NURSING AIDS AND TLBERCULOSIS

Timaru Herald, Volume CLVIII, Issue 23261, 24 July 1945, Page 5

NURSING AIDS AND TLBERCULOSIS

Sir.—Major G. T. Hennessy commen tea at a meeting of the South Canterbury Hospital Board last week “ihau the attention of the Hospital Board be directed to the extreme youth of nursing aids nursing tuberculosis patients and the great risk oi inieclion.” We would like to inform the public that only one nurse at the Waipiata Sanatorium, in the last 21 years, has contracted the disease and these nurses are nursing tubercular patients all the time. Nursing aids in public hospitals arc nc more susceptible to tuberculosis than the ordinary working person, as statistics will show. It was also suggested that the tubercular patients in Waimate Hospital should be moved elsewhere. Does this mean that people unfortunate enough to contract this disease should be treated as outcasts and left to fend for themselves? As two patients in Waipiata Sanatorium we admire the nursing aids of 16 years and upwards who come here of their own free will and who are not led by the ignorant public.—We are, etc., Two Unf< rtunates ai Waipiata.