Ravages of Consumption

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 48, 28 November 1907, Page 30

Ravages of Consumption

' Last year (says the London ' Morning Leader ') 12,000 died of consumption in Ireland. -For several years past the plagu» has been killing about a million people every "year in India. The two figures may seem at first glance to .be wholly- unrelated. As a matter of fact, the rate of mortality is almost exactly the same in the two countries. • . The v only difference is that in India the plague is an epidemic — terrible, but transitory — while in Ireland the loss from tuberculosis is a permanent condition wliich only changes by growing steadily worse." - There is' nothing mysterious about .consumption. It is not one of those unforeseen visitations of contagious disease which from time to time -have swept across Europe and vanished again. It is simply the inevitable outcome of certain well-known physical conditions of life. . Bad and insanitary housing, insufficient and improper nourishment, racial deterioration caused by the steady 'draining away of the better blood by emigration — these are the prime reasons why 12,000 Irish people died from preventable disease last year. The business of an efficient Government is to change the conditions which "have produced these results. So- long as Great Britain insists on retaining the government in her own hands against the will of the Irish people, the responsibility for the death of those who need not have died is hers alone.