THE HIDDEN PLAGUE.

Northern Advocate, 6 October 1913, Page 3

THE HIDDEN PLAGUE.

HALF A MILLION CASES A YEAR.

" MORE RUTHLESS THAN THE

DESTROYING ANGEL."

LONDON, Aug. 26

In unmistakable terms the world specialists attending the International Congress of Medicine in London passed on Saturday by a large majority a resolution calling for State control of the dread disease for which leading medical men in this country are urging the appointment of a Royal Commission.

This hidden plague, the disease which Professor Ehrlich is fighting ■with his famous specific "606" (Salvarsan), was strikingly described by Sir Malcolm Morris, who presided, as "more ruthless than the Destroying 'Trne disease does not strike only those who expose themselves to it; it strikes also, and in greater number, the innocent," said Major H. French, of the Royal Army Medical Corps. It costs the country milions of pounds; it fills many homes with preventable misery, overcrowds our workhouses, prisons, and lunatic asylums with imbeciles ana criminals, and if uncontrolled may eventually endanger the very existence of the country. It destroys infants by hecatombs, 48 per cent, in private practice in Paris and 84 per cent, in St Louis." MARRIAGE PROBLEM. The question, said Major French, must soon become crucial in Great Britain under the Insurance Act. As it had been provided that those who ■were ill should receive benefits, what course was to be pursued in the case of those who did not report in the early stages of disease and so developed complications causing prolonged invalidity? Among the measures he advocated were confidential medical notification, punishment for concealing the disease, and "legal discouragement" of the marriage of suffereres for ten years after they had contracted it. He pointed out that in Paris there were seventeen sufferers out of every hundred men.

Dr. Douglas White, of London, stated that there were 500,000 fresh notifications of the disease annually in this country, at least a quarter of which were of the most serious nature, if these figures were even approximately correct we were face to face with continual national disaster—ruinous in its relation to the birth rate, to infant mortality, and to the national physique.

Dr. Woods Hutchinson, of New York, said that the fact that the State had nothing to fear from compulsory notification was shown by the experience of New York, where the disease had been compulsory notifiable for over six months.

The official resolution, which was caried, called upon the Governments. of all countries to institute a system

of confidential notification of the disease to a sanitary authority wherever such notification does not already obtain; and to make sustematic provision for the diagnosis and treatment of all cases not otherwise provided for.