TYPHOID FEVER

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXIV, Issue 11931, 24 January 1936, Page 4

TYPHOID FEVER

NOT A MAJOR DISEASE. Referring to the typhoid cases reported from Taranaki, Dr R. H. Makgill, relieving medical officer of health at Auckland, said that as far as the Auckland health district was concerned, only seven cases of typhoid had been reported recently and none from the city area. He referred to the end of last century when two wooden buildings were

erected at the Auckland Hospital to accommodate typhoid patients during an epidemic. “I notice that those wooden buildings are still doing service,” he said, “although they were put up temporarily.” Dr. Makgill said that typhoid had ceased to be a major mortality cause. Before the establishment of the Health Department, typhoid was most prevalent in Auckland, but in more recent times, owing to the improvement in sanitation, the disease had ceased to be a menace. Cases were comparatively rare and usually occurred in Maori settlements where sanitary arrangements had remained primitive.

It was in 1898, said Dr, Makgill, that he made the first blood test for typhoid. In those days the children were subject to summer diarrhoea and enteritis and there were hundreds of deaths up to 1901, when the Health Department came into being. Infant mortality had speedily sunk since then. Up to 1907 as many as 25 per cent, of the total deaths of children was from that cause. In 1926 the disease had almost entirely disappeared. The vital statistics report of 1934 gives illuminating information about typhoid. From 1872 to 1876 the death rate per 10,000 of population was 5.09 per cent. Each four-yearly period it fell until at the time of the last report in 1934 the figure was .04. The report stated inter alia; “The gradual elimination of typhoid fever as a significant factor in mortality statistics is a feature of the history of the'public health measures in New Zealand and terminates with the recording of only one death from this disease in 1934.”