How to get Influenza.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume LVI, Issue 8683, 16 February 1907, Page 2

How to get Influenza.

There is probably more illness caused by defective ventilation than by draughts (the "Lancet" says). The person who shuts himself up in a very warm room, with every source of ventilation practically closed, so that the vital quality of the air is destroyed. is invariably the first, victim of influenza. Such a condition of environment lias an extraordinary effect in lowering- the general tone of the body and its power to resist disease. Disease germs are. of course, übiquitous, and the only chance of escaping their successful and insidious attack is by keeping the body proof against them by preserving a power of resistance, by keeping , , so to speak, the soil in a condition opposed to their development and growth. Tjfc being careful. however, to measures to keep the body in a diseaseresisting state, there is the serious handicap of having to submit to the indifference of others.

In most places of amusement in London, for example, crowds of people are entertained under an environment teeming with pathogenic organisms, and in which the conditions of the air and surroundings are so obviously unhealthy as rapidly to lower the health standard of the body, and to render the attack of the disease entity an easy success. It is time that the real mischief, caused by stuffy places and by devitalised air.'■was more seriously taken to heart than it is. Such places are for certain a. fertile source of influenza and respiratory disease by the insanitary and unscientific conditions described. It is not a little instructive that influenza is invariably epidemic at a time when ventilation is least invited because of the coldness of the season, when every step is taken to keep our hotises and places of meeting warm, which generally means that fresh air is carefully excluded. Cold and variations of temperature are, of course, a factor in the etiology of the disease, but "jit chances of spreading would be JW less if people would insist on breathing fresh air.