CONQUERING DISEASE.

Thames Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 17570, 8 March 1929, Page 6

CONQUERING DISEASE.

TUBERCULOSIS RECEIVES A SETBACK.

Steadily and surely, year by year, tlio frightening proportions of the tuberculosis .scare are shrinking in New Zealand, as in most countries of the world. The year 1928 will show the lowest death-rate on record for this disease. This year hundreds of persons are alive and well who would have died from tuberculosis had the deathrate of 1918 still prevailed.,, The prophecy of a prominent statistician is that within the next half-cenury, or even less, tuberculosis will be “only one of the relatively minor couses of death.” The New Zealand Official Year Book says; “Tuberculosis takes sixth place in point of the number of deaths resulting, therefrom during 1927. Each of the four years preceding 1.926 in its turn established a new record in low rates of mortality for this disease. In 1918 7.54 persons in every 10,000 died from tuberculosis, while in 1927 the rate was 4.86, a gratifying drop.” For the past thirty years the antituberculosis campaign has been active in America and the result of the movement is the -cutting of the death-rate from this cause about 60 per cent., bus saving the lives of literally hundreds of thousands of people. No one thirty years ago. when the anti-tuberculosis campaign \ya s actively- launched in America, would have dared to 'prophesy any such achievement as Inis actually occurred in this short interval. At that time the death-rate from tuberculosis was close to three times as high as it is now. and this disease was the first of the causes of death. But with the establishment. of the National Tuberculosis Association arid the launching of local societies all over the country the mortality from the disease- Ix?gan to fall at a remarkably fast rate, which has not only continued, but accelerated its velocity with time.

No one can realise fully what this drop in tuberculosis lias' * meant in bettering the conditions of life. Tuberculosis claims its victims' at a comparatively early age, and many of its victims would have been young men with growing families. Tlie success of the tuberculosis campaign is the most outstanding example of the effectiveness of the public health movement, and by learning how to control tuberculosis the greatest single factor in producing poverty and misery has been greatly checked.