Diseases.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 15, 10 April 1902, Page 18

Diseases.

It is at this season of the year that the sins of omission and commission with respect to sanitary affair 3 bear fruit, and in several of the larger centres of the Colony, as well as in some of the smaller ones, the presence of. such diseases as diphtheria and suarlet fever warn the community that the sparsenees of the population affords no justification for neglect or defiance of the laws of health. When a case of diphtheria or scarlet fever breaks out, the medical men immediately set about a search for the cause, and in every case cause and effect can be clearly associated. In a certain rural district in Southland some years ago, an epidemic of diphtheria blighted many families. All the surroundings were apparently conducive to health, and for some time the cause of the outbreak baffled experts. But at length it was remembered that a certain paddock of remarkably luxuriant and apparently inexhaustible grass had been very heavily manured with refuse from a boiling down establishment. This paddock was situated by the road that led to the Bchool, and here the cause of the disease was found, Typhoid fever has broken out on a farm where the sanitary conditions Beemed ideal, and the cause has been found in an unsuspected drain. It cannot be too strongly or too frequently impressed upon the public mind that all such diseases arise from dirt. They are common to all lands, and may arise in all climates. The frigid cold of the poles or the torrid heat of tropical regions may alike engender them. In New Zealand we are exceptionally fortunate in having no malarial diseases. Nor are there climatic conditions that engender disease. If, therefore, disease comes it is purely from insanitation, and neglect of sanitary laws ought to be punishable in the common interest. No doubt there does still exist considerable ignorance of those laws, yet the elements of them are simple enough, and may be summed up in the one word, cleanliness.