CURED OF TETANUS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 14, 17 January 1931, Page 7

CURED OF TETANUS.

NAPIER BOY'S RECOVERY.

INFECTION OF SCRATCH.

DOCTOR'S ACHIEVEMENT,

(By Telegraph.—Press Association.)

NAPIER, this day.

The persistent efforts by Napier doctors to cure a case of tetanus, one of the most dreaded of all diseases, have been responsible for the recovery of an 11-year-old Taradale boy, who has spent weeks of agonising pain through tlie infection of a small superficial scratch on a foot, received while climbing over a barbed wire fence. The recovery of the - boy is more notable because the period of incubation of the disease, in his case, was short. This is significant because it has illustrated the success of the more intensified treatment than has been used in past years. The boy, Gyiil Webb, son of Mr. and Mrs. A. L. Webb, of Taradale, was affected by the disease about a weeK before last Christmas. He was admitted to the Napier Hospital as a patient of Dr. J. Allen Berry and his brother, Dr. Harold Berry, on December 23. Since then these two doctors, assisted by Dr. W. P. Purvis and Dr. J. Foley, of the hospital staff, have worked tirelessly to effect a cure. A comparatively new system of treatment, under which injections of serum were more intensive than has been the case in past years, was used, instead of the injection of large quantities of serum at long intervals. The treatment commenced with large injections, followed by very frequent injections of slightly smaller quantities. A quantity of 2,000,000 units of serum were used. It is interesting to compare that figure with the quanity generally injected. It is considered exceptional to use 500,000 units, and then success is achieved only very rarely. Quantities of the serum had to be procured from Auckland and Wellington in order that the treatment might be continued. The supplies alone cost the Hawke's Bay Hospital Board not less than £300. Besides that there were many items of expense concomitcnt to the treatment. Tetanus is an abnormally fatal disease. The rate of j

mortality from it is regulated to a certain extent by the period of incubation, which varies according to the part of the body affected. In cases where the period of incubation is ten days or more, the percentage of mortality is over 09 per cent, and where the period is less than, ten days, the successful cures are even infinitely rarer. In the case of the boy Webb, the period of incubation of the disease was only six days.