And a Botulous New Year

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 343, 18 January 1946, Page 8

And a Botulous New Year

OR a few hours at the beginning of , each new year we find ourselves sufficiently moved by the season’s propaganda to indulge in unusual optimism about this and that. Health, for instance. We are sure that the influenza of the incoming year will be less frequent and less violent; we will be able to avoid hospitals and our "old trouble" will take. a turn for the better. Within a day or two soberer thoughts begin to close about us. We notice that among our acquaintance there are just as many new cases of measles this week as there were last, and that is a good many. It then eccurs to us that the 1946 Year Book will. show the hospitals as full as ever, and that our chances of figuring personally in these sordid columns are no less than they were in 1945; on the contrary, they are somewhat greater as we are now

a year older, It is a pity though that the realists in the Health Department were let loose on our illusions quite so early in 1946. They crashed into our morning coffee on New Year’s Day with a "Health in the Home" talk from 1YA on food poisoning, featuring abdominal pains and sinister signs in tinned and bottled food that is not what it should be. It’s seasonable enough, of Course, at a time of year when half the population are keeping body and soul together only by strenuous use of the tin opener, and the other half preparing to salt down their surplus harvest in preserving jars. And naturally the best time to startie us with a fine description of a deadly but rare disease called Botulism is during those few hours of optimistic coma of the New Year, before we have remembered about the atomic bomb and other such matters.