SPOTTED FEVER.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1224, 5 September 1911, Page 7

SPOTTED FEVER.

OUTBREAK IN SUFFOLK. ■ By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright London, September 3. Twenty-six persons at Stowinarket, Suffolk, have been attacked with cerebrospinal meningitis. Of this number five died. A TERHIBLE DISEASE. Considerable alarm was occasioned in August of last year, in sonic of the MidLand districts of England by the appearance of cerebrp-spinal meningitis, popularly known as "spotted fever," in tho neighbourhood of Aswardby and elsewhere. Cerebrospinal meningitis was first recognised as an epidemic in 1837, when it broke out' with much virulence among some troops in garrison in the South of France; and two or three years later it committed great ravages about Dantzic and in tho provinces bordering on t'ho Baltic, whore if encountered populations and circumstances eminently favourable to its diffusion. Its dependence upon invasion of tho body by a microbo has been recognised for some years; and tho microbe concerned was identified by Weichselbaum in 1887, and was named by him Diplococcus intracellular!?. Like other diseases of the same class, spotted fever is greatly dependent upon insanitary conditions for its power of diffusion; and. although manifestly infective, it docs not appear to possess infoctiveness in a very high degree. The disease is essentially, as its name implies, an inflammation of the investing membranes of the brain nnd spinal cord; but tho- presence of tho microbe involves also a general blood poisoning, of which an eruption of purple, spots or patches is one evidence. The cases vary much in intensity in different outbreaks; but even when tho mortality is low the disease is often protracted, and followed by a tardy convalescence. In 1905 700 deaths from this disease were recorded in New York in the short space of two months. An American authority, Holt, fays the mortality varies much in different epidemics and at different stages of the same epidemic. It is usually greatest at the height and lowest towards the end of the epidemic, and the average of deaths is about 70 per cent of cases. Of 50 cases treated in his hospital the mortality was 8G per cent, but those patients were infante or very young children. Another authority finds that epidemics givo all grades of mortality, from 70 to 75 per cent, and ho thinks tho worst cases are at the commencement of tho outbreak nnd the mild ones at the close. So that even on that point tliero is much uncertainty.