WAR'S AFTERMATH

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 237, 5 October 1940, Page 5 (Supplement)

WAR'S AFTERMATH

TN discussing war and pestilence, "Time," the popular American news magazine, comments:—

"In Europe's bloody wars, for every ten men slain by the enemy, pestilence has killed its thousands. ... On Napoleon'a retreat from Moscow typhus, dysentery and pneumonia killed 450,000 out of the Grand Army's 500,000 men. ... In 1914 typhus swept through Serbia, spread to Russia, where, in four years, it killed 3,000,000 people. . . . Although there is no effective remedy for any of these diseases, all can be prevented by sanitary precautions. Prevention is aimple: "No lioe, no typhus,' I Also louse-borne is trench fever, a milder relative of typhus. . . .

"When the Germans moved into Poland last fall they lugged with them portable shower baths (complete foresight and preparation), ran farm motors to make steam for delousing Polish prisoners. Because of these thorough precaution* there has been no large-scale typhus epidemic in louse-ridden Poland, although the disease has flickered there, as it has in China, for many years. . . . Nor have the Finns been plagued with typhus. Biweekly steam baths are their chief protection."