THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 23, 1909. STAMPING OUT CONSUMPTION.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9224, 23 June 1909, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 23, 1909. STAMPING OUT CONSUMPTION.

! When in opening the Tuberculosis Exhibition in Whitechapel, England, the other day, the Right Hon. John Burn 3 declared that open windows would stamp out consumption in a generation, he was doubtless more concerned about emphasising the value of fresh air in the treatment and prevention of the disease than caref .1 to form an accurate estimate of the possibilities of absolute eradication. His epigramatic presentation of the teachings of hygiene in regard to consumption will not lose force on that account, however. Adequate ventilation of the home has been proved to be the greatest factor in limiting the ravages of the bacillus. And as tne ability of the people ot the large cities of the world to secure that ventilation depends upon their capacity to pay for better housing, there is, as Mr Burns pointed out, a direct relationship between the prevalence of the disease and sweating, drunkenness, "gambling and unemployment. In those four words is summed up not only the great cause of the poverty which prevents the victims of the scourge from fighting it. but also of the physical degeneracy which predisposes them to its attack. Apart from the promise of better things contained in the greater concern with which Society to-day looks upon those evils, however, there is a strong anchor of hope for the ultimate destruction of consumption as a menace to the human family in the growing immunity of the people to it. The wonderful decline in its death-dealing power in the last thz-ee-quavters of a century could scarcely be accounted for on any other ground. Seventy years at?o, according to English figures, the disease carried off one-person out of every 250; to-day the mortality rate is less than one person in every 1800. Better living conditions are doubtless responsible for a proportion of the improvement, but had riot the resistance of the human system to the influence of the pulmonary enemy, from inoculation or other causes, became greater there had been at large erough potential disease to have almost decimated the civilised race.