PREVENTION OF CONSUMPTION.

Otago Witness, Issue 2499, 5 February 1902, Page 13

PREVENTION OF CONSUMPTION.

The campaign against that fell disease consumption is now being carried on m Scotland with great and ever-increasing vigour, and that section of the community which has a eoul above strikes, whisky, and football seems to be thoroughly roused to grapple with the enemy. A great meeting to consider the subject was held in the St. Andrew's Hall, Glasgow, on November 19, under the presidency of the Duke of Argyll, who in his opening remarks inveighed against the " most odious habit of spitting. He had seen men, he said, in firstclass railway carriages calmly and spitting close to ladies' dresses.

Sir .fames Crichton Browne gave an address upon consumption. There were always in the United Kingdom, he said, 175,000 people who were more or lees crippled and disabled by that disease. Nevertheless, during the last 60 years the mortality caused by it had been reduced by two-thirds, and if the same rate of reduction could be retained, in 30 years more consumption would have disappeared from among us. Scotland was rather behind England in the matter, for its rate of mortality per 10,000 was 17, as against 13 across the Border. In Glasgow the rate was 20 per 10,000. On the Continent, however, things were much worse. In Paris the consumption death-rate was 38 per 10,000, in Vienna 41, and in Moscow 45. With the resources of modern science in their hands he thought it by no means Utopian to hope that they should exterminate consumption and its bacterial allied' just as they formerly exterminated wolves. Sir James added that the indiscriminate spitting about of consumptives should be branded as a heinuos offence — -hazardous not only to others but to themselves, because they had reason to believe that consumptive-) might be reinfected again aud again. Disinfection was now absolutely obligatory, and the best of all disinfectants were sunshine and fresh air. Isolation was one of the best kinds of prevention as well as of treatment, and it ought to be practised in all active and acute stages of the disease. Consumptives should be excluded from our general hospitals and convalescent homes.

Professor T. M'Call Anderson, of Glasgow University, who followed, said that tuberculous consumption wa6 a curable disease, and even that terrible form of it known as galloping consumption might be steered into a haven of convalescence. He believed the disease was only feebly infectious. As a physician of one of their great hospitals for many years, he did not remember a single case in which tuberculous had spread from a patient to those occupying neighbouring beds. In private life, howe\er, and especially in the ill-ventilated dwellings of the poorer classes, it was a very different matter.

The Lord Provost, in moving a vote of thanks to the noble chairman, said the Corporation of Glasgow was determined to do %U it goesjbjg could^ in tht Jine of grerent-

ing the disease, -whether or not it saw ita way to take further steps towards the cure of it.