A BAD HABIT

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 71, Issue 6137, 17 September 1945, Page 3

A BAD HABIT

(By the Department of Health) Sensible folk agree that spitting is a filthy habit and "one that spreads disease, but there is are still some diehard spitters about. It should be a public offence to spit about our street —or in fact, to spit anywhere. There is, however, something which is just as bad as but far more common than spitting, and which spreads diseases just as readily. It is the habit of putting one’s finger in one’s mouth, and moistening things with saliva before passing them on. A number of diseases are passed on by personal contact. Pneumonia, influenza, diphtheria, scarlet fever, measles, whooping cough, chickenpox, mumps, and the common cold—these and other diseases are contact diseases. They spread from a person with the disease, to another, mostly directly, but sometimes, indirectly, through things touched and infected by the sufferer. It’s the bodily secretions and excretions that are the transfer agents. When articles are moistened with saliva and passed on to others, this is a most effective and indirect way of passing infections on to others. It’s really a very close method of personal contact. The clerk who moistens his fingers to turn over correspondence for somebody else, the ticket seller who wets the tickets with saliva to facilitate the sale, the shop assistant who moistens the sheet of wrapping paper with a wet finger to pull it off a pile of paper, and the folk whlo moisten papers to turn them over—all those help to spread infection. Just keep your eyes open and notice how many

lick-finger folk there are about. The cure of this bad habit is public recognition of its danger, that it’s bad form—that licking of fingers, moistening them with saliva, is dangerous to others, and socially wrong.