The Sun MONDAY, JULY 30, 1928 T.B. NOT A MENACE!

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 419, 30 July 1928, Page 8

The Sun MONDAY, JULY 30, 1928 T.B. NOT A MENACE!

IT might be argued plausibly that either motor transport or the open railway 'crossing is a greater menace to life in New Zealand than that usually associated with the scourge known in the vernacular as “T. 8.” The special medical committee, which, in almost record time, recently investigated the incidence and treatment of the disease throughout the Dominion, asserts in its report to the Minister of Health that pulmonary tuberculosis in New Zealand does not constitute a grave national menace. “Fewer people die from all forms of tuberculosis than are killed by violence.” If that welcome assertion should fail to convince observers of the disease and make them cheerful, it is only necessary to look abroad for impressive and soothing comparisons., T.B. is very much worse in Australia, Canada, Denmark, and Hungary. And if all these facts fail to comfort the New Zealand public, there remains the unassailable truth that pulmonary tuberculosis is a trivial thing compared with that common and dreadful malady—old age. Let it be taken for granted, on the authority of a flying Squad of medical experts, whose rapidity of travel from one end* of the Dominion to the other was greater than that of a politician chasing votes, that T.B. does not constitute a grave national menace in this virile country. There is no necessity for elastic exaggeration. In spite of medical opinion and the testimony of comparative statistics, the position still is bad enough to demand more remedial attention than that now given to it at great cost in money and in life. Since the close of the world war, New Zealand has lost over seven thousand of its population through death from tubercular disease, and three-fifths of that formidable total succumbed to the form best known as T.B. Incidentally, it may be noted that as many as 73 per cent, of about 700 deaths in, a given year were, according to the State’s statistician, those of patients under forty-five years of age. And, moreover, it has been estimated conservatively by practical experts in the treatment of the disease, which is not a grave national mbnace ill this country, that not less than ten thousand persons are suffering from T.B. all the time. There can be no argument, however, about the loose manner in which this infectious disease is permitted to become a menace all over the country. Hundreds of patients are not under any form of proper precautionary control. As a South Island expert has said with some vehemence, “So long as nothing is, done for them, they are persistently scattering seed which will produce a plentiful crop of tuberculosis cases in the next generation.” The medical committee admits frankly that the accommodation for chronic cases of T.B. throughout the Dominion is inadequate, and that extra provision for them is urgently required, particularly in Christchurch, Wellington, and Auokland. One hopes that our Hospital Board will have noticed that the committee includes Auckland. Here, indeed, as said before in this column, the lack'of adequate accommodation for cases of T.B. is a grotesque scandal. Regret has been expressed by the committee that other large centres (again including Auckland) have not followed Dunedin and Christchurch in the establishment of tuberculosis dispensaries. And the expex-t investigators urge the erection of a North Island sanatorium in the Auckland Province.'

The layman need not attempt to discuss the committee’s reference to the doubtful use of tuberculin. On that question the expei’ts differ, and while doctors differ the patient is left to solve the argument in one of two ways—either by demonstrating that he has not had T.B. at all, or by dying under treatment about which expei’ts are none too sure.