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Otago Daily Times, Issue 17429, 25 September 1918, Page 4

It has besu suggested to us that our observations yesterday morning upon the lack of special railway accommodation for persons proceeding frorr. Dunedin and from Oamaru to Pleasant Valley, in order that they may be admitted as patients in the sanatorium, may be construed in some quarters as implying that a danger to the public health is necessarily caused by the mingling of consumptives with healthy travellers in tho same compartment on the train. Certainly, no such implication was intended. Consumption is not a highly infectious disease. It is not contracted' by casual contact with a consumptive person,, nor is it carried

through the air from person to person. Moreover, sufferers from one of the,forms of tuberculosis are not regarded as infective at all. Even in the. cases of the patients in -whom the disease is infectious the danger that the infection may be communicated to other persons is not great— it may even be infinitesimal—if the precautions which the sufferers < are warned to take are duly observed. Tho presence in a railway carriage of a person who observes the prescribed precautions with respect to his expectorations—which, when they have resolved themselves into dust, constitute the chief source of danger of infection—is not to bo viewed with apprehension by tho other travellers. What wo suggest, however, is that a sensitive patient may be deterred from observing the necessary precautions in a crowded railway carriage by the knowledge that the fact that if ho were to observe them he would direct attention to himself. It is distressing to such a patient that he should have to reveal his condition byy'the observance of the precautions, and it is distressing also to the other pasengers that ho should be required to use his spitting-flask in their presence. And we surmise that there fe an element of danger to the public health in the omission on the part of the patient to take the precautions which he would have no hesitation in taking if he did not, by 60 doing, disclose his condition to other people. It is for these reasons that we submit that the provision of special accommodation, other than is procurable at the heavy cost involved in engaging separate carriages, is desirable and necessary.