RACE WITH A GERM

Dominion, Volume 16, Issue 88, 10 January 1923, Page 5

RACE WITH A GERM

A SPORTING ASPECT OF VACCINATION.

An English physHogirb.• who was asked the other day when last he had been vaccinated for small-pox replied, greatly to the questioneria surprise, that he could not recollect the date, hut he had in all been vaccinated seventeen times! Pressed to for this curious record, he explained (savs the “Observer”) that. he had had occasion on a number of times during the last thirty years to visit the smallpox hospital at Dartford, of which the director was a close friend of his. One of the rules of the hospital was thaj any outsider who entered it should be vaccinated at the gat© before coming in. This rule was absolute. \Vorkmen, new nurses, new servants, men or women, engineers, carpenters,, dispensers, clerks and all. the /miscellaneous people who constitute the staff of a hospital all had to be vaccinated before they passed the gates, whether their stav was to bo long or short, wlieffier it was to be a matter of a few hours, days, weeks, or years, the value of this precaution was seen in the recorded fact, that never in all the 30 years of the existence of the Hartford Small-pox Hospital has there been a case of small-pox among the staff, the workmen, or the visitors. The only people who have had. small-pox In the hospitals have been the patients who were brought there suffering from One curious fact about this vaccination at the gate is that the vaccination races the germ and_ beats it. A visitor might bo actually Infected with smallpox while In tho hospital, but if he had been vaccinated at the gate the vaccine would race the small-pox germ in his body, and would pass it and sei up an impassable barrier against it before it had time to develop and declare its symptoms. A physician at another ®mall-pox hospital cmco said to a scientific visitor who had intrepidly come to see him and his work: f ‘My dear Blank, you’ve got small-pox. But you’ll never know it j for I shall vaccinate you and hold it up.” It was spoken only partly in jest ; the.meaning was clear —that even if in the short time when danger had been run small-pox had been communicated to the. person taking the risk, yet vaccination would prevent the small-pox germ, from ever getting home. Even with a start the vaccine would beat it in the race.

Although no smalLpox case ever developed among the staff or visitors at the Dartford Hospital, there was once a mysterious outbreak in Dartford itself, and naturally people were inclined to attribute this to an escape of germs from the hospital. After long Investigation it was found that they had escaped—in this wise.. All blankets, etc., belonging to patients were, of course, sterilised by prolonged baking. Some workmen temporarily employed mistook some blankets that had not been into the steriliser for those that had been passed in and through, stole them, smuggled them out of hospital and pawned tham. Tho monthly interest on . the pawntickets not having been paid, the blankets were with other pledges duly put up to auction six months (or n year) later. *Ti3’’'unortunate persons who brought the blankets contracted small-pox.