LIQUOR AND INFLUENZA

Waikato Times, Volume 91, Issue 14241, 16 December 1919, Page 5

LIQUOR AND INFLUENZA

MEDICINE IN THE HOME. The probability of a recrudescence of the influenza epidemic brings up at this time the question in relation to to-morrow's licensing poll. Some recent by leaders in the medical faculty will be read with great interest. Sir Malcolm Morris, t K.C.V.O., F.R.C.S., President of the 'institute of Hygiene, at a conference called by the Institute on February 28, 1919, to consider influenza and its prevention, said:— "Alcohol is not essential for the prevention or the treatment , of influenza." Dr E. B. Turner, F.R.C.S., is a leading London practitioner, and has lectured: on venereal disease in the army with great acceptance to officers and men. He has kept a record of an unbroken series of 2300 cases of influenza which he has treated, ending in complete recovery with no complications and without a single death. He described in the British Medical Journal for March Bth, 1919, how in the epidemic, raging in London since October 1916 he had treated 335 cases, all with temperatures of 103.5 degrees to 105 degrees and of virulent type, all recovered without pneumonia or other complications. Dr Turner says in a recent letter: —

"I have not ordered any alcohol whatever in influenza, either in this epidemic or any of the earliest ones. They do not require it as far as I can see." . .-. : y The public should remember that in the event of prohibition being carried alcohol for medical purposes will be available. The Act specially provides for it, and the Minister for Health in the National Government specially mentioned that provision would be made to obtain it without payment, of doctors' fees. These facts should be carefully weighed by electors.