inspector-General of Mental Hospitals, gave remarkable evidence to-day at the Venereal Diseases Inquiry. He said that syphilis, directly or indirectly, was the cause of a large proportion of mental diseases and its average distribution corresponded more or less with the proportion of mental disease, but mental disease lagged ton or fifteen years behind. Infection in the primary stage, in spite of the mental stress created, rarely caused insanity except among those inherently unstable. Among tho/e admitted were some of the devil-may-care classes who failed or refused to recognise the seriousness of the infection. These were a greater danger to the community than the merely ignorant, who placed themselves under treatment. In the secondary stage prolonged mental stress led to a mental breakdown. Hereditary syphilis accounted for fi to 8 per cent, of all idiots and imbeciles. Calj dilating from a known number of 40 and the proportion of deaths caused by syphilis, he arrived at 1320 as the annual number of infections and, assuming the duration of life after the infection was 25 years, this meant that the number of people in New Zealand who had or have had syphilis would be 33,000, or one in 38.