OCR Text |
Show DIPHTHERIA. . V The city seems to be suffering from an epidemic of diphtheria. It is a scourge to be dreaded almost as much as smallpox small-pox and like contagious diseases. Diphtheria Diph-theria is generally deemed to be a disease arising from filth, but when once it gets started it invades the palace as well as the hovel. If it comes from the great abundance of bad odors arising from a prevalence of filth, then it is as liable to be carried everywhere. It is a disease that seems to baffle all efforts to effectually effectu-ally curtail and ' eventually stop its spread, but something can be done to lessen the spread of the disease. This something . is a rigid enforcement of wise quarantine regulations. Such regulations do not enforce themselves, and upon the ordinance book may look never so well and sufficient, still, their worth is only in their enforcement. The quarantine regulations of the city are not stringently enforced. A yellow flag hung out in front of a house where diphtheria exists may prevent people from entering the house so long as the flag hangs out, but so soon as it is removed the friends and neighbors rush in to see those who are in sorrow for the loss of a loved one, when in nine cases out of ten there is as much danger in the house after the flag is down as when it was up. These houses should be quarantined for sometime after the patient is well or. no more, and the inmates forbidden to mingle writh the community until all possible danger is passed. The houses where people may have been sick with any contagious or infectious disease, should" be thoroughly disinfected, and the city authorities should see that it is done. But more than this still remains to be done. The city authorities au-thorities should forbid the digging of cesspools in the city, and should compel owners of land within the city to fill up those now in existence. These are the great breeders of filth, and for the city to take no heed of these and other causes of disease, but to confine their attention merely to diseases after they are developed, devel-oped, is for them to merely gaze at the flower which blooms on the tree of death. Let the citizens demand of the City Council a rigid enforcement of every quarantine regulation, for if some immediate imme-diate and strong effort to check diphtheria is not made, the death-rate from this cause will be increased to a most alarming alarm-ing extent. |