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Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3199, 29 September 1881, Page 2

So far as Napier is concerned we beg to give an unqualified denial to the statements contained in the followiiag extract from an article published in the Wangauui Herald of the 23rd instant. Cur contemporary says : — " Diseases and rumours of diseases are just now afflicting New Zealand. Auckland is devastated by scarlet fever, Wellington by a species of typhus, and Napier by swamp malaria. Dunedin with its filthy dairies (no worse probably than those of any other populous town) is afflicted with complaints of all sores; the Chinese go in for leprosy, and in fact, from the Bay of Islands to the Bluff, no topic is more discussed than the ilia that flesh is heir to. And there is the bugbear of the smallpox looming in the future—a bugbear which is the more serious because it is notorious that the mass of New Zealaxd born adults have never beon vaccinated. The vaccination law at present seems to be a dead letter, enforceable only upon unhunpy passengers in quarantine, and equally upon unhappy 1 Civil Servants and prisoners in gaol. This loathsome disease may at any moment reach our shores, and toe effect upon the population of New Zealand would be most disastrous, especially with a Government which relaxes quarantine regulations to expressly favor a Shipping Compan}', and a collection of doctors, many of whom never saw a case of variola i<\ their lives. Under these circumstances, and j without wishing to play the role of alarmists, it behoves everybody to look to their hospital accommodation—more especially in small towns, where the absence of sickness or epidemics of any kind in the past has rendered the citizens callous and unconcerned, and consequently unprepared for an emergency. Generally speaking it may be said that in the large towns of New Zealand— notably at Wellington— the Hospital accommodation is more than ample, and the existence in those towns of Infirmaries, Homes, and so forth relieves the Hospital accommodation of a good many cases which pass into it naturally in smaller places. It is for example a notorious fact that many small Hospitals in New Zealand are really refuges for the destitute, and havens of rest for old and decrepit men and women, who, if turned out of the institution, must take their choice of death from starvation or imprisonment in gaol under the Vagrancy Act. This anomaly in Hospital affairs was largely the case at Wellington until lately, and exists extensively at Napier." Not only is Napier not " devasted" by " swamp malaria," but no such disease baa been known here. Our hospital is not a refuge for the destitute, nor a

haven of rest for old and decrepit people. In all other re&pecta the article may be perfectly truthful, more especially where it deeeribee the Waogacui hospital as an old barrack with gloomy wards and bare walls, which have as depressing an influence rin th? visitors as they have on the uuhappy patients.