LIFE’S END

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 20108, 29 March 1928, Page 12

LIFE’S END

MANKIND AND DISEASE ARE WE BECOMING IMMUNE. The hope that man may look forward. to the time when he becomes so used to infectious diseases that they will disappear altogether, in view of the .fact that most of the ills that affect us are becoming milikjr and less dangerous, is held out by Dr J. Laumomer, writing in “Lc Petit Provencal” (Marseilles, France). “We always end uj> by dying, but everyone wishes to delay this event as long as fiossible,” writes Dr Laumonier. “In this regard the most recent statistics purvey a certain degree »of comfort, since they show that the [average length of human life is in[creasing about 12 mouths every 10 or J l2 years. At this rate, in a few scores of centuries our descendants will be living as long as the Biblical patriarchs.

“Perhaps we should derive additional consolation from the fact that we do not djie of the same maladies as our ancestors. In fact, certain diseases have been disappearing, while new ones take their places—or, at any rate, seem to do so; for often what we are inclined to consider a new disease is only a very old one which has changed its character, either through the efforts of preventive hygiene and specific therapeutics, or under the Influence of some spontaneous transformation whose causes escape us. “Numerous cases illustrate this. Thus, acute articular rheumatism, though it sometimes occurs as an epidemic, has become rarer and, does not attack the joints as a regular thing. It now prefers the heart—a fact that by no means renders it less serious. Ln liko manner, we seldom meet plain pneumonia now, but rather bronchopneumonia. whose character is even more grave. As fur the grip, a rather mild affectation by itself, it is now complicated with infections of all kinds which give it a varied scope, as we saw during the epidemic of 191819, which had more than 30 millions of victims throughout the world.

“On the other hand, besides these maladies that arc aggravated or transformed, there are many others that have grown feebler, such as chlorosis, exceptional to-day; gout, whose acute crisis arc replaced by a chronic development; diabetes, in which the very free glycosuria of yesterday is now rarely seen, and which develops with a slowness formerly unknown; tuberculosis, which tends to wand the fibrous type, more easily curable; and finally variola, typhoid, diptheria and scarlatina, whose ravages arc now limited by our creative powers. “To sum up, a considerable number of diseases are changing; some are incontestably more serious, but most are weakening, tending to threaten a less immediate danger, going through an evolution that is more easily controlled. This progressive attenuation is certainly not without influence on the prolongation of human life. Although in certain cases this is the fruit of progress in mcidjcal knowledge, in others it appears to result from the altered nature of the morbid conditions, to which man is reacting more and more by slow adaptation. There are microbes, such as those of putrefaction, that are no longer able to make us ill, because we have become used to them. Why should we not get accustomed to other disease germs? The attenuation that is manifested by certain infections is perhaps only the advance indication of an adaptation that will sooner or later protect man from all their attacks.”