WAR AND EPIDEMICS.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume L, Issue 175, 5 October 1917, Page 6

WAR AND EPIDEMICS.

The prospect of the war being followed by epidemics has been discussed lately bv Dr W. C. Rucker, of the United States Public Health Service, in an American professional journal, the Military Surgeon. He emphasises the fact that large bodies of troops have, been suddenly transported to new environments, 'bringing with them their own customs to some degree and their own particular diseases. They have been placed in intimate contact with other groups in whose bodies life infecting agents of disease toreign to their comrades are instilled. They have dug deep into soil saturated for generations with the manure of animals and men. in the military hospitals in the territory of Venice" more thau 26C0 soldiers have already been found to harbour intestinal parasites foreign to the region. Dr Rucker predicts that "this worldmovement of armed men is bound to result in at least a partial change in the geographic distribution ol some of the infections of disease." But what about the risks of the spread of infection upon the return of the armies to civil pursuits? Dr Rucker s judgment is that this will depend on tw-o factors —first, upon the degree of the community's sanitary intelligence, and, second, upon the economic conditions that- will prevail. The nations that are most- backward in public hygien? will suffer most. As to economis conditions, Dr Rucker is evidently anxious about the probable effects of renewed industrial competition and of the nervous and physical slrain resulting therefrom. The danger will be the more serious in view of the exceptional prevalence of mental disease among soldiers in the present war. Dr Rucker urges especially that disabled soldiers, in whatever way disabled, must be aroused trom the condition of moral inertia which is so frequently the outcome of the disablement. "The ultimate consequences,'' he warns us. "will be appalling if these cripples are permitted to lapse into a state of mental lethargy."