TUBERCULOSIS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 231, 26 November 1943, Page 3

TUBERCULOSIS

Sir,-It is laudable that the Health Department has begun a campaign against tuberculosis, but I am amazed at the form these "messages" take. Instead of breaking down the barriers of prejudice and antipathy surrounding tuberculosis, the department’s advertisement encourages ignorance of the disease. Many people walk in daily terror of contracting the disease and take precautions to avoid mixing with people whom they know to have been or to be suffering from tuberculosis. Through this antipathy towards T.B. many lives have been made unnecessarily miserable, friendships have been broken, and homes wrecked, What of the thousands of persons suffering from the complaint unknown even to themselves who walk in crowded streets, travel in crowded tramcars and trains, and sit for hours in illventilated theatres? There is the menace to society-the man who unconsciously spreads with every cough infection to be picked up by man, woman and child alike! The ex-sanatorium patient is rarely infectious, and if he is he knows precisely how to prevent the spread of the bacilli, But from the Health Department’s advertisement in the newspapers the average person gets the impression he must shun people known to have active T.B. Is anyone

| going to stop and ask himself the meaning of that little word "active"? No! It is one thing to educate the public up to safeguarding themselves against T.B., but entirely another thing to do so at the expense of those of us who are at present fighting the disease. The extuberculous patient must be absorbed into society once more if T.B. is to be eradicated from our midst. We sufferers are the apostles in that fight against one of society’s deadliest enemies, and can do more than anyone else to break down the wall of ignorance surrounding the disease. Why does the Health Department not say plainly that every living person harbours T.B. bacilli and that the protection against them is good general health? If the public is to be misled into believing that we who have had the disease are social pariahs we may as well be cast out as

lepers.-

R.J.M

(Waipiata)