OCR Text |
Show IS COUNTRY WITHOUT GERMS. Peculiarity of Jamaica That Greatly Impressed Philadelphia Physician. A Philadelphia physician, lately returned re-turned from a trip to Jamaica, - was greatly impressed with the almost total to-tal absence of many kinds of germs on the island. Infection is so rare as to be almost unknown, and it is not necessary nec-essary for surgeons to take the precautions pre-cautions against it which are indispensable indis-pensable here. "I was amazed when I saw them dressing wounds in a Kingston hospital," said the physician. "They used no antiseptics of any kind, and did not even go to the trouble of sterilizing instruments. I questioned the surgeons in charge, and they said it was not necessary; that there 'were so few infections germs on the island that healing was almost never interrupted by infection. If we should do work in any of oar Philadelphia hospitals as they do it, we would be overwhelmed with blood poisoning and other cases of that kind. They will not always have this freedom from germs, however. Intercourse Inter-course with the United States and En-rope En-rope will, in time, load them up with germs, unless great precautions are taken. It is a pity that such must be the case, just as the introduction of tuberculosis germs into America by the white man was a great pity The Indians never had tuberculosis until the Europeans came, and then thev were decimated by ,he diseas; Many of the South Sea islands are tally free from malaria just because they do not have malarial germs nor the mosquitoes which transmit them To me a country that had no germs would seem a paradise." |