CAUSES OF CONSUMPTION

Temuka Leader, Issue 1813, 8 November 1888, Page 3

CAUSES OF CONSUMPTION

The (members of the congress on tuberculosis which has been sitting in Paris are all agreed in considering it to be caused by a bacilie, consequently contagious and transmissible from animals to human beings. The members of the congress are about to embody in a book the result of their inquiries and the counsels which they desire to urge on parents, farmers, the public, and Governments for the eradication of consumption. For the present they urgently advise th at not a drop of milk should be drunk by infants or by adults without having been boiled; and also that all patients affected with tuberculosis (which they consider as identical with scrofula, the two diseases being the same, under a modified form) shall be received in establishments judiciously prepared for their treatment and cure, in the country, apart from all outsiders, so as to cheek the propagation of the terrible disorder. One member proposed to ask the Government to let them use condemned criminals, during forty days, for the elucidation of the various points on which light is being sought—as, for instance, their being exclusively fed during that time on tuberculosed meat, so as to ascertain whether the disease is thus transmissible. Before doing this it was decided to wait until the remedy for the disease has been discovered.