Fresh Air and Influenza.

Otago Witness, Issue 2782, 10 July 1907, Page 76

Fresh Air and Influenza.

Crowded places take first rank as disseminators of disease, and especially respiratory disease, unless, * which is rarely the case, they are adequately ventilated! /There is no factor more favourable to the successful invasion of the human body by the disease-producing organism, says* the Lancet, than when air is rendered stale, warm, and musty by human exhalations. For that reason the visit to the place of worship, the concert room, the ballroom, the theatre, or the social gathering may often be traced as the starting point of a common cold or of influenza. There is probably more illness caused by defective ventilation than by draughts. The person who shuts himself up in a very warm room with every source of ventilation practically closed, so that the vital quality of the air is destroyed, is invariably the first victim of influenza. Such a condition of environment has an extraordinary effect in lowering the general tone of the body and its power to resist disease. It is time that the real mischief caused by stuffy places and by devitalised air was more seriously taken to heart than it is. Such places are for certain a fertile source of influenza and respiratory disease, and it seems to us that, in regard at all events to public buildings, our health authorities should give their earnest attention to the matter with the "view of protecting the public against those diseases which are en?end,ered by the insanitary and unscientific conditions described. It is not a little instructive that influenza is invariably endemic at a time when ventilation ie least invited because of the coldness of the season, when every step is taken to keep our hou«es and places of meeting warm, which generally means that fresh air is carefully excluded.