RAVAGES OF DIPHTHERIA

Dominion, Volume 14, Issue 305, 19 September 1921, Page 5

RAVAGES OF DIPHTHERIA

A HOPEFUL PROPHECY. Is "dip.” doomed? It seems a strange question to ask, just when diphtheria has been busy breaking epidemic records in the Old World and when it still has a New World casualty list of many thousands per annum. It is true that since the discovery of the serum treatment the mortality has been reduced to less than half of what it used to be, but beyond a certain stage the reduction does not proceed. Something is hindering the saving power of antitoxin. What is it? A clue will be afforded by the following "remarks’ appended by Dr. M'L. to a case report furnished to tho Ontario Board of Health:—"l saw this case half an hour before death. The child had been sick all week without medical attendance, the parents thinking it a case of tonsilitis. The patient waa comatose when I saw him first.” What a tragic mistake! And how often it is made. The absence of alarming symptoms until too late In tho disease, tho commonness of “sore throats," added to the fact that antitoxin is a perfect remedy only in the early stages 'of diphtheria, have meant for many thousands of parents a parent’s greatest grief. And such mistakes will be made for many years, for the health education of the public will not be completed in this generation. n Who then dares to say that dip. is doomed? Dr. Lina Potter sajs so (in other words) in a calculated statement which is published in The International Journal of Public Health. She bases her hopeful prophecy on two recent discoveries: the Schick reaction and the toxin-antitoxin immunisation. By the first of these methods doctors are now able to find out whether or no a child is liable to catch diphtheria. If the Child is naturally immune, well and good; if he or she is found to be susceptible, the seebnd method is invoked to produce an immunity. rhe injection of toxin-antitoxin is absolutely harmless, and produces an immunity which probably lasts a child . through the dangerous early years of. life. Ab Dr. Potter says, if the news is spread abroad there will be a demand for this protection. Already a great experiment has been began by the New York County Chapter of tho American Rod Cross. At the request of the Commissioner of Health of New York tlity they have undertaken to immunise, with parents’ consent, 25,000 children in the kindergartens and primary grnde schools of Manhattan. Already it is found that half the parents are anxious to have their children made safe, and the mand has become so great that the New York Health Department has mad» special arrangements for a free supply of tho needful materials to doctors in that city.—(From the Department of Health, League of Red Cross Societies.)