AN EXTRAORDINARY DISEASE.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 745, 11 June 1886, Page 25

AN EXTRAORDINARY DISEASE.

Job’s Boils

A telegram published in the London Times of April 16th runs as follows :-r “ St. Petersburg, April 15.

“ The Herald gives an account of a lecture delivered by a Russian doctor, before General Komaroff and the assembled officers of tbe Garrison at Aekabad on what is called the Penjdeh plague, an epidemic that attacked no less than 90 per cent of the troops of the Murghab detachment between January and November of the year before last. It consisted of an eruption of boils and swellings all over the body, which, although not very painful, and not apparently otherwise injuring the general state of health, still incapacitated the greater num ber of those affected"by it for all active service on the frontier. Sometimes from 40 to 90 boils gradually appeared on one man, each one lasting from four to six months. The doctor produced a nuoibtr of painted plaster casts of the eruption in a 1 stages of development. He attributes the cause to a kind of bacteria found in tbe air of tbe Murghab Valley, and in summer blown into the dust and sand oc to the clothes, and soon penetrating to the skin. The mic ooosms comp from the Murghab water, a single drop of which, the doctor estimates, contains as many as eight millions of the organisms. The deaths from drinking the water of this river he considers to have been caused by the same bacteria taken inwardly. Thirteen hundred cases were examined, and by inoculation similar boils were produced in various animals.”