The Influenza Outbreak.

Press, Volume LIX, Issue 17812, 11 July 1923, Page 8

The Influenza Outbreak.

Prior to 1918 the name of influenza was not at all a name of terror. It was a periodic visitation, causing widespread discomfort and even distress, but causing few deaths. Since the frightful outbreak in 1918, however, every recurrence of the disease causes groat alarm. Whether this alarm is well-founded one may take leave to doubt, because official medicine has never clearly established that tho 1918 ©pidemio was influenza and nothing else. Indeed, the medical profession knows much less about influenza and about the 1918 epidemic than the layman could desire. There is no positive reason why the public should become alarmed by the outbreak which has affected so many people—so many thousands of people, indeed—in this province, and the general character of the epidemic has been such that, if the horror of 1918 had never happened, nobody would be perturbed at all. The worst of the outbreak, it would appear, is over, unless the whole population is this time to be affected. "We can afford to offer this cheering reflection to the public, because we may be sure that all rational people will take such precautions against infection as they may. The Health authorities are keeping a close watch upon the situation, and that they do not consider it a serious one may be inferred from their abstention from fitrong measures of regulation. If there were any good grounds for alaitm they would have done mora than recommend that children should be restrained from attending the theatres. We assume that the District Health Officer's instruction on this point has for its object the checking of the ailment amongst children, so that they may all be at school again as Boon as possible. For if there were any serious danger ahead, the instruc-

tion would apply also to adii' who are as susceptible to infection a3 children are. It is comforting to know ■that, although some doctors think the hostile microbe is growing fiercer as it marches through its successive hosts, there is nothing abnormal in the record of tho serious cases.